Kalamassery, Kerala
Bird of the Day: Scaly-breasted Munia
Kalamassery, Kerala
Adriatic, The Experience & The Book
When I first set foot in Croatia more than two decades ago it was for a project to assist the country in defending the coastal areas from the pressures of mass tourism development. Within a couple of years I was doing similar work in Montenegro. Before too long we were enough in love with the region to make it our family’s home for a year.
So seeing this book about the future importance of the region, by an eminent scholar, is both heartwarming and concerning:
“[An] elegantly layered exploration of Europe’s past and future . . . a multifaceted masterpiece.”—The Wall Street Journal
“A lovely, personal journey around the Adriatic, in which Robert Kaplan revisits places and peoples he first encountered decades ago.”—Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads
In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Ruddy Shelduck
Hotel-ish Homes For Birds, Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Artist-made birdhouses are installed throughout the Garden as part of For the Birds. Use the exhibition map or scan the list below to explore!
Zach Helfand gives us a quick sketch of what happens when celebrities, and celebrity architects, collaborate on behalf of birds. When you next have the opportunity to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, keep this initiative in mind:
To benefit the Audubon Society, “For the Birds,” a COVID passion project, brings together ornithophiles and artist-designed birdhouses, including a 12BR Apt, A/C, No Elv, Vus.
100 Martin Inn birdhouse on location at Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
The recent housing market has brought about ruinous price increases, a bidding war over a fifth-floor walkup studio with no oven, and enough of a civic exodus for the Post to declaim, earlier this month, “listen up, new york—florida sucks, and you’ll all be back in five years.” But that doesn’t mean deals can’t be had. Take a unit that just went on the market. It’s a newly built architect-designed twelve-bedroom in shall we say Crown Heights, with finishes by a master carpenter and three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views of Prospect Park. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Sand Lark
Uttarakhand
Rural Wind & Gold
Thanks to Josh Gabbatis and the folks at CarbonBrief:
Windfarms raise incomes and house prices in rural US, study finds
Wind turbines have increased local incomes by around 5% and house values by 2.6% in parts of the US, according to a new study.
The research, published in the journal Energy Policy, found benefits in terms of jobs, taxes and land payments associated with renewable energy. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Resplendent Quetzal
father feeding a green jade beetle to its young
Volcan Atitlán, Guatemala
Kaboom! The First Successful Climate Raid Ever
Until reading about them in this newsletter I read each week, Blair Palese, Peter McKillop and the Climate & Capital Media team were not on my radar. Now they are, and I enjoyed reading what they have written to Jeff Bezos about changing the game:
Capitalism in the right hands: How a tech bro just rewrote Australia’s climate future
- Following a stunning shareholder coup, Australian software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes becomes the world’s first corporate raider with a mission to radically reduce Australia’s carbon footprint.
- Cannon-Brookes made billions in software, but he is not retiring from the game in order to “give back” in the gentlemanly pursuit of charity.
- His victorious raid demonstrates that real climate action requires more than just writing checks.
- Instead Cannon-Brookes channeled corporate raider Carl Icahn, investor Henry Kravis, feminist organizer Gloria Steinem, Cajun political strategist James Carville and to do what no person has ever done: Merge political, financial, shareholder, and climate action into a single, ground-breaking capitalist moment to take on global warming.
- We thought Jeff Bezos should know Mike.
Dear Jeff Bezos,
Greetings from Climate & Capital Media. We tried to send you a message on LinkedIn, but there are like at least two dozen Jeff Bezoses and you are not one of them. We applaud your commitment to climate action and setting up the $10 Billion charitable Earth Fund.
But word in New York is you are a tad frustrated with the fund’s impact. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Burrowing Owl
Volcan Pacaya, Guatemala
Pantanal Priorities
The Pantanal wetlands in Brazil. MARKUS MAUTHE / GREENPEACE
There is not much that has happened in Brazil in the last few years that I would consider good environmental news.
YALE ENVIRONMENT 360
So one more urgency is at risk of getting lost in all the rest (which may be part of a strategy). But making it easier to extract the extracted from the center of the continent is akin to adding fuel to a very big fire:
A Waterway Project in Brazil Imperils a Vast Tropical Wetland
The Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, has been battered in recent years by agricultural development, drought, and fire. Now, a push to turn the region’s key river into a waterway for soybean-laden barges threatens to alter the natural flows of this iconic ecosystem.
It takes 14 hours for Lourenço Pereira Leite to reach his fishing spot.
He and his brother-in-law chug along in a simple one-engine motorboat, towing their traditional fishing canoe behind them. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Violet-headed Hummingbird
San Isidro de el General, Costa Rica
Friday Feel-good Photos
Scientists named the giant tortoise Fernanda, after the Fernandina Island, a largely unexplored active volcano in the western Galápagos archipelago that she calls home. Photograph: Lucas Bustamante/PA
Every now and then it is time for nature photos. First, above, is from a story that surprises, from a place we love:
‘Fantastic giant tortoise’ species thought extinct for 100 years found alive
Identification of Galápagos tortoise celebrated by scientists as a big deal for island’s biodiversity
And then there are photos unconnected to any news stories, scientific or otherwise, submitted for us to enjoy by people from around the world:
A newly hatched green iguana rests on foliage in a terrarium at the Chennai Snake Park in Chennai, India. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty Images
Two are from India, our home for seven years. Monkey business was a constant theme.
Monkeys eat watermelons during the heatwave in New Delhi, India. Photograph: Rajat Gupta/EPA
Another from a place whose name has lots of meaning for us:
A jellyfish swims off the island of Ithaca, Greece
Photograph: Cor Kuyvenhoven/Ghost Diving/Reuters
See all the other photos here.
Bird of the Day: King Vulture
Costa Rica
Deep Divers & Learning
Thanks to Stephanie Pain, Knowable Magazine and Smithsonian for this:
What Are Scientists Learning About the Deepest Diving Creatures in the Ocean?
Animals-turned-oceanographers are helping biologists find out what they do when they get to the cold, dark depths
Chilean devil rays swim in the Atlantic Ocean near the Azores. Reinhard Dirscherl / ullstein bild via Getty Images
There’s only one word for it: indescribable. “It’s one of those awesome experiences you can’t put into words,” says fish ecologist Simon Thorrold. Thorrold is trying to explain how it feels to dive into the ocean and attach a tag to a whale shark — the most stupendous fish in the sea. “Every single time I do it, I get this huge adrenaline rush,” he says. “That’s partly about the science and the mad race to get the tags fixed. But part of it is just being human and amazed by nature and huge animals.”
Whale sharks are one of a select group of large marine animals that scientists like Thorrold, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, have signed up as ocean-going research assistants. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Crowned-Lapwing
Etosha National Park, Namibia
Orchidelirium Anew
Burnt tip orchids. At least 10 vanished from a national nature reserve at Mount Caburn, East Sussex. Photograph: Katewarn Images/Alamy
Susan Orlean brought orchidelirium to our attention in 1999, shining a light on how and why these flowers inspire lots of good, and plenty of bad behavior. Orchids have been abundant in our pages over the years for various reasons, most recently due to a show; today due to criminal enterprise:
Spate of orchid thefts in England puts rare species at risk
Experts believe plants in Sussex and Kent were ‘stolen to order’
Hardy Orchid Society Replying to @HardyOrchidSoc This is what you should have seen. If you have any information that can help in the investigation please contact @kentpolice @BBCNews
A spate of thefts of rare orchids from sites in southern England has concerned scientists, who say endangered species may be at risk.
Orchid experts believe that the plants, from locations including in Sussex and Kent, may have been “stolen to order”.
Conservationists at the Sussex Wildlife Trust were dismayed last week to hear of at least 10 burnt-tip orchids missing from a national nature reserve at Mount Caburn, while in Kent the Hardy Orchid Society reported that 30 late spider orchids had been taken from a site in Folkestone.
Neil Evans, of the Hardy Orchid Society, said: “The theft represents a major loss to the population. They are only found in this country in a few sites in Kent.” Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Sooty-capped Chlorospingus
Cerro de la Muerte, Costa Rica
Tertulia & Touch
Customers in Bookmongers of Brixton, a book store in London. Apps have struggled to reproduce online the kind of real-world serendipity that puts a book in a reader’s hand. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
Yesterday’s post notwithstanding, my favorite book review in ages was published five days ago. A couple weeks earlier I had read an essay that riffs off the book, written by the book author himself. And I was all in–hook, line and sinker as they say–after reading the author’s punchy riff. The reviewer, one of my favorite cultural commentators, filleted the book such that I had to question my susceptibility to the book author’s riff essay.
One reason I read book reviews in a variety of publications is to get the next best thing to in-store browsing; comparative criticisms. But finding and holding a book is a whole other thing. Alexandra Alter’s article, about how technology may afford that in a new way, is of interest; Tertulia, if you can simulate that sensation of discovery, I will be all in:
A New Way to Choose Your Next Book
Most books are sold online, where it’s impossible to replicate the experience of browsing in a brick-and-mortar store. Book-discovery apps aim to change that.
By some measures, the book business is doing better than ever.
Last year, readers bought nearly 827 million print books, an increase of roughly 10 percent over 2020, and a record since NPD BookScan began tracking two decades ago.
But all is not as rosy as it seems. As book buyers have migrated online, it has gotten harder to sell books by new or lesser known authors. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Alexandrine Parakeets
Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand
What the #@ ϟ ⚛︎!
The first mention of humpback whales in our pages, more than a decade ago, was a very brief reference in a post explaining the tragedy of the commons, a precursor to Seth’s environmental history honors thesis. One post mentions humpback whales in Monterey Bay but we missed the video above until now. There have been so many posts about these whales, that missing it makes the following book review all the more interesting to read to the end. Of course, since it is a review by Elizabeth Kolbert, about a book by Ed Yong, you will want to read to the end anyway:
The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World
Nonhuman creatures have senses that we’re just beginning to fathom. What would they tell us if we could only understand them?
One evening almost sixty years ago, a Tufts University researcher named Roger Payne was working in his lab when he heard a radio report about a whale that had washed up on a beach nearby. Although it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. Continue reading
Organikos 