On Friday, when most environmentally-inclined people were despairing about the the torturous climate talks in South Africa (since ended, good roundup and assessment here), a short op-ed appeared in the NYT, arguing that despair over the fate of the planet was getting a bit stale. The three authors of the piece–a journalist and two scientists–don’t…Continue Reading…
Roger Cohn, the editor of Yale Environment 360, conducted an interesting interview with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a scholar who studies the intersection of ecology and religion. This is a perennial interest of mine, even though I’m a life-long atheist. Most people in the world (including many scientists) possess a religious faith or seek out some kind…Continue Reading…
Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: In wildness is the preservation of the world. Since the late 1800s, the notion of wilderness as nature incarnate has been an animating force in American culture. A host of seminal, hugely influential environmental writers and activists, from John Muir and Aldo Leopold to David Brower and Edward Abbey, have…Continue Reading…
Andy Revkin wrestles with Tim Flannery’s new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in a NYT book review: An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have upended hosts of ecosystems and are exerting a growing and potentially calamitous influence on the climate. Some, perhaps in response to public indifference, have…Continue Reading…
Via Andy Revkin at Dot Earth, I see that Peter Gleick, living in an imaginary world where tradeoffs never occur, is outraged that some people in California are daring to consider that not all endangered species, because of their dire status, can be saved: In a desperate attempt to make it easier to solve California’s complex and contentious water…Continue Reading…
It’s a good day when forest ecology and the prevalence of movie sex scenes can be discussed in the same breath.
Julia Whitty asks: Are prophecies of conservation doom self-fulfilling? Summarizing a recent paper by Australian researchers, Whitty writes: the authors suggest that relentless communication of an impending mass extinction is failing to motivate politicians, policy makers, or the public, and is likely to be counterproductive. Hmm, perhaps this will resonate with the climate doom crowd.
The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes? I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and…Continue Reading…
**UPDATE: Stuart Pimm, the highly respected conservation biologist at Duke University, emailed me his thoughts on the climate change/global land use dichotomy that is implied by my post. It’s an important perspective. Stuart has given me permission to publish his email in its entirety. You can find it below at this comment.** Perhaps the biggest…Continue Reading…
The social/ecological relationship is one that fascinates me. It seems to have been the theme of this year’s annual Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) symposium, which Piper Corp reports on at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog. For those unfamiliar with LTER’s, this gem of a program is in its third decade and is…Continue Reading…