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This is the March 4, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
There’s a classic scene in “The Graduate” where Dustin Hoffman’s character, fresh out of college, gets pulled aside at a graduation party by a well-meaning friend of his parents and told: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word . plastics.”
If that scene were written today with sustainability in mind, the word might be “batteries.” Or maybe “hydrogen.”
But it might also be two words: “energy efficiency.”
The Horned Lizard Conservation Society, a nonprofit that sponsors scientific research on the critters, started in 1991. Speaking at one of its first meetings was Wade Sherbrooke, the former director of the Southwest Research Station of the American Museum of Natural History in Arizona. He was moved by people’s passion about the creatures he’d studied for more than 40 years.
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“Some old rancher would get up and say, ‘We
had horny toads and we should have them again! Ice cream cones and horny toads, that’s what life’s all about!’” he recalled.
But the lizard’s decline,
he said, is just one tragic example of the damage humans have inflicted on this ever-warming planet.