Friday Links
Some stuff that caught my eye this week:
Bryan Walsh at Time attempts to sort through the frack-off at Cornell.
Biotechnology to the rescue? Shhh, don’t tell the anti-GMO crowd about this one.
Steve Silberman tweets:
Between them, Gingrich and Limbaugh have had 7 marriages. And they want to abolish my one.
Did you know Israel was at war with itself?
An evangelical climate scientist (much in the news lately) explains what it will take for conservative evangelicals to really get on board with the climate concerned community:
Environmental issues and climate change carry a lot of baggage in evangelical circles. If you can dissociate the issue from Al Gore, if you can dissociate the issue from the Democratic Party, if you can dissociate it from hugging trees, from pro-choice, from evolution vs. creation, if you can strip away all of those ties and only talk about the issue of taking care of the planet God gave us and loving our neighbor as ourself, then there is hardly anyone who will not accept that message. It’s not about theology, it’s about baggage.
Jerry Coyne, picking up on that scientists-are-clueless-about-journalism Guardian article, ask his readers:
What are your complaints about science journalism? Who, in particular, doing you think is doing a really good job or a really crappy job?
We learn that Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, can envision himself being a Republican in the Make Love-Not War era. Maybe he would have penned a book called The Democratic Brain on Acid.
Richard Betts wants to widen the climate conversation. Good luck with that!
Finally, courtesy of Charles C. Mann, I’ve been made aware of this excellent essay by a geographer who looks back at his own famous 20-year old essay and an ensuing body of work by scholars that deflated the “pristine myth.” The humanized landscape theme and some of the authors (and their books) mentioned in the essay have previously been discussed at Collide-a-Scape (see here and here, for example).
Have a nice weekend.
The topic noted by your Mann reference – Charles NOT Mike! – is THE huge elephant in the room that the postnormal pseudoscience called Conservation Biology deliberately tries to squash, censor or revise.
Because ALL their fake baselines – and thus all their impossible ‘restoration’ goals based on false historical assessments – are based on the myth it destroys. The whole green vision is based on fake history.
It is also one of my favourite topics so glad to see you actually mention it.
Ed, agreed. But still looking in all the small dark corners of the ego as to when humans became somehow detached from the natural world.
One more time with feeling – what we do as humans is as natural as what a bat does in the dark of the night. why are people so afraid of our gift of intellect and the ability to survive with just 6-8 hours sleep, thus giving us time to do what we do?
Stating that somehow there is a divide between humans and nature is UN-NATURAL!
Betts seems to be conflating whom one talks with, with what one talks about. What I hoped would be a reflection on ways to break out of narrow constructions of what constitutes climate change and response is a jumble of role of scientists, breadth of climate, and strategies for engaging skeptics. Lots of good topics, some interesting inclinations, yet left wanting more depth on fewer ideas in one post.
DeNihilist
“Stating that somehow there is a divide between humans and nature is UN-NATURAL!”
I fully agree. And that artificial divide is the even larger elephant in the room. And an extremely ironic one.
On the one hand the so called Conservation Biologist/Biodiversity Inc crowd claims to be all about science and claim to believe in evolution – supposedly in sharp contrast to the supposed antiscience people who question them.
Yet this ‘humans are not part of nature’ premise is based entirely on religious views and they only accept the part of evolution that does not include extinction.
The unequivocal fact that they deny historical reality and very deliberately choose the ‘myth of the pristine wilderness’ reveals that it is nothing but a false religion.
Unfortunately, there are other forces who supporting the ‘pristine wilderness’ myth because of the way it portrays Native North Americans – as ecologically irrelevant ‘primitives.’
Accepting that they were not, and were as human as anyone, makes the whole American Myth rather complicated. Much simpler to imagine a land where just a few primitives disppeared to make way for modern history.
Ed,
If I can find the issue, I will post the prose. In one of my sons’ Discover mags, it was stated that scientists were amazed ( I believe that was the word used) to find that humans’ were still evolving!
I was thunderstruck! Again, everything else in nature can still be evolving, but humans are outside this system.
Bloody ridiculous.
I just checked the wikipedia page for conservation biology, as well as the Society for Conservation Biology, and I saw nothing in the definition, mission, or principles that indicates that they think that humans are separate from nature. Based on what I do know, I think they think just the opposite.
They may hold opinions that you disagree with, such as that all human-caused extinctions are bad. But it seems that some of you are taking a New Age meme that you disagree with and trying to tar all of conservation biology with it. Seems similar to what some skeptics try to do with climate science.
#6 – Yes. Their “mission.” Missionaries masquerading as scientists.
Which explains everything anyone needs to know about this pseudoscience.
For this week’s collection of links:
http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/1-23-12%20Priorities%20Release.pdf
“Since it was first tested on the annual policy priorities list in 2007, the share of Americans who view dealing with global warming as a top priority has slipped from 38% to 25%. Democrats (38%) are far more likely than Republicans (11%) to rate this as a top priority. But the decline has occurred across party lines: In 2007, 48% of Democrats rated dealing with global warming as a top priority, as did 23% of Republicans.”
Source- Pew Center.
My, my, a whopping 38% of Democrats are convinced it’s a high priority- a huge drop since 2007. Just one in four people nationwide see it as a “top priority” for the nation.
Well, that’s certainly an achievement.
#7
Ha. The Society for Conservation Biology is an organization. Most organizations put together mission statements. So far you assertions about conservation biology have no basis other than your belief, and I note that you did not challenge my point that there is nothing in conservation biology that suggests that humans are separate from nature, as you have been asserting.
As with AGW, I suppose that you just don’t like the implications of attempting to prevent an extinction event, so you use any old rhetoric to tar it. Goes well with the choir, but you will have to actually find some substance to get beyond that.
@8
Jeff – So since the start of the worst recession in many decades, other issues have dropped in priority. This is news?
@10
Dean- I see you never bought into the phony “green jobs” claims either. But other than that, what would it take to move the most important issue ever – in fact, the avoidance of an extinction event! – back up there somewhere at least comparable with “moral decay” on the list of priorities? At least for communitarian liberals.
“In December 1985, Soulé published a long manifesto, “What is Conservation Biology?” in BioScience, the journal most visible to the academic and, especially, the non-academic biological community in the United States. Soulé proclaimed that a new inter-disciplinary science, conservation biology, based on both substantive and normative ethical foundations, had been recently created to conserve what still remained of Earth’s biological heritage (Soulé 1985)… Setting the tone for much of the discussion during the early years of North American conservation biology, Soulé emphasized that the new field was a “crisis discipline”… in 1986, Daniel Janzen published an influential exhortation, “The Future of Tropical Ecology,” urging ecologists to undertake the political activism necessary for conservation.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservation-biology/
Yes. A new postnormal “crisis’ feeding missionary pseudoscience. Which explains why most of what it produces is alarmist junk, and why it was so nicely married to the AGW junk.
To see their great megalomanical landgrabbing project, google ‘Rewildling.’
I see the baboons here are still making their funny ‘global warming is dead hur hur hur!’ noises. Meanwhile, the globe keeps warming, and physics keeps not caring what polls say.
You’re not really gonna miss all this, are you, Keith? I would find it dismal to have to deal with some of these characters day in and out.
“Climate Concerned” is yet another in the long list of euphemisms the AGW beleiver community relies on to pretend they are on the high ground in the climate dispute. The correlation between the AGW beleiver’s need to have euphemistic names for themselves, the climate situation and those who dare to disagree with them and their being proven either wrong or deceptive or misleading is interesting.
Skeptics care more about the climate than believers. Skeptics do not largely support windmill power. Skeptics do not like wasting resources on failed policies. Skeptics know that putting efforts into actually solving environmental problems is much more helpful than imposing unworkable ideas at great cost. Believers only have their faith and rhetoric. Who cares more? Those who look to actual problems to solve with actual solutions, or those who are willing to spend every dime of other people’s money, no matter how pointless?
Steve,
Keep telling yourself that. Over and over. You might even believe it someday.