Karen E. Peterson | Portfolio
Selected Articles
Washington Post
A warming world means an invasive grass is threatening the famous saguaro
TUCSON — The giant saguaro, an icon of the American West, is beloved in this state. Arms raised in a perpetual “hello there,” the saguaro covers the desert wilderness and thrives in cities. Its silhouette appears in fine art and on restaurant walls; businesses and schools carry its name. Arizona state law protects the plant, and it is revered by the native Tohono O’odham tribe.
Karen E. Peterson
A newspaper journalist by profession, I have spent my career as a writer of all trades, from reporting the news and management positions to corporate journalism in the tech industry; freelance features covering a wide range of topics, music in particular; web design and publishing; and a full measure of human interest storytelling.
I worked at various San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, primarily the San Francisco Chronicle. I participated in an investigative series by a small weekly newspaper in Pt. Reyes Station, California, that won a Pulitzer Prize for community service. As a writer and producer at Macworld Online, I joined my team in winning a prestigious Jesse H. Neal Award from the Software & Industry Information Association.
Twenty years ago I began adding climate change to my portfolio, first as a contributor to the Climate Change Business Journal, an industry research publication, then as founder and editor of Terra Marin, a magazine on climate and the environment in Marin County, CA. In Tucson, where I moved to in 2013, I founded Climate Tucson, an online community forum.
The Tucson Climate Report
I launched The Tucson Climate Report on Substack to publicize news and issues affecting our region as climate change makes itself at home in an increasingly hotter Sonoran Desert.
Small Nuclear Reactors Could be Part of Our Desert Landscape
As 2025 opened, Arizona’s three largest utilities, Arizona Public Service (APS), Tucson Electric Power (TEP), and the Salt River Project (SRP) were finishing up a proposal to co-develop a nuclear plant using the truck-sized technology to help ease the future energy crunch. Blame the boom on data centers and generative AI factories.
Book Review
Seeking the Trees Primeval
What do you get when you put ten dendrochronologists in one book?
Ten more reasons to hug a tree.
Dendrochronologists are specialists in dendrochronology, the science of deciphering what trees have to say about their age and time on earth as displayed in their rings. Developed in early years of the 20th century, in the beginning tree-ring dating was used to help archaeologists determine the age of wood found in ancient Southwest Native dwellings and fire pits.
Washington Post
TUCSON — For the past 23 years, Jim Filipiak, 73, has lived in a 1976 singlewide mobile home. Mobile homes dominate the flat landscape of his Tucson neighborhood, a mostly treeless plot near the railroad tracks and Interstate 10. The retiree and Vietnam veteran has remodeled his home and kept up with maintenance, but there’s little he can do to shield himself from what has become the norm in Arizona: searing, deadly summer heat. Caption Jim Filipiak outside his mobile home in Tucson. Photo by Cassidy Araiza.
Washingon Post
Tree rings from centuries past help reveal a warming planet’s futureTUCSON — Each specimen in a strangely beautiful “treehouse” laboratory here tells a story of resilience — from droughts and floods to catastrophic wildfires and bitter winters, some occurring thousands of years ago.
Nowadays, though, much of the work at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research is about the future of a planet that’s squaring off against global warming and its cascading disasters.
National Geographic
While writing this, I caught myself talking to… myself. Between clicks on the keyboard, I realized I was having an internal conversation about an encounter I'd had the night before. Why, out of the blue, would I interrupt the work I was doing to chat with myself about something that seemed so inconsequential?
National Geographic
It’s toad time in the Sonoran Desert, the season when Incilius alvarius, popularly the Sonoran Desert toad—also the Colorado River toad or locally “the toad”—pops out of its underground burrow at the first hint of rain from the North American monsoon.
Like the tall-armed saguaro cactus and the lumbering desert tortoise that are both native to this desert, these toads “are an intrinsic part of the region,” says Robert Villa, president of the Tucson Herpetological Society and a research associate at the Desert Laboratory in Tucson.
Washingon Post
Camera in hand, Linda McCartney revealed life well beyond the BeatlesShe photographed nature and animals. She photographed fame. But above all, Linda McCartney photographed the “silly love song” that she and her famous Beatle spouse lived for nearly three decades.
In this sunlit desert city, the Linda McCartney Retrospective at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography (CCP) is visual confirmation of how that romance played out far from the concert crowds and screaming fans. The exhibit is an intimate journey captured by Linda through the lens of her 35mm Nikon camera — a classic in analog, not digital, imagery.
Acoustic Guitar
It's Monday Night at the McClurg Jam
Searching for the homegrown sound of the Ozarks
In this special Roadside America package for Acoustic Guitar, I went home to the Ozarks to explore the origins of Ozark music. It’s not bluegrass. It’s not Appalachian. Containing elements of both, it was born and refined out of the need to dance for people who preferred to live far apart in the hollers or the steep valleys that cut through the hills. One day a week for church, music, jigging, and a potluck supper suited folks just fine.
Above: The old post office / grocery store, now the home to the Monday night jams in the speck-of-a-town McClurg, Missouri. At left, a few of the players at the jam, including the master of Ozark music, Gordan McCann (right, top) and the acclaimed xxx with banjo.