Keeping Shakespeare in Mind

/ Amie Inman / Leave a comment
Illustration by Mathew McFarren

Illustration by Mathew McFarren

Quite a few of our team can attest to the power of a liberal arts education, especially when put in such a joyful context.

Scott L. Newstok’s convocation speech to the Rhodes College class of 2020 embraces this joy, adding the cheeky tweak of asking the incoming class to approach their college experience in the “spirit of the 16th century”.

Building a bridge to the 16th century must seem like a perverse prescription for today’s ills. I’m the first to admit that English Renaissance pedagogy was rigid and rightly mocked for its domineering pedants. Few of you would be eager to wake up before 6 a.m. to say mandatory prayers, or to be lashed for tardiness, much less translate Latin for hours on end every day of the week. Could there be a system more antithetical to our own contemporary ideals of student-centered, present-focused, and career-oriented education?

Yet this system somehow managed to nurture world-shifting thinkers, including those who launched the Scientific Revolution. This education fostered some of the very habits of mind endorsed by both the National Education Association and the Partnership for 21st Century Learning: critical thinking; clear communication; collaboration; and creativity. (To these “4Cs,” I would add “curiosity.”) Given that your own education has fallen far short of those laudable goals, I urge you to reconsider Shakespeare’s intellectual formation: that is, not what he purportedly thought — about law or love or leadership — but how he thought. An apparently rigid educational system could, paradoxically, induce liberated thinking.

“Take advantage of the autonomy and opportunities that college permits by approaching it in the spirit of the 16th century. You’ll become capable of a level of precision, inventiveness, and empathy worthy to be called Shakespearean.”
So how can you think like Shakespeare?

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Pandas & Baboo

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment
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Giant panda feasting on some bamboo at Chengdu Research Base.

Reading this morning’s news about the giant panda being moved from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, reminds me of my small stuffed (artificial) panda bear called Baboo and the backstory to getting him.

During my semester abroad in China two years ago, I made a trip to Sichuan province and visited the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. I had never seen a panda before and the opportunity to watch many of them (not only the giant panda, but also the red panda) was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

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Case for Human Settlement Enhancing Ecosystems

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clamshells

Source: conservationmagazine.org

A recent scientific publication in Nature Communications enlightens us to the possibility that human settlement does not always equate to land degradation, and in some cases, improves the local ecology. Here’s the results of the study as shared in Conservation Magazine:

Researchers studied temperate rainforest on Calvert and Hecate islands, off the central coast of British Columbia, Canada. This forest is very wet, receiving an average of 4 meters of rainfall a year, and has acidic, nutrient-poor soils. The dominant tree species is western redcedar (Thuja plicata).

The coastline is also dotted with semi-permanent settlements where First Nations groups, as indigenous people are known in Canada, lived seasonally or year-round. Especially over the past 6,000 years, people intensively harvested shellfish from intertidal areas and built up large shell middens—some up to 5 meters deep—near their settlements.

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Cornell University Campus Pursues Geothermal Heating

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment
© Cornell Marketing Group

© Cornell Marketing Group

In 2009, Cornell faculty, staff, and students came together to create a Climate Action Plan that made a goal of making the Ithaca campus carbon neutral by 2035. Since then, gross emissions have already been reduced by about 30% through several measures, such as installing solar farms and ceasing the use of an old coal-powered energy plant. Now, a new initiative to keep the campus warm in winter with a geothermal project called Earth Source Heat might help reduce emissions by another 38%. Syl Kacapyr reports for the Cornell Chronicle:

Cornell is pursuing a project that has the potential to eliminate an estimated 82,000 metric tons of carbon from its annual footprint and establish one of the country’s most advanced geothermal systems to heat the 745-acre Ithaca campus – an effort that could demonstrate a new scalable model for using this sustainable energy source throughout the U.S. and almost anywhere in the world.

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British Wildlife Photography Awards

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British autumn season winner: Robert E Fuller, ‘Common weasel’, North Yorkshire, England. Photograph: Robert E Fuller/British Wildlife Photography Awards 2016

British autumn season winner: Robert E Fuller, ‘Common weasel’, North Yorkshire, England. Photograph: Robert E Fuller/British Wildlife Photography Awards 2016

We like to feature different nature photography competition winners here, because the audience always wins, as we put it two years ago. This week, The Guardian is featuring a competition that we hadn’t heard of yet: the British Wildlife Photography Awards. This contest has interesting categories, including photos of Britain in its four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter – all of which were won by a photograph of a family of common weasels:

British summer season winner: Robert E Fuller, ‘Common weasel’, North Yorkshire, England. Photograph: Robert E Fuller/British Wildlife Photography Awards 2016

British summer season winner: Robert E Fuller, ‘Common weasel’, North Yorkshire, England. Photograph: Robert E Fuller/British Wildlife Photography Awards 2016

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Sanitation’s Reincarnations

/ Crist Inman / 2 Comments
Still from video by The New Yorker

Still from video by The New Yorker

Some trash can be found and then turned into art, like the pieces of plastic that were built into sculptures at the National Zoo. Other trash is not necessarily garbage, but merely objects that someone doesn’t have the space or energy to take care of, and that man’s trash can become another man’s treasure. A man who worked for the New York Department of Sanitation for about thirty years spent a good part of his career collecting and curating things people threw away, but which caught his eye as interesting treasures, as David Owen explains:

Saving Treasures from the Trash

A Sanitation worker shows off the notable items he has rescued from curbs and bins over the course of thirty years.

Nelson Molina grew up in a housing project in East Harlem, in an apartment where his mother still lives. “Starting when I was nine years old, in 1962, I had a passion for picking up,” he said recently. “I had, like, a three-block radius. I would look through the garbage and pick up toys that people threw out, and I would fix them. I had two brothers and three sisters, and I was like Santa Claus to them.” Continue reading →

An Object Lesson on Tote Bags

/ Seth Inman / 1 Comment

We discovered the “essay and book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things” called Object Lessons through The Atlantic a few months ago, when we shared an article on real cheese. Today, I learned an unsettling – and to borrow a phrase – inconvenient truth about tote bags. Pretty much any time I go grocery shopping I use a couple reusable totes, unless I need some plastic shopping bags to replenish my trash-can liner supply, so what the folks at Object Lessons have to say about the issue is very informative about how we need to change the way we look at certain everyday objects:

For at least a few decades, Americans have been drilled in the superiority of tote bags. Reusable bags are good, we’re told, because they’re friendly for the environment. Disposable bags, on the other hand, are dangerous. Municipalities across the country have moved to restrict the consumption of plastic shopping bags to avoid waste. Many businesses have stopped offering plastic sacks, or provide them for a modest but punitive price. Bag-recycling programs have been introduced nationwide.

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Regenerative Agriculture Revolution

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment
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Source: Modern Farmer

Organic farming is the agricultural “trend” that we keep hearing about for the future, but what about a different type of farming method that is not certified organic but is still environmentally friendly? The following is the story of John Kempf, a young Amish man who embarked on a quest to rescue his family farm from worsening disease and pest problems and from it all, became a staple in the alternative-agriculture lecture circuit and founder of a consulting company, Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). Here’s his story as shared on Modern Farmer:

Once he finished school at age 14, Kempf went to work on his family’s fruit and vegetable farm in northeastern Ohio, overseeing irrigation, plant nutrition and herbicide and pesticide applications. In the fields, Kempf used horses instead of a tractor, with a sprayer powered by a small Honda engine.

It was a trying time for the family. Pests and disease were ravaging the crops, and Kempf found himself mired in escalating chemical warfare against them, with little success. Things hit a low point in 2004, when well over half of the Kempfs’ mainstay crops – tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and cantaloupes – were lost. With the family staring at an increasingly bleak financial situation, Kempf, then 16, set off on his mission to relearn everything he’d been taught about farming.

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Doing More for Protected Lands and Oceans

/ Organikos / 1 Comment
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Photograph: Owen Humphrey’s/PA

Almost fifteen percent of the Earth’s land is enclosed in national parks or other protected areas, which accounts for approximately 20 million sq km. This figure is close to an internationally agreed goal to protect 17 percent of the land surface by 2020. Comparatively, ocean conservation only accounts for 4 percent of total surface of the ocean, covering 15 million sq km. In spite of these statistics – which reflect a positive outcome of the increased attention and importance given to land and ocean conservation – there are concerns over how well these areas are managed and whether they effectively protect endangered species, as Seth wrote a few days ago.

A progress report by the UN Environment and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warns that some of the most biodiverse ecosystems are not being protected and that the management of many protected areas is deficient.

Less than 20% of areas considered crucial hubs for species are fully protected, the report states, with countries routinely failing to assess the effectiveness of their national parks nor provide wildlife corridors that allow animals to roam between protected areas.

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Our Attention to Plants (or Lack Thereof)

/ Jocelyn Toll / 1 Comment

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Compared to “juicy” pop culture news, nature-lovers and conservationists constantly have to fight for people’s attention on subjects like endangered animals or protected wildlife. However, the struggle for plant devotees to garner people’s interest on green eukaryotes is much more difficult, except maybe for some garden-popular flowers and vegetables, and perhaps a few trees, but otherwise plants go unnoticed.

Conservation efforts are devoted overwhelmingly to animals; compared to the hundreds of plant species easily found but mostly overlooked in our environs. There’s even a formal name for this: plant blindness. And in a study published in the journal Conservation Biology, biologists Kathryn Williams and Mung Balding of Australia’s University of Melbourne ask whether it’s inevitable: Are people hard-wired by evolution to ignore the vegetal world? Can something be done about it?

“We are absolutely dependent on plants for life and health, but so often they fade into the background and miss out in the direct actions we take to protect our planet,” says Williams. “I wonder how the world would look if more people, instead of seeing a wall of green, saw individual plants as potential medicine, a source of food, or a loved part of their community.”

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Measuring Natural Gas Emissions

/ Organikos / 1 Comment
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A natural gas well in Hamilton, Pennsylvania. Source: triplepundit.com

Last spring the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) predicted that natural gas would generate more power in 2016 than coal, and now that natural gas has taken that lead, it is under close scrutiny as a “cleaner” alternative to coal. From the EIA’s latest Short-Term Energy Outlook, natural gas also beat out coal for carbon dioxide emissions from power generation.

“Energy-associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from natural gas are expected to surpass those from coal for the first time since 1972. Even though natural gas is less carbon-intensive than coal, increases in natural gas consumption and decreases in coal consumption in the past decade have resulted in natural gas-related CO2 emissions surpassing those from coal.”

And the agency isn’t talking in fractions of a percentage point, either. EIA puts the emissions figure for natural gas at 10 percent greater than coal for 2016.

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Wildlife Crime Challenge Winners Announced

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment
From wildlifecrimetech.org

From wildlifecrimetech.org

Back in July we shared a story on turtle egg poaching that was part of the Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge, created by USAID with the support of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society, and TRAFFIC. The company with the fake turtle egg idea from that article was one of the sixteen winners of the competition, but a grand prize was announced for the four “most creative and impactful” ideas offered out of those winners. The four grand prize winners were announced this weekend at the  World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Honolulu, Hawaii. Christine Dell’Amore reports:

Every year about 10 million aquarium fish pass through United States ports, many on their way to new homes as family pets. But first, federal inspectors must leaf through mountains of paperwork on the animals, which are shipped from more than 40 countries around the world. “Until recently, the [inspectors] didn’t even have wireless access in the warehouses,” says Michael Tlusty, director of ocean sustainability and science at the New England Aquarium. Continue reading →

Ghost Snake Discovered in Madagascar

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Iconic limestone Tsingy rocks in Ankarana National Park in northern Madagascar where the ghost snake was discovered. Photo by Sarah Ruane, LSU

Last month it was Mexico, and this time it’s Madagascar – once again, a new snake species with a presumably localized distribution has been discovered in a little-explored area. The elusive and pale gray snake has likely evolved to camouflage against the rocks of the region, and was named Madagascarophis lolo (lolo meaning ghost in Malagasy) by researchers from the LSU Museum of Natural Science, the American Museum of Natural History and the Université de Mahajunga in Madagascar.

The ghost snake is part of a common group of snakes called Madagascarophis, or cat-eyed snakes, named for their vertical pupils, which is often found among snakes that are active in the evening or night. Many of the cat-eyed snakes are found in developed areas or degraded forests. However, the researchers found the ghost snake on the national park’s iconic pale grey limestone Tsingy rocks.

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Wulff & Konstali & Hygge

/ Crist Inman
Brunch

Image from the Galleri of Wulff & Konstali’s website

It is just after 10am Sunday morning in Kerala, as I type this. Maybe because brunch is associated with late Sunday mornings, or maybe because I just read Jocelyn’s post (or maybe both) my mind is wandering in the direction of food experience. While we have had (and hosted) many a fine brunch in Kerala at the moment my brunch-thinking has drifted to Copenhagen. You do not need to speak Danish to sense the hygge in the image above, or to want to experience it in the space pictured below.

Hyggespace.jpg

Image from the Galleri of Wulff & Konstali’s website

If you need a primer on hygge, the best place to find it is this article just published in the Guardian, which also happens to be how my attention was brought to Wulff & Konstali:

…“Hygge is when you treat yourself, it’s not that healthy, but it’s good food,” Agnete says. Continue reading →

National Park of the Week: Ergaki National Park, Siberia

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment
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Photos by Moscow based photographer, Alexander Ermolitsky

Colloquially referred to as the “Russian Yosemite,” Ergaki National Park is a mandatory stop for those who ever plan to travel to Russia, and more specifically, to Siberia. Located in the Western Sayan Mountains of Siberia, this 342,873 hectare park of steep mountain ranges and glacial streams and lakes will break your camera lens with its beauty – figuratively speaking.

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FDA Bans 19 Chemicals in So-called Antibacterial Soap

/ Seth Inman / 1 Comment

Image via The Telegraph

In my family we practically never used antibacterial hand-wash, because it wasn’t proven that they perform any better than normal soap – it was convenient sometimes to have a quick gel to clean up on the go without water, but antibacterial consumer products in the household were pretty much nonexistent. As it turns out, chemicals like triclosan, while still not proven with certainty to act negatively on human health, can persist in the natural environment for decades, including in water and soil. And that never seems like a good thing, especially when such compounds might be strengthening bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics. Monique Brouillette reports on the new US Food and Drug Administration’s ruling:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released its decision Friday on banning 19 active ingredients in antibacterial soaps. The ruling, 40 years in the making, caps a decades-long debate over whether these germ-busting chemicals are safe and offer any advantage over ordinary soap. The ban includes the most widely used antiseptic in hand soaps, triclosan—after a large number of studies have fallen short of manufacturers’ claims about its health benefits.

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Lionfish Trap Tests in Pensacola Show Promise

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Lionfish traps are currently being tested in the waters off of Pensacola.
Photo by Dr. Steve Gittings

There is no shortage of lionfish posts here, as a quick search of the site will show. Off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, we’re encouraged to hear that there is good news from the trapping scene – rather than speargun hunting, which has certain limits. Although we aren’t told how the tested traps avoid catching other fish than the target, it sounds like progress is being made. Jeremy Morrison reports:

Eighteen miles out into the Gulf of Mexico, lying in wait about a hundred feet deep, are a collection of contraptions that have Steve Gittings “pretty encouraged” and “really kinda jazzed.”

“I’m kinda pleasantly surprised about what we found in Pensacola,” said Gittings, science coordinator for the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Marine Sanctuary.

Since July, Gittings and a his collaborators have been conducting tests on some prototypes of a lionfish trap he designed. In late August, the scientist wrote a report detailing what he considers to be the initial successes revealed during this summer’s testing.

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