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.

The Primordial Goo of Modern Living

Ending our reliance on fossil fuels will take more than phasing out gas-guzzlers and flooding the grid with renewables. The world is awash in petrochemicals born of the decayed primordial plants and zooplankton oozing beneath us, crude oil.

Waiving Our Rights Away

The Trump Administration is planning to break ground on 25 miles of new border wall in the pristine grassland between Nogales and Naco south of Bisbee. This is a wonderland of wildlife, where El Jefe, the endangered jaguar, was first spotted. People are watching, and for many in Southern Arizona it’s déjà vu all over again, but worse.

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.

Strings Magazine

An atmospheric river of rain was battering Southern California in February of this year, with forecasters warning of life-threatening flash flooding. Only a few days earlier, the Los Angeles Times reported that the storms causing the havoc were being supercharged by a deadly combination of two excessive rain-producing events, El Niño, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern, and climate change.

Washingon Post

TUCSON — 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

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

She 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.