All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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When I was asked to prepare a report on how the candidates’ positions on climate change would impact voters, I remembered one voter who cares deeply about global warming. I first met her in January while I was on assignment in Antarctica. Jean Pennycook studies penguins there, and she has seen the devastating impact on penguin colonies when glaciers melt more rapidly than anyone has seen before. I decided it was time to check in with Pennybrook again.

When she’s not in Antarctica, Pennycook teaches environmental science at Awhanee Middle School in Fresno, Calif. I sat in on a class where she talked to students about the science of global warming and about the real-world results she has seen first hand down in the Antarctic penguin habitat. The most significant thing she sees in this presidential campaign is that – after eight years of the Bush Administration pretty much denying that global warming is caused by human activity – both parties' nominees accept the scientific conclusion that climate change is real. While she hopes that will bring new sense of urgency at the top in Washington, she continues to work from the bottom up, telling students that doing things like saving energy at home is a step toward saving some penguins at the other end of the earth. She asks them the kids: "are you willing to turn out the lights in your room to save the penguins?"

Some people are doing much more than turning out the lights. John Fiscalini is a California dairy farmer who was shocked when people started pointing fingers at agriculture as one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases. He discovered the truth: Manure from his 3,000 cows produces huge ...

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent.

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At the Lake Tahoe Wildlife Care center the cub called Li'l Smokey is recovering from the second-degree burns he suffered on all four paws in a Northern California wildfire last month. Every couple of days the Wildlife Care staff remove protective booties from his paws, unwrap the bandages and change the dressing. His paws are healing well.

Li’l Smokey has had a lot of help from humans. He almost certainly would have died if he had not been found and captured by Adam Deem, a firefighter.

Still, the little bear doesn’t much like people and that makes the people taking care of him quite happy. When bears and humans get too friendly it can often end badly … for the bear ...

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent.

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“You should have been here yesterday.”

As a TV news reporter, I have heard that too many times.

It goes like this: We learn of something interesting happening and head off with a camera crew ready to record it all on video. But when we get to the location we hear the dreaded phrase: “You should have been here yesterday.”

So often, whatever it is that we want to take pictures of seems to take a break just as we arrive.

I was a little concerned when we headed down the California coast to do a story on elephant seals behaving badly. Elephant seals can weigh up to 5,000 pounds, so when they behave badly it can be a big story … particularly if what they’re doing is wandering onto a busy state highway.

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent currently filing from Antarctica, while he's working on a series called, "Journey To The Bottom Of The Earth."

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We stood in silence and in awe on a ridge of black volcanic rock. Behind us a wisp of steam rose from Mount Erebus, the southernmost active volcano on earth. In the distance an ice shelf in pure white stretched down to the Ross Sea where the water was an almost unbelievable deep blue. And then leaping out of the water and wobbling across the ice were the penguins.

We traveled to Cape Royds on Ross Island in Antarctica to see how the Adelie Penguin colony there is doing. But along the way we had a fascinating encounter with Antarctic history.

We stopped at the hut built by Irish polar explorer Ernest Shackleton in 1908. On the stove there was cast iron skillet and a couple of big cooking pots. There were cans of preserved onions and pickled cabbage on the shelves along with salt and candles. Hard to believe it was a century since Shackleton and his men were here.

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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A couple of weeks ago I saw a story in a Northern California newspaper about a local couple adopting a child from Vietnam. On the surface that is not a big news story…international adoptions are relatively common these days. But this story had an interesting twist.

The couple, Tallia Hart and Mark Bodenhamer, had waited for months after applying to adopt. One morning, by e-mail, a photo arrived of an infant girl. A note on her sweater spelled out her name in Vietnamese characters. In English her name means “Gentle Water”.

Her story could seem sad. She was abandoned near Hanoi when she was just a few months old, wearing only a little t-shirt decorated with cartoon characters. But whoever left her seemed determined to make sure she was found and well cared for. She was left in the garden at the front gate of an orphanage.

Tallia is certain the baby’s mother abandoned her only because she wanted her to have a better life. And in a way that makes her a perfect child for Tallia because Tallia’s story is almost exactly the same. She is an orphan of the Vietnam War. When she was just a few months old she was abandoned in a rice field. The nuns who took her in at an orphanage thought she wouldn’t live.

But a family in Colorado offered to adopt her and she was put on a plane to America.

Tallia was nursed back to health and grew up as an all American girl. When it was time to start a family she knew where it had to begin. She and Mark decided to adopt from Vietnam.

For the first time since she was a baby, Tallia returned last month to the land of her birth to pick up her new daughter. She’s determined to give her daughter the same gift of a new life that she was given.

Tallia and Mark have chosen an English name for the daughter. They call her Lola. They tell their story and hers in this blog.

John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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If you have been watching the fire coverage from southern California you have undoubtedly seen most of us reporters fashionably clad in our yellow protective fire suits. I have been wearing the yellow suit myself but I have to admit I often feel a bit like a phony.

The firefighters wear the same yellow suits…but they never look like ours do. The suits the firefighters wear are darkened by smoke, soot and dirt as well as by a lot of sweat. The suits worn by the reporters are usually clean and bright yellow. The reporters’ suits don’t show any of the hard work and hard wear so obvious on the firefighters’ clothing.

That’s not to say the reporters wear the protective gear just for show. Usually wearing the suits is required to get into areas close to the fire that are closed to the public. Fire officials want to know that, if things turn bad, reporters have at least a little bit of protection. And whenever I get close enough to the flames to really feel the heat it is comforting to know that my clothes are unlikely to catch fire.

Still, in 20 years of covering wild fires in the west only once have I really needed my fire suit. I was reporting on a huge fire in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. The fire had threatened several towns but then turned and seemed to be burning well back in the wilderness. But suddenly the winds changed and the fire started burning directly toward the fire camp where firefighters kept their food, their tents and their equipment...

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

What I witnessed on the steps of the County Courthouse in Stockton, California struck me as strange and sad and worrying…particularly if you think the worst is over in America’s mortgage meltdown.

An agent for lenders stood on the courthouse steps, his hands full of official documents. He was preparing to auction several houses with mortgages in default. He’s there almost every day at 10 AM. On this day, at least, he had a lonely job: there was nobody there but me…and I wasn’t there to buy.

Still, the agent read aloud what he was legally required to read and declared the bidding open. The first house up had an opening bid set at $465,000. Less than two years earlier a buyer had paid $620,000 for the same house. But now, even with a $155,000 discount, nobody was interested.

Houses that nobody wants are now all too common in recently built subdivisions in California’s central valley. These are upscale developments, often built just within the last four years. Houses that sold briskly as recently as a year ago for $400,000 to $600,000 now sit empty and abandoned. And there are lots of them.

In one subdivision I drove through in Stockton, four houses in a row were all in foreclosure. The houses are easy to find. Often the lawns have turned brown. Plants in the garden have died. Mail is piled up at the door. There may still be a “For Sale” sign on the lawn but it may be broken or blown over and nobody has done anything about it. The lender that now owns the house seems to have given up on selling it anytime soon.

That’s bad news for all the neighbors. Not only do the foreclosed houses look bad, they drive down property prices for everyone nearby and often those are people who bought within the last couple of years when real estate prices in California were near their peak. They now face the painful realization that their homes are probably worth less than they paid for them.

If they can keep up their mortgage payments and the market turns around in the near future it may all turn out fine. But on a block with two or three houses with the brown lawns of foreclosure, it’s hard to be optimistic that the real estate boom is going to return anytime soon.

That feeling is reinforced back at the County Courthouse. There about 40 new notices of default are filed there everyday. It seems likely there will be a lot more auctions on the courthouse steps where nobody shows up to buy.

John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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It was with just a little anxiety that I sat down within easy striking distance of the jaws and claws of a 320 pound black bear in a parking lot in Reno, Nevada. The bear was sleeping off the sedative that had been used to get him out of a tree behind a burger stand in downtown Reno.

Carl Lackey, the Nevada Department of Wildlife’s chief bear biologist, had shot the bear with the sedative. Lackey is having his busiest year ever for problem bears. He has been called out to capture more than seventy bears this year that have wandered into places they shouldn’t be as they search for food. A western drought has made nuts and berries scarce.

The big bear we were sitting beside had probably come out of the mountains to the west. Lackey figured it had looked down from the dry forest and spotted Reno, looking like an oasis…and decided to gamble on finding a good meal there. The bear seemed to hit the jackpot in the garbage by the burger stand.

Lackey’s goal now is to make this bear think that was a very bad idea, indeed. The next day, when the bear was well awake and Lackey could check that it was healthy, he drove it in a cage back up to the mountains. When the cage door opened and the bear started to run Lackey let loose his two fearless Karelian bear dogs. He shouted and fired rubber bullets at the fleeing bear. He hopes the bear will now think twice before the next time he heads into the city.

But Lackey’s research over ten years now has revealed quite a number of bears that have become urban bears...

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John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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Every time I drive from San Francisco to Sacramento it seems another farmer’s field has been turned into a subdivision. Around Sacramento new homes now sprout where crops once grew.

Much of this development is on land protected from flooding by levees that may not be strong enough to do the job they are expected to do. There’s a lot of water here. This is where two of California’s great rivers, the American and the Sacramento, meet. In the springtime, when the snow melts in the Sierra the rivers can run dangerously high.

When there were just farms here it didn’t matter all that much if it flooded from time to time. But now a flood would be a disaster for thousands of people and millions of dollars worth of property.

The city of West Sacramento is one of the fast-growing suburbs that is most at risk if there is a levee failure. The citizens of West Sacramento recently voted to increase taxes to raise some of the money needed to fix the levees.

But the city is also taking a controversial route to raising money for levee repairs: it is encouraging more development on land that could flood if the levees fail. The new development will generate fees and assessments that can be used to pay for levee repairs. But that new development will also put more people and property at risk.

It’s a “Catch 22” situation that bothers Jeffrey Mount, a geologist at the University of California, Davis. For years he has questioned the wisdom of increasing development on floodplains where a levee failure will mean catastrophe.

“There are only two kinds of levees,” Mount says. “Those that have failed and those that will fail.”

John Blackstone is a CBS News correspondent based in San Francisco.

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It’s almost too beautiful here to be the scene of a mine disaster. The rescue command center where we spend our days and nights sits just outside the mine entrance in a steep canyon. Rugged sandstone cliffs rise all around.

Just behind the media encampment of satellite trucks and RVs Huntington Creek rushes past. There’s plenty of white water as it bubbles over and around huge boulders. It’s the kind of river it would be lovely to spend a few days camping beside, throwing out a fishing line now and then.

But its hard to appreciate the beauty when you think of the urgent and frightening work going on far beneath this mountain. Around the clock more than a 130 miners are digging out a tunnel filled top to bottom with coal. Somewhere far back in that tunnel they hope to find six miners waiting.

The entrance to the Crandall Canyon Mine doesn’t go down, it goes straight into the mountainside. When geologic forces pushed up the mountains here on the Wasatch Plateau, coal seams were exposed along with the different strata of sandstone and shale. So the miners dig horizontally into the coal, going far back into the mountain. Where the miners are trapped is almost four miles into the mountain. At that point almost 2000 feet of rock rests on top of the mine.

As the miners here explained it to me, it’s the weight of the mountain on top of the mine that made the mine’s walls buckle and explode blocking the tunnels with tons of coal. People who live here understand the geology and they understand the danger of coal mining. There aren’t just miners here, there are mining families. Sons follow their fathers into the mines. Brothers and cousins go together. And as the wife of one coal miner here told me, they do it so the rest of us can run our TVs and microwaves, dishwashers and computers...

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