Thattekadu Bird Sanctuary, Kerala
Our Goal Here
We will continue sharing news stories and sharing anecdotes from our daily work lives that reflect Raxa Collective’s orientation to Community, Conservation & Collaboration. Those “3C’s” have been essential ingredients of La Paz Group’s work since the beginning, which is how they became the focal points of Raxa Collective. We have also had Sense & Sensibility as watchwords in our company for the last 16 years or so, and that will not change. Continue reading
Heavenly Apricots
The ‘Turkey’ apricot, a hand-coloured engraving after a drawing by Augusta Innes Withers (1792-1869), from the first volume of John Lindley’s Pomological Magazine (1827-1828). The Romans dubbed the apricot the “precious one.” Poets praised its beauty. The conquering Arabs took it to the Mideast, where the luxurious fruit was exploited in sugary confections. The Royal Horticultural Society Diary/Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) and the Salt folks:
‘Moon Of The Faith:’ A History Of The Apricot And Its Many Pleasures
The Romans dubbed it the “precious one.” Poets praised its beauty. The conquering Arabs took it to the Mideast, where the luxurious fruit was exploited in sugary confections.
Heroic Decisions, John Racanelli Edition
The dolphin exhibit at the National Aquarium in Baltimore last summer. Credit Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Four members of La Paz Group remember the day in May, 2014 when they had the good fortune to share a breakfast table with John Racanelli. The conversation was about conservation, what we call entrepreneurial conservation and what he seemed to be practicing in the world of mega-aquaria. We knew from that moment that this was someone to watch, and news from this week’s Science section of the New York Times is just one of many examples why:
Questions We Never Thought To Ask, But Should Have
Why did humans start cultivating celery? It’s low-calorie and, one might argue, low flavor. We asked some experts at the intersection of botany and anthropology to share their best guesses. Cora Niele/Getty Images
Thanks to good old Salt, the special feature at National Public Radio (USA):
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Celery: Why?
by NATALIE JACEWICZ
Celery, the mild-mannered straight man of the vegetable world, packs a puny six calories per stalk and — in my opinion — about as much flavor as a desk lamp. Yet despite its limitations, the fibrous plant has featured in Mediterranean and East Asian civilizations for thousands of years. Continue reading
Raxa Collective Migration to La Paz Group
As noted over here, tomorrow we will begin publishing in these pages the type of news and reflections that had been the mainstay of Raxa Collective’s site on WordPress. We will be adding more features here than had been present there, and will trim out some features that were there but that seemed not to go anywhere, so to speak.
La Paz Group’s website has been under renovation recently as well, and will have a fresh appearance soon. These migrations and renovations are in anticipation of completing at the end of this month the tasks we started in 2010-2011 with Raxa Collective; and in anticipation of several exciting new activities that La Paz Group is just starting to work on. Exciting stuff. Stay tuned.
CO2 + Brine = Baking Soda and More
Map showing the largely artificial salinity of the Persian Gulf.
Desalination is clearly going to be a very important technology for the future, as our drinking water supply dwindles. Carbon capture/storage is also an imperative process to be working on in an effort to slow down global warming in any way possible. So the fact that a scientist at Qatar University is working on a process that takes pure CO2 waste from natural gas plants, waste brine from desalination plants, and ammonia, which all react chemically to create sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), calcium chloride (used as a preservative or tanning chemical), and ammonia (which can be recycled to continue the process). Erica Gies reports for Scientific American:
Farid Benyahia wants to solve two environmental problems at once: excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and excess salt in the Persian Gulf (aka the Arabian Gulf). Oil and natural gas drive the region’s booming economies—hence the excess CO2—and desalination supplies the vast majority of drinking water, a process that creates concentrated brine waste that is usually dumped back into the gulf.
Community Conservation in the Arnavon Islands
ACMCA ranger Dickson Motui clears a path for the hatchlings. Photo © The Nature Conservancy (Justine E. Hausheer)
We value sea turtles as an important part of the ocean ecosystem, and are always happy to hear about new conservation stories regarding them. In many coastal areas, the sea-faring reptiles are hunted for their meat and their eggs are harvested from sandy nests, quite often illegally. We report on poaching frequently here, but have good news from the Solomon Islands, where The Nature Conservancy is helping with community conservation in the Arnavons:
After a 40-year history punctuated by arson, conflict, and poaching, conservation efforts in the Arnavon Islands are yielding a glimmer of hope for hawksbill sea turtles. Now, Conservancy scientists are working with local communities to make these critical islands the first site to be registered under the Solomon Islands’ 2010 Protected Areas Act.
Bird of the Day: Crimson-backed Sunbird
female – Thattekadu Bird Sanctuary, Kerala
Community, Collaboration & Conservation 2011-2016
As pop-ups go, this has been long-lived. We listened to the communities we came to Kerala to serve; we collaborated with them every day of the week, each month, year after year since arrival; and the conservation work will continue. We will be watching and commenting from our new site at lapazgroup.net, which will retain all our material from the past five years.
My personal thanks to all the individuals who are listed in the Contributors section above. It would be unfair to highlight any one or even just a few of them. By definition each one broke through the inertia sometimes described as the collective action problem–leaving it to someone else to do–and did the writing and illustration needed to make our work resonate with a broad audience. And if you look at the number of views, visitors and comments they left behind, our readers seemed to appreciate all that. We had employees, as well as interns, plus friends and family— even our main man on more than one occasion contributing–individually, collectively, collaboratively.
Thanks said, we hope you will continue to follow us after the name change in a couple days.
Make Way for these Ducklings
I remember the children’s book from years ago, and have since seen many groups of wild Mallard ducklings roaming ponds and lakes in the US, including at Murphey Candler Park.
Bad News for the Night Sky
Credit: The authors of the manuscript. Prepared by Fabio Falchi
It is unsurprising to learn that light pollution has increased in the fifteen years since the first global map tracking the spread of artificial lumens, but disappointing to hear nonetheless. Last week we posted about one downside to lights in the dark, two years ago shared the idea of “dark sky parks,” and four years ago linked to an initiative to reduce light pollution. Carl Engelking writes for the Discover Magazine blog on the new atlas of the night sky:
The beauty of the night sky is rapidly fading, and an update to the first global light pollution map, created 15 years ago, makes that painfully clear.
The new atlas revealed that more than 80 percent of the world lives under light-polluted skies – that rises to 99 percent of the population in the United States and Europe. One-third of humanity can no longer see the Milky Way. As the new map shows, the night sky is slowly retreating to the glow of artificial light.
Bird of the Day: Demoiselle Cranes
Vijayapura, Karnataka
The Collective Of Raxa
As we wind down this pop-up endeavor, a comment on our collaborators. First and foremost on the George M George of 2010, whose vision was what got this collective going. George had come to my attention ten years earlier in a classroom in France, where I was offering a course called Organizational Behavior in the Masters program Cornell Hotel School had established there. My first, and lasting impression of George was that he valued laughter over all else. Continue reading
Migrations in the “Animal Internet”
© BBC
A couple weeks ago we shared a story about animals’ ability to travel without getting lost, and we’ve also featured pieces about migration in birds and butterflies. That eBird post from Seth is a direct example of what Alexander Pschera calls the “animal internet,” where data is accumulated in life that can be tracked, whether with devices or by people connected around the world. John Vidal reviews Pschera’s new book and covers the idea for The Guardian:
Aristotle thought the mysterious silver eel emerged from the earth fully formed. The young Sigmund Freud could not understand how it reproduced, and modern biologists puzzled for years over whether it ever returned to the Sargasso Sea, where it was known to breed.
Last year a team of Canadian scientists found conclusive proof of that extraordinary journey. They strapped tracking devices to 38 eels and followed as they migrated more than 900 miles at a depth of nearly a mile to the Sargasso, in the Atlantic near Bermuda. This year French researchers used geolocators to watch them descending European rivers and passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, heading for the same spot.
Arecibo Observatory at Risk, but Defended
Photo by Nadia Drake
If you’re a fan of James Bond films, then chances are you’ve seen the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on a screen at some point–it was the location for the climax of Goldeneye, where Pierce Brosnan debuted as the British spy character. The largest radio telescope in the world, and for several decades managed by Cornell University, Arecibo Observatory is now threatened with defunding in the coming year, but the community around it in Puerto Rico, as Nadia Drake (whose father once directed the Observatory) reports for NatGeo and Science Friday, is rallying around it:
SAN JUAN and ARECIBO, Puerto Rico — Francisco Cordova just started his job as director of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope. But at a public meeting on day two of his new post, he was already facing the iconic telescope’s potential demolition.
At meetings June 7 in San Juan and Arecibo, students, scientists, observatory staff and community members spoke about what would be lost in terms of science and education if the observatory were to close, an outcome that no one in attendance seemed to find acceptable in any way. As the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, Arecibo is famous for searching for distant galaxies, gravitational waves, and signs of extraterrestrial life.
Bird of the Day: Verditer Flycatcher
Thattekadu Bird Sanctuary, Kerala
Raxa Collective, A Purposeful Pop-Up
When the first post appeared on this site we did not have a specific end date in mind. But now we do. Nearly 7,000 posts, half a million views and 1,825 days later on June 14, 2016 five years of blogging about community, collaboration and conservation around the world under the banner of Raxa Collective will be complete. We will continue these endeavors, and more, under the banner of La Paz Group. We will incorporate enhancement and expansion ideas that our readers, friends, colleagues and contributors have all shared with us.
Raxa Collective has had a very specific objective: the creation of a meaningful brand with community, conservation and collaboration as the core values. Xandari is that brand; it is the legacy of a collaboration between MLHS and La Paz Group. We expect that Xandari’s remarkable sense of community will continue to flourish under MLHS’s own guidance, as La Paz Group moves on to new challenges in the realm of entrepreneurial conservation.
Biomimicry Institute Ideas
Illustration by Franz Eugen Köhler via Wikimedia
Just a few days ago we shared a piece on biomimicry, and two weeks before that, this little drone showed the advantage of copying flying animals’ ability to perch. Today, via GreenBiz.com, we heard from the Biomimicry Institute about three ways that asking nature “how do you make energy?” can potentially help industries like construction, transportation, and energy:
Humans are becoming increasingly dependent on our ability to connect via technology and easily access the energy grid. Practically every facet of our lives is somehow plugged in and powered up. Yet as our demand for power increases, so must the innovative and life-friendly ways we access and use that energy.
Here’s a light bulb idea: how does nature make energy? For the billions of species that have existed on planet earth, humans are the only ones who have placed such a premium on unsustainable and non-local sources of energy. How then, does nature balance its energy books while producing relatively little energy waste?
Engineering Solutions to Disease
We haven’t feature lyme disease much here, although it’s a highly problematic pathogen that will become more common with a warming climate. The exact same goes for Zika, a much newer danger in the United States. This week in the New York Times, an article by Amy Harmon covers the idea of changing the gene pool in white-footed mice in Nantucket to fight Lyme disease, and a video explains how infecting the Aedes aegypti mosquito may help stop the spread of Zika. Below, the article:
Can genetically engineered mice save Nantucket from the scourge of Lyme disease?
If the 10,000 residents of the Massachusetts island did not have such a soft spot for deer, they might not be entertaining the prospect, which could provide the groundwork for an even more exotic approach to controlling tick-borne diseases on the mainland.
Organikos 