Pinons were my first real experience with climate change. We used to go out and pick pinion nuts, which aren't very good, which are tiny, and which have shells that aren't easy to crack unless you're stupidly fastidious. It was half a day in the sun in the national forest with not enough water so you could eat something that wasn't very good. More often than not you'd crack one open and it would be a dried husk. This precluded my chosen method of dealing with pinon nuts, which was "throw a handful in your mouth and chew, slowly swallowing the pulp until you have a mouthful of mostly-shells which you spit into the garbage disposal." Probably lots of fiber that way.

This guy showed up in 2nd grade.

A new bug. Science class doesn't teach you about that. We were too fixated on acid rain at the time. Yet the pinons started dying. The obvious conclusion is that the new pest was killing the trees; an ecologist would argue that if the trees weren't already weak the pest couldn't get a foothold.

By the time I was in 8th grade the pinons were mostly dead. Senor Murphy, New Mexico's most famous candymaker, had been importing pinon nuts from Italy for four years by then.

By the time I was a junior in college the rest of the pines were dead, too. My home town burned a year after I graduated, and again eight years later. I grew up in the woods. The place I left? Looked like Afghanistan. Now? Now it looks like Iraq. Ten years from now it'll look like Arrakis.

No more pinons.