It may take a lifetime to see the results, but students replanting a native oak forest near Glen Ellen are taking the long view.

   Bouverie Preserve 

   Sonoma Valley High School

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.

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."

To the Rev. Scotty McLennan, Jesus was a man who told stories and spoke in metaphors, who respected the science of his day, and who emerged from his mystical sojourn in the desert with a radical message about the power of love.

The Rev. Scotty McLennan is the dean for religious life at Stanford University. He was the university Chaplain at Tufts University from 1984 to 2000, and senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School for ten of those years. McLennan received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970 as a Scholar of the House working in the area of computers and the mind. He received his M.Div. and J.D. degrees from Harvard Divinity and Law Schools in 1975. In 1975, he was also ordained to the ministry (Unitarian Universalist) and admitted to the Massachusetts bar as an attorney. He is the author of Finding Your Religion and was the inspiration for Doonesbury's Rev. Scott Sloan.

Some of the most heated issues in contemporary American society revolve around questions of science, from evolution to stem cell research. The Rev. Scotty McLennan says he sees no conflict between science and faith, and just as he doesn't believe Jesus did.

Jesus taught tolerance, McLennan believes, but following that teaching in the face of the adamantly pejorative beliefs of others is a challenge.