Alastair Bland
Reporter at CalMattersAlastair Bland lives in Sonoma County, California. He writes about water, climate, marine research, agriculture and the environment, and his work has appeared at NPR, Time, East Bay Express, Audubon, Hakai, Slate, Smithsonian and other news outlets. He can be reached at alastair@calmatters.org
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Chefs and environmentalists have been promoting the benefits of eating fish lower down the food chain. But San Francisco's herring fishery shows some of the challenges to spreading that message.
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Bartenders are finding novel ways to reuse leftover wine and spent ingredients from cocktail-making. It's just one part of a nascent movement toward sustainability in the industry.
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Using farmland to capture carbon rather than release it into the atmosphere is called carbon farming. The idea is taking off and countries and institutions have endorsed a new agenda promoting it.
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Thanks to a blazing hot summer and unusually warm water, early counts of juvenile winter-run Chinook are at extreme low levels. To protect them, regulators may restrict ocean fishing.
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Halloween pumpkins are nutritious and perfectly edible — if they haven't been carved and left outside for days. And yet we throw almost all of them away. Here's what happened when we cooked with one.
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At fine-dining places, white workers overwhelmingly fill jobs with the heftiest salaries, while Latinos, blacks and other minorities have jobs with pay closer to the poverty level, a study finds.
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The humble red root contains a molecule that boosts muscle power in heart failure patients and athletes, a few small studies show. But it's not yet clear if beet juice can improve muscle stamina.
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California wineries use between 2.5 and 6 gallons of water to make a gallon of wine, not including irrigation water and other needs. But drought is forcing the industry to conserve in new ways.
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Each year American consumers buy and then never eat 1.3 billion pounds of fish and shellfish, according to a new study. Fishermen, retailers and processors waste a lot of fish, too.
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This year, as many as 50 percent of the pistachios harvested in California could be hollow inside. Blame it on drought, heat and weather changes that are messing with male trees' virility.