The surprising career of the advertising slogan “everybody talks about the weather” is a story about political transformation.

In this article, historian Kate Brown considers the connections between plants, biospheres, and the politics of breathing. “What can the history of controlled environments tell us,” she asks, “about how we understand the planet today?”

In this issue of Mendocino Environmental Center Newsletter, Susan Crane discusses who are the real vandals; Vicki Oldham writes about Clinton’s Forest Plan; and Mary Pjerrou brings up the issue of logging companies using new tactics to avoid the Timber Harvest Plan (THP) process.

This essay brings previously underexplored paths of political ecology, environmental history, and even biosemiotics and plant neurophysiology in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees (1957) to light.