female – Baja California Sur, Mexico
Birdsong – Making Visible the Invisible
We recently posted on artist Xavi Bou‘s creative use of chronophotography, a series of photos that capture the illusion of movement, to craft still portraits of birds in flight.
Australian artist Andy Thomas specializes in creating ‘audio life forms’: beautiful abstract shapes that react to sounds. These videos were created using computer program to activate particle effects from digitally captured bird sounds. Continue reading
A River Runs Through Amboli Reserve
On my Saturday afternoon I followed up a morning of farm visits with a visit to the local agricultural research extension of the state university. More on that tomorrow. For now, I want to share some images from my Sunday exploration about an hour from the farms described, due inland and into the Western Ghats. Specifically, Amboli Reserve, which is in the view above.
Bird of the Day: Red-lored Parrot
Gallon Jug Estate, Belize
National Park of the Week: Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
Source: holicoffee.com
Granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 1979, Plitvice Lakes National Park is Coratia’s largest and most popular park. Sixteen lakes, all inter-connected over a distance of 8 km by series of waterfalls and cascades, are set deep in the woodland and have a height difference of 135 meters (Veliki Slap, the largest waterfall, is 70 meters tall). Although the terraced lakes comprise only a small area of the total 300 sq km park, they offer a stunning sight with their changing hues throughout the seasons and garner practically all the attention from local and foreign tourists alike. Continue reading
Coal Mining, Climate Change & Entrepreneurial Conservation
Reclamation crews fill in rock highwalls like this one, creating flat land that Tom Clarke intends to reforest as a way to trap and hold carbon dioxide. Credit Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
We had to read it to believe it:
A Curious Plan to Fight Climate Change: Buy Mines, Sell Coal
Tom Clarke, a nursing home owner, concocted a strategy to cut carbon emissions by gaining control of millions of tons of coal reserves and multiple mines.
FAIRVIEW, W.Va. — The coal was piled about as high as it could go, spilling down to the railroad tracks and towering over the elevator shaft. A yellow bulldozer pushed the mound to make room for more. From a distance on this rainy day, the black heap looked like a giant whale about to swallow the mine whole.
The word underground was that Federal mine No. 2 would soon have to close. It was early April, and the mine was running out of storage space. There were not enough buyers for all the coal. Continue reading
Mango Dreaming
Crist’s visit to small farms as part of our work on a new project serves as a reminder of the amazing diversity and abundance of fruits and vegetables growing in many fertile parts of this country. In Kerala it seems that any seed or stick placed into the rich soil will sprout, and even in the sandy or red clay soil of Maharashtra he found vegetables with explosive flavor. He described the mango trees that surrounded the farm – not only was he in “mango headquarters”, as he put it – he was likely surrounded by the one of the most prized of this “king of fruit” – the Alphonso.
Note to self: visit during mango season. Continue reading
Perspective On The Ages
The Geologic History of Earth. Note the timescales. We are currently in the Holocene, which has been warm and moist and a great time to grow human civilization. But the activity of civilization is now pushing the planet into a new epoch which scientists call the Anthropocene. Ray Troll/Troll Art
Big words in the title may distract from the excellent point of this “cosmos & culture” article at National Public Radio (USA), worth a read:
Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene
You can’t solve a problem until you understand it. When it comes to climate change, on a fundamental level we don’t really understand the problem.
For some time now, I’ve been writing about the need to broaden our thinking about climate. That includes our role in changing it — and the profound challenges those changes pose to our rightly cherished “project” of civilization. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Osprey
photo credit: Stephen Crafts
Bowman Beach, Sanibel Island, Florida
45 Red Wolves Remain In North Carolina
Captive red wolf at Species Survival Plan facility, Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium (Tacoma, Washington).B. Bartel / USFWS
Thanks to EcoWatch for this news
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina today issued a preliminary injunction that orders the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to stop capturing and killing—and authorizing private landowners to capture and kill—members of the rapidly dwindling population of wild red wolves. Continue reading
Olympic Acknowledgement
Jesse Owens, 1936, AP File Photo
In February we posted about the documentary film Olympic Pride, American Prejudice, that highlighted the history of the 18 African American athletes attending “Hitler’s Olympics” in 1936 Berlin.
They returned home to their segregated country, receiving zero recognition from President Roosevelt, despite winning a quarter of the metals won by the U.S. team in the games.
Eighty years later, the athletes—16 men and two women—received their overdue recognition by a U.S. president Thursday when their relatives visited the White House for an event honoring the U.S. team at this year’s Rio games.
“It wasn’t just Jesse. It was other African American athletes in the middle of Nazi Germany under the gaze of Adolf Hitler that put a lie to notions of racial superiority—whooped ’em—and taught them a thing or two about democracy and taught them a thing or two about the American character,” President Obama said Thursday. Continue reading
Agricultural Exploration, Flavor Surprise
Where is Asha, or at least her book? I could utilize her culinary inputs related to southern Indian vegetables and flavors right about now.
I am in the coastal region of southern Maharashtra now, just north of the Goa border. The cuisine is different from that of Kerala, but with many of the same vegetable inputs. For ten days my mission is primarily to food-focused. For a new project we are working on, our current task is to determine what food items will be grown on property and which will we sourced from local farmers. This is always a curious task. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Northern Cardinal (Villa del Faro)
male – Baja California Sur, Mexico
The Green of Baja
Green is not the first color I associate with Baja California Sur and as the coastal outline slowly became clearer through my plane window I was stunned by the vibrancy of color I was witnessing. The “rainy” season of Baja, which only means a few inches of rain in a span of three months, had transformed the dry, craggy landscape into a verdant, blossoming oasis. In my previous trip to Baja, I had been informed of this phenomenon but I was unprepared, nonetheless, for the volume of greenery and pop of pink and blue flowers.
Ornitographies – Making Visible the Invisible
Great cormorants, Ibars Swamp, Catalonia (Courtesy of Xavi Bou)
Birds are photogenic in their own right, but this creative capture of their flight by artist Xavi Bou is both innovative and etherial. A geologist and photographer by training, Xavi’s love of birds goes back to childhood.
Xavi Bou focuses on birds, his great passion, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible.
Unlike other motion analysis which preceded it, Ornitographies moves away from the scientific approach of chronophotography used by photographers like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey. Continue reading
Northern Lights, Iceland Edition
The northern lights over Iceland in February. The glowing orange area on the left side are the lights of the capital, Reykjavik. Jamie Cooper/SSPL via Getty Images
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for letting us know where they still take these things seriously:
Reykjavik Turns Off Street Lights To Turn Up The Northern Lights
Wednesday night’s aurora borealis forecast was particularly strong, so Icelandic officials tried to reduce light pollution to make the green glow more visible to people in the capital Continue reading
Bees’ Emotions
A bee enters a cylinder with an ambiguous reward in the study of bee “feelings.” CreditClint J. Perry
We avoid gimmickry but now a bee has finally convinced us that a gif can do just what is needed to convey a point:
The Sweet Emotional Life of Bees
By
It is hard enough to figure out emotions in humans — but insects?
Nonetheless, as far back as Darwin, scientists have suggested that insects have something like emotional states, and researchers continue, despite the difficulties, to try to pin those states down. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Plum-headed Parakeet
female – Valparai, Tamil Nadu
Tale Of Two Souths
I had the distinct pleasure of dining with a friend at Asha’s restaurant in Atlanta, and of having a discussion with Asha after dinner about our inverted common experience of operating restaurants in these two souths referenced in the title of her new cookbook (she has family in Kerala and I have family in Atlanta, and we both live in one another’s country of birth).
My foodie dinner companion and I thought it would be interesting for Asha to come to Kerala to share her culinary talents in one or more of the kitchens we were in the process of setting up at the time of that dinner a couple years ago. Asha was then, and obviously remains, quite too busy for that. Go, Asha!
Review: An Indian Twist on Southern Cuisine in ‘My Two Souths’
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Can the remix be better than the original? It’s something to contemplate while working through the chef Asha Gomez’s debut cookbook, “My Two Souths: Blending the Flavors of India Into a Southern Kitchen,” with Martha Hall Foose. Ingredients make unexpected cameos that often steal the show. Continue reading
Organic Is A Word Well Suited To Curiosity
From the Oxford English Dictionary, skipping past the obsolete and rare definitions of the word organic, and picking the ones we find most interesting for our purposes, all of which predate by decades, and even centuries, one of the latest uses of the word organic in the categorization of a method of agriculture:
Belonging to the constitution of an organized whole; structural.
Of or relating to an organized structure compared to a living being.
Of, relating to, or characterized by connection or coordination of parts into a single, harmonious whole; organized; systematic.
Designating a work of art in which the parts seem naturally or necessarily coordinated into the whole; (Archit.) (in the writings of Frank Lloyd Wright) designating a style which attempts to make a unity of a building and its setting and environment; (also, more generally) designating any of various styles in which the character of buildings is more or less reminiscent of a living organism.
Characterized by continuous or natural development; (Business) designating expansion generated by a company’s own resources, as opposed to that resulting from the acquisition of other companies.
We care about these definitions because the word organic comes into our conversations constantly. We have avoided overuse in these pages of this and other words that we care about. But recently this word stands out, worthy of more of our attention. We will use it more, but carefully. A balance is required.
Organikos 