NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment
bcohen | December 16, 2006This is a notice for a conference to be held in Belfast next year. I post it both to broadcast and to ask about techno-scientific input. (Well, also, if anyone's ever searching for "post-modernism" at Scienceblogs, to ferret out the Continentals in the bunch, they'll find this one.)
"Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands"
The School of English, Queen's University, Belfast
17th and 18th April 2007
"Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish":
Samuel Beckett's representation of the human condition as regulated by
waste in Breath , a playlet of 1969, now…
bcohen | November 29, 2006So says the following article in The Guardian: "How mirrors can light up the world."
The subtitle: "Scientists say the global energy crisis can be solved by using the desert sun."
Then follow the sub-headings and you'll have the basic run-down on the story:
"Competitive with oil"
"Safer and cheaper"
Then the Friends of the Earth guy finishes it off: "In the wake of the Stern report the enlightened investment is on hot deserts, not uranium mines or oil wells."
While I offer healthy skepticism, here's a multi-line quote to help you feel that by reading this efficient synopsis you have the gist…
bcohen | November 20, 2006"The Key to Modern Life is Strategic Ignorance."
That's a quote from Joel Achenbach's story, "Another Way," in the Washington Post this weekend about an off-the-grid eco-settlement in North Carolina. (Some good pictures here.) He writes about Earthaven, an eco-village, that considers itself an "intentional community" (as opposed to a commune, said commune encouraging a vision of dirty hippies who are probably lazy pot-smokers too, right?) . The quote about ignorance is apt - we are sustained in our consumer habits by the illusion that we are autonomous beings, separated from the source of…
worldsfair | November 15, 2006
Image resulting from tree "painting" by Douglas-fir for two minutes
Nalini Nadkarni, a tree canopy researcher and a National Geographic regular, was kind enough to let me publish this interest piece that looks at the intersection of science and arts.
In essense, she explores the notion that lack of empathy for flora such as trees, is partially mitigated by its stationary status, and so goes on to explore whether how mobile trees actually are. To do this, she essentially adheres a paintbrush to a twig on a branch, and places a canvas in proximity. What's produced is essentially a "painting…
bcohen | October 31, 2006The Silencer (being performed in Blacksburg, VA, on November 1, 2, and 3, ahead of its London opening in 2007) is a play about Global Warming and Climate Science. How about that, a play about global warming and climate science. Not your everyday occurrence. I can't say if it's Michael Frayn-level theater, but I can say that it's not the usual approach to confronting climate science issues.
Here's a summary of the play:
Dr. Brian Heath must decide whether to protect his family or publicize his alarming findings about the impending threat of climate change. His predicament stands for our…
bcohen | October 12, 2006Amy Bentley, a Profesor of Public Health at NYU, has this well-done* review of Food, Politics, Food Politics, Morality of Food Production, the Ethics of Foopd Systems, and what not, at the Chronicle.
The books reviewed in her essay are:
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006)
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The…
bcohen | October 9, 2006Archer-Daniels-Midland CEO Patricia Woertz blasted ethanol for use in fuesl when she was with Chevron (7 years ago). Now she's acquired a taste for it, as the new CEO of ADM (supermarket to the world). The New York Times reports in "A Bet on Ethanol, With a Convert at the Helm."
Let's see, let's see, what are my options here...
"Delicious irony?" No, not quite direct enough.
"Yummy mix-up?" That's probably worse.
Could get lewd, but I won't try that.
How's about, "Corny Consequences Abound: For ADM, and, worse yet, For Bad Blog Lines." Well clearly self-defeating there.
"Cornrows…
bcohen | October 5, 2006Some argue that Distributed Generation (DG) of electricity is flawed and not worth pursuing because it can never replace the production capacity of "the grid." Others argue that the flaw with DG is that it lacks a visible Superhero as its representative. I'm of the latter type. DG needs a popular Superhero to boost its visibility.
I favor the latter argument not only because the former is itself based on a flawed premise - DG advocates don't actually claim it could replace the capacity of the grid, as if the case at hand was either/or, either full-on centralized grid production and…
bcohen | October 2, 2006There are a range of campus sustainability initiatives across the US and across the world (though the US needs them more). There's even a conference this week at Arizona State held by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
One nice opportunity with campus-wide approaches is that they can avoid being "sustainable" for the sake of "sustainable development." Most efforts that use the sustainable term are, to be sure, aiming to develop their incomes and resource uses in sustainable ways, not to sustain the earth and ecological health. They are, in other…
bcohen | September 27, 2006First, a quote, then (below the fold) the book I found it in (and, incidentally, the post title about infinite variability, is taken from the book, below):
W.H. Auden:
"The historical world is a horrid place where, instead of nice clean measurable forces, there are messy things like mixed motives, where classes keep overlapping, where what is believed to have happened is as real as what actually happened, a world, moreover, which cannot be defined by technical terms but only described by analogies."
I've recently been reading How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition,…
bcohen | September 19, 2006This article by David Ewing Duncan, "The Pollution Within," is in the new issue of National Geographic. (He was also on NPR this morning.) So, while we're on the subject of consumption her at The World's Fair, I think we need to get far past very narrow senses of what consumption means. So, Duncan asked himself, what is he really consuming?
The tag line on the piece:
Modern chemistry keeps insects from ravaging crops, lifts stains from carpets, and saves lives. But the ubiquity of chemicals is taking a toll. Many of the compounds absorbed by the body stay there for years--and fears about…
bcohen | July 26, 2006Environmental Science/Studies in Review, Volume 1
Here is a rundown of some recent pieces of note w/r/t environment, science, and technology -- specifically, a few on atrazine and hermaphroditic friogs, and then a few on Big Organic (farming and planting and eating and such).
From the August issue of Harper's comes an article (not available on-line - I'm just saying, maybe go read it at a newsstand, like one of those guys who stands there reading select articles and learning for free) "It's Not Easy Being Green: Are weed-killers turning frogs into hermaphrodites?" by William Souder . The…
worldsfair | July 23, 2006It's ironic but having just answered a scienceblogger question about preservation, I'm aware of a personal predicament that addresses some of the same ideals. Namely, I've got a critter in my backyard. This is what I saw on my lawn this morning:
This isn't so surprising in itself, since we live next to a farm. Lots of other fauna inhabit around and about our surroundings. But see, these are mole hills and they are wrecking my lawn. And short of doing some targeted gene therapy to coerse them into prefering my neighbour's habitat, I'm a bit stuck about what to do.
Googling mole, of course…
worldsfair | July 18, 2006A little late on this one, but the scienceblog question of the week (of last week), reads:
"Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?..."
If you take the question at face falue - that is in an empirical sense - then the answer is of course not. You could, I suppose, say it would be nice to at least give everything a fighting chance, especially so far as how our own human ecological footprint comes into play. But the fact of the matter is that even if we embarked on a "preservation of all kick," the reality would be that it would be done under a human…
bcohen | June 23, 2006If ever there was an art-science piece on the web, this would be it: environmental angle, artistic production, scientific context, you get it all. This is, courtesy of our friend Cletus, a piece at Salon about "Activist, environmentalist and former rock promoter" Natalie Jeremijenko.
Go here first, to get into the site, but then pop back to this blog post, and then go here for the article.
Excerpts and comments to come, later on...
...but would include:
1. Why "mad scientist"? Are we still doing that stereotype?
2. What's it take to provide a new perception of something, beyond the lab (…
worldsfair | June 13, 2006Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irene, Jose, Katrina, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Phillippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma, Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon, Gamma, Zeta...
Not exactly the makings of another Children's Alphabet Picture Book. Rather, these are names of the 27 hurricanes/tropical storms given by the World Meteorological Organization in 2005, the first time in history, where letters of the Greek alpabet had to be used when the predetermined names had run out. A few days ago, the first such storm of the 2006 hurricane season, named Alberto, rumbled and…