You have to get up pretty early to capture the pure sounds of nature… and get a long way away from the rest of the noisy human race.

Gina Farr of Wild Sound Stories in Marin County finds a poignant significance in these recent recordings, because the changes they document tell a story of losses that will not be recovered.

This is one of her summer 2009 recordings of birds in the Grand Tetons of northwest Wyoming:

Tom Rusert, an avid birdwatcher and the volunteer director of Sonoma Birding, joined in the June workshop to see firsthand how the sounds now increasing featured in birding guides were being collected.

Hundreds of shorebirds were covered in oil after the Cosco Busan oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. Many died, but some were saved. Here, International Bird Rescue Association volunteer Tom Rusert releases one of the very first stricken shorebirds back into the wild after being cleaned.

The Messenger is a film about war that doesn’t take sides, according to director Oren Moverman, but seeks instead to personalize the losses experienced by the families of the servicemen and women who don’t return.

Oren Moverman (right), writer-director of The Messenger, says there is no political agenda behind it, other than a desire to raise awareness about the human costs and consequences of modern warfare.

The Messenger has drawn generally good reviews, but Moverman is even more pleased that coverage of it has also included his central themes about the people it portrays.

In his private life, actor Woody Harrelson (below right)  is well know for his progressive politics. But in the film, Moverman says Harrelson was entirely in sync with the director’s apolitical stance.

View the trailer for The Messenger below, or go here for a sampling of reviews of the film.

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Sonoma County’s delegation to the Copenhagen Climate Summit will be heading home with some ideas they hope to apply locally.

Anderson, who is also attending the Copenhagen conference, says that while he has not been directly affected by any of the numerous protests that have been staged in and around the Danish capital, it’s impossible not to be aware of them.

Rohnert Park city councilman Jake McKenzie is one of the local elected officials attending the Copenhagen conference. In this video clip, filmed earlier this week, he shares some of his ideas and inspirations from the event.

Also attending is Sonoma County Supervisor Valerie Brown, who explains that her primary focus there is being an advocate for local governments.

The most powerful earthquakes in American history didn’t happen in California or Alaska, but almost 200 years ago in Missouri.

As Santa Rosa novelist Sally Watson set out to research the details and circumstances surrounding the New Madrid Earthquakes, she found an important source and ally at the town museum there.

Reports vary on the number of houses destroyed in the initial quakes, Watson says, as do the accounts of the number of people who fled afterward.

  A more contemporary view of the New Madrid Fault

New approaches and western ideas find many paths into modern China, even through niche magazines about medical specialties.

State of the art procedures, and the ways medicine is practiced and made available elsewhere is gradually forcing some incremental changes in the ways that individual Chinese doctors think about their work, something that Jeffrey Parker (left) says his Chinese publications are quietly helping to facilitate.

After he reported on India’s high-volume, low cost eye care treatments, Parker says the first wave of reaction from his readership of Chinese ophthalmologists was skepticism. But that was soon followed by a upwelling of interest in learning how the Indian system worked.

Jeffrey Parker will talk about his experiences as a journalist and publisher in China before the World Affairs Council of Sonoma County Dec. 10 at Spring Lake Village in Santa Rosa, at 7:30 pm. Details about the event can be found here.

He will also speak at Stanford University at noon on January 14, 2010 on the subject,  "Grassroots Empowerment: Can Models from India Spark a Revolution in Healthcare Delivery in China?"