From his home base in Sonoma, Dr. Rodney Jackson reaches halfway around the world to protect the endangered Snow Leopards of the Himalayas.

For almost three decades, Dr. Jackson, a zoologist, has played a leading role in the study of the elusive high mountain snow leopards. He explains how it has progressed over the years.

Snow leopards are notoriously shy, as Jackson details, but they are surprisingly available to be seen at zoos across North America, including in San Francisco, where a new habitat was recently constructed for their active breeding pair.

Dr. Jackson has recently developed the Long Tail wine label, selling high quality Sonoma County varietals as a fund-raising tool for the Snow Leopard Conservancy.

Obeying the old admonition to “find an need and fill it,” Dustin Zuckerman has created the Santa Rosa Tool Library.

The introduction of the Santa Rosa Tool Library started slowly, reports founder Dustin Zuckerman, but it gradually gathered support and users.

The Santa Rosa Tool Library lends hand and power tools, but only those powered by electricity. Zuckerman explains he has two reasons for that policy.

The full list of available tools is posted here. Go to this page for details on the tool library's lending policies.

Electrons move faster than earthquakes, giving new automated alert systems a few key seconds to warn outlying areas that some shaking is on the way.

This project is moving forward as quickly as possible, says Doug Given, but to be fully effective it requires the installation of many more sensors along the biggest known fault lines.

In setting all this up, priority has been given to the San Andreas Fault, one of the longest and most active in all of California.

Read more here about plans for broadcasting earthquake alerts to cell phones in Japan.

The pathway to sustainability depends on morphing conflict into consensus, and when it comes to food systems, that’s what Sebastopol’s Ag Innovation Network is all about.

Even in areas where there is a history of deep distrust between factions within the agricultural sector, such as Sonoma County with its history around the 2000 Rural Heritage Initiative, Ag Innovations Network CEO Dan Schurman (left)  says they are committed to a process that works to heal past rifts.

Far out in the oceans of the world, away from the continents and even shipping lanes, vast floating seas of plastic garbage form an intractable sort of water pollution, something the bay area’s Project Kaisei  is working to combat.

The north Pacific gyre is 700 to 800 miles across, explains Mary Crowley,  co-founder of Project Kaisei, but it is not a solid mass of garbage so much as a shallow stew of floating debris.

The north Pacific Gyre is believed to hold the largest plastic Vortex anywhere on Earth, but Crowley observes that there are numerous other gyres across the seas, and each of them have their own growing expanses of floating garbage.

Returning from the Pacific Gyre, the Kaisei sailed under the the Golden Gate Bridge on August 31st. Kaisei is a Japanese word meaning "Ocean Planet."