It's Tree Huggers vs. Bird Lovers in the ultimate throwdown.
Listen to the story on NPR's All Things Considered - LINK
In Georgia, the golden-winged warbler is endangered. Do they clearcut to provide open spaces for the bird to thrive? Or is clearcutting too destructive?
It's Tree Huggers vs. Bird Lovers in the ultimate throwdown. Listen to the story on NPR's All Things Considered - LINK I'm back after a much needed and successful vacation (in which I discovered Disney World has little to no recycling going on), a fried motherboard on my 2-year old desktop, and a destructively sly virus on my laptop which managed to thwart all my attempts to eradicate it. The good news is that we now have a new desktop plus all the salvaged parts from the old one; the bad news is I am much poorer and still have no laptop - the reimaging program was down, the person who administers said program was on vacation, and our IT person at work has no administrator privileges either. School system. Enough said.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, an article appeared in the Independentfeaturing Dr. Orrin Pilkey and his son Keith. Many of you know that Dr. Pilkey is a fan favorite of Mr. Greenberg, and for good reason. Pilkey is a world famous climatologist from Duke University, whose new book is entitled Global Climate Change: A Primer. Like me and many other scientists, Pilkey is tired of the know-nothing denialists out there, and he makes no apologies about going after them in this book. Climate change is occurring, the facts are right in front of us, and we need to understand what the real hoax is - the interest groups who sow seeds of doubt and dissent for their own financial gain. And true to form, the responses in this week's Indy feature a know-nothing who claims to be smarter than Dr. Pilkey.
I've been cleaning old crap out of the basement..just took a load of old electronics parts, wires, etc. to the recycling center, with more to go later. I'm also reading Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff, a so-far wonderful description of what underlies the enormous quantity of "stuff" we purchase, consume, and dispose of. I like the idea of downshifting in my consumption, and this book is a great way to motivate me. In her introduction, she refers to Einstein's observation of paradigms, and how problems cannot be solved from within the same paradigm in which they're created. A paradigm change is needed to steer us away from the consumption-driven economy, and it is probably an enormous undertaking. Leonard reminds the reader in the intro that water is involved in almost everything we buy (I'm going to try to determine my water footprint at the link she provides, www.waterfootprint.org). She also groups those that approach the problem of consumption into several categories:
While I drove my kids to their summer camps today, I listened to Frank Stasio's The State of Things on WUNC radio. His guest was NC State ecologist/evolutionary biologist Robert Dunn, whose book is entitled The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. Amid the discussion of bellybutton bacteria and forehead mites is an interesting look at the coevolutionary relationships we have with the ecosystems that thrive on and in the human body. I'm definitely putting it on my reading list for my AP students. - Link
David McCandless, blogger at InformationIsBeautiful.net, created this wonderful graphic based on a study of the disappearance of Atlantic Ocean fish over the past 100 years done by the Fisheries Centre in Vancouver, Canada. The article at guardian.co.uk touches on our collective amnesia about the "way things were," and how the environmental baseline continues to shift closer and closer to collapse. - Link
Grading the last remaining papers for the year is so much fun, especially when students are trickling in with their late work (some handing in assignments that were due in October). As I perform this wonderful task, I'm listening to WUNC's Dick Gordon interview Cary Fowler, who is storing seeds inside a mountain. This massive biodiversity project is located above the Arctic Circle, and is apparently designed to withstand earthquakes, tsunamis, and climate change. Safer than a nuclear reactor? We touch on the topic in APES. Scroll to the bottom at the link to play the audio. - Link
Wastewater treatment plants are good at what they do. In fact, they're most often better and have stricter regulations than bottled water companies. Unfortunately, they don't filter out everything. National Geographic has a piece on prozac in the water as part of their continuing coverage of global water issues. - Link
A brief glance at these two maps indicates that just because there is a higher frequency of tornadoes doesn't mean that's where all the death and destruction occurs. Read the post from a geologist at the University of Chicago to find out what may drive the discrepancy. - Link |
Who is Riss?
Alan Rissberger "No one warned me that life would involve science, except my science teacher. But, of course, he's going to say that. He's got a job to protect."
- Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You) Wish List
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