The Magazine of The Sierra Club
How Weird Was 2018? An Illustrated Gallery From Sierra's ICYMI
Porn sharks, jazz whales, horny toadlets: Peter Arkle draws them all.
Illustrations by Peter Arkle
Female pumpkin toadlets in Brazil have lost the ability to hear the mating calls of males.
Wildlife Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says that it will stop killing beavers in Oregon, the Beaver State.
A young cow that escaped from its Polish farm last fall is found living with a herd of bison in Białowieża Forest.
After porn star Stormy Daniels reveals President Donald Trump’s intense fear of sharks, donations to shark welfare organizations surge.
A mutation in a marbled crayfish in Germany allowed it to clone itself asexually in great numbers. The six-inch crayfish is now spreading rapidly across Europe.
A previously unknown “super-colony” of more than 1.5 million Adélie penguins is discovered in Antarctica.
The bowhead whales of Spitsbergen exhibit “extreme diversity” in their songs, which researchers liken to jazz.
The beaks of puffins are found to be fluorescent.
The survival of Pongo tapanuliensis, a new species of orangutan identified only last fall in Sumatra, is threatened by Sinohydro, a Chinese state-run company that is clearing the ape's forest for the construction of a dam.
Rolls-Royce, Uber, and others are racing to build a flying car.
Soaring temperatures in Vienna, Austria, lead transit authorities to pass out deodorant to passengers on the city’s subway.
Bowing to pressure from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Nabisco releases animal crackers from their cages.
London is home to up to 10,000 foxes. A beluga whale appears in the Thames.
A dead sperm whale that washed ashore in Indonesia has more than a thousand pieces of plastic in its stomach, including 115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, and two flip-flops.
Facial recognition technology is being used to identify individual bears over time.
The high point of my work week at Sierra comes on Thursday mornings. I come in, dump my cycling gear in the corner, fire up the computer and my email, and click on the draft sketch from illustrator extraordinaire Peter Arkle for the week's In Case You Missed It. In most cases, literal and loud LOL ensues. Sometimes, though, there is just a stunned silence as I, and others, take in some sad and devastating image that he has produced to illustrate one of the score or so items I sent him the afternoon before.
We never tell Peter which item to illustrate, although we sometimes take bets on which one will catch his fancy. (I totally nailed it on the jazz whale, by the way, although I had absolutely no idea where he would go with it.) His sense of the absurd, we have found, is a perfect match to the head-spinning strangeness of environmental news in the modern era.
Peter is a Scot now living in New York City, where he illustrates books, magazines, and ads. In his spare time, he produces the Peter Arkle News on Tumblr, his amusing “illustrated fragments of everyday life,” to which you can subscribe here. He also has a book, All Black Cats Are Not Alike, in which he illustrates 50 black felines who are nonetheless very distinctive. Kinda like him.
