Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Associate Producer

Tim McDonnell joined the Climate Desk after stints at Mother Jones and Sierra magazine, where he nurtured his interest in environmental journalism. Originally from Tucson, Tim loves tortillas and epic walks.

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The Wood Brothers Get Back to Their Roots

—By Tim McDonnell

| Mon Jan. 30, 2012 4:00 AM PST

Oliver Wood, left, got his younger brother Chris, right, started on bass.

Chris and Oliver Wood hadn't played music together since childhood, but that all changed one night in 2004. Oliver's funky rock band King Johnson had opened a gig in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for his kid brother Chris' far-out fusion trio Medeski Martin & Wood. At some point during the headlining act, as Chris plucked lustily at his upright bass, Oliver carried his guitar onstage, plugged in, and melted into the sound.

Despite the brothers having spent years in the musical trenches, it had taken this long for them to strike a chord as professionals. But they share the sort of uncanny chemistry usually only found between veteran bandmates: John and Paul, Miles and Coltrane, Simon and Garfunkel, and now Chris and Oliver. "It was like watching myself play," Chris said at the time. Oliver calls it "a certain telepathy…a supernatural, psychic kind of thing."

Fast forward to last Saturday night at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and it's clear there's still no static in that psychic connection. After the Winston-Salem show, the brothers whipped up a demo of Oliver's soul-saturated roots-folk songs, sent it off to Blue Note Records, and the Wood Brothers were born. Their 2006 debut album, Ways Not To Lose, was an invigorating reminder of the understated power of the duo; NPR called it one of the year's top "overlooked" albums. Last week, the brothers kicked off a national tour in support of their most recent album, August's Smoke Ring Halo. Along for the ride is another sibling duet, Winnipeg's Sarah and Christian Dugas, a howling chanteuse with a dark blue melodic sensibility and her rhythm guitar-picking brother.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

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A Pro Snowboarder's Guide to Climate Change

Shredder and film star Jeremy Jones blames global warming for lackluster snowpack, and he's taking his beef to Capitol Hill.

—By Tim McDonnell

| Fri Jan. 13, 2012 4:30 AM PST

Jeremy Jones on Feather Peak outside Bishop, Calif., last January.

A few years ago, Jeremy Jones was cutting up one of his favorite runs down a glacier in Chamonix, the legendary French ski area high in the Aiguilles Rouges mountains. Jones has been a regular at this spot for the last 15 years, coming for a few weeks every winter to hone the skills that have made him one of the world's leading big mountain snowboarders. But on this occasion, he did something he doesn't often do: stop short. The glacier, he said, had receded a few hundred yards up the valley, effectively chopping off the end of his run. "That's kind of a drastic deal," he told me, and not because he was bummed about losing the powder: "Glaciers aren't supposed to move that fast."

The experience was representative of something Jones, 36, said he's been noticing more and more on his globe-crossing expeditions to the world's sweetest slopes: warmer winters, less snow, and generally lame ski conditions. The culprit, he says, is climate change, and it's not just impacting skiers and snowboarders: The $67 billion snow sport industry includes businesses near ski spots and the locals who run them, and their survival depends on robust winters. Just ask ski-area business owners from Vermont to California, who are still slogging through a major bummer of a winter this season. Climate scientists agree that global warming, unsurprisingly, is bad news for snowpack.

To fight back, in 2007 Jones created Protect Our Winters, a nonprofit alliance of snow athletes that raises money and lobbies politicians to pass legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and supporting clean energy. This fall, Jones, along with a team of scientists and other snow athletes, traveled to Washington, DC, (where the battle over climate change is "gnarly," he said) to meet with lawmakers from snowy states, including Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.). I called Jones to talk about the link between snowboarding and climate change, and the experience of swapping beanies and down jackets for a suit and tie.

[Read the full article]

Book Review: A Universe From Nothing

—By Tim McDonnell

| Fri Jan. 6, 2012 4:00 AM PST

A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing

By Lawrence M. Krauss

FREE PRESS

For particle physicist Lawrence Krauss, the revelation that the universe is expanding ever more rapidly reinforced a more basic question: How did it first come into being? Here he seeks clues on scales impossibly small (the insides of protons) and unimaginably large (the shape of the heavens). With its mind-bending mechanics, Krauss argues, our universe may indeed have appeared from nowhere, rather than at the hands of a divine creator. There's some intellectual heavy lifting here—Einstein is the main character, after all—but the concepts are articulated clearly, and the thrill of discovery is contagious. "We are like the early terrestrial mapmakers," Krauss writes, puzzling out what was once solely the province of our imaginations.

Alan Lomax and the Original Social Network

—By Tim McDonnell

| Mon Dec. 26, 2011 4:00 AM PST

Alan Lomax, circa 1942.

In an age where Justin Bieber can skyrocket to the highest heights of pop consciousness thanks to a couple well-placed YouTube videos, we've forgotten how hard it once was to spread popular music to the populace it described. In the 1930's and '40's, while Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and others were crafting the folk songs that laid the foundation for uniquely American styles like rock and roll and the blues, they mostly sang in obscurity to local audiences in the country quarters where they lived. Recording equipment was bulky, fragile, and expensive, and those who could afford access to recorded music were listening mostly to European imports and early jazz. Thus, the music that best captured the lives of workaday Americans could only be heard by lucky locals in small-town dance halls and living rooms.

Enter Alan Lomax, an upstart folklorist who in his early teens began to accompany his father John on expeditions across the country, recording the songs of poor farmers, prisoners, bar musicians, and others whose music would otherwise have faded like a melody in the wind. Lomax's road stories are captured in a book by Columbia University musicologist John Szwed's Alan Lomax, to be released in paperback tomorrow.

Courtesy Penguin

Lomax was born on the outskirts of Austin in 1915, into a family that worked on the fringes of Unversity of Texas academia; his father made his career collecting the songs of Texas cowboys. Until his death in 2002 at the age of 87, Alan Lomax produced thousands of field recordings, many specifically destined for the Library of Congress, and was the first to "discover" Guthrie, Lead Belly, Pete Seeger, Jelly Roll Morton, and Son House, among other folk musicians revered today. They were progenitors of the singer-songwriter type we know so well today, leaving an incalcuable impact on everyone from Bob Dylan to Kurt Cobain to Jack White.

But the real import of Lomax's work goes beyond bringing backwoods folk singers into the limelight. At the heart of his mission was a fervent belief in the democratizing effect of folk music. The real point of lugging recording equipment over praries, swamps, and mountains was to capture the voices of "miners, lumbermen, sailors, soldiers, railroad men, blacks, and the down-and-outs, the hobos, convicts, bad girls, and dope fiends," and bring their stories, wrapped in song, to the ears of middle- and upper-class whites. America "was hungry for a vision of itself in song," Szwed writes, and Lomax was determined to feed it.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

There's No Hiding From Tar Sands Oil

Keystone XL pipeline or no, America is awash with the dirty oil from Canada. Here's our interactive map revealing the refineries near you.

—By Tim McDonnell

| Thu Dec. 15, 2011 1:20 PM PST

An oil refinery in Edmonton, Alberta

Recent debate over the Keystone XL oil pipeline has turned a spotlight on Canada's controversial and oil-rich tar sands, which would be the source of crude oil flowing through the pipe to the Gulf of Mexico. Tar sands oil has faced stiff criticism from environmental groups, which say that it's far dirtier than its Middle Eastern counterpart despite claims from the Canadian government and industry groups that they keep a close eye on environmental impact.

But long before the Keystone XL became a cause célèbre, tar sands oil was already ubiquitous in America: It goes to fuel our cars and corporations' trucking fleets, and it's used in the production of products from aluminum cans to asphalt. Starting last year, San Francisco-based environmental advocacy group Forest Ethics launched a campaign to encourage American companies to boycott tar sands oil and, specifically, the refineries that process it (below).

[Read the full article]