Kumaon Hills, Uttarakhand
Bird of the Day: Oriental Turtle-Dove
Kumaon Hills, Uttarakhand
August Reading, Science For Nonscientists
Clea Simon, correspondent for the Harvard Gazette, has these book recommendations from professors around campus:
Climate change, global hunger: What to do?
Black holes, warming seas, new treatments for disease: No matter how you approach it, the news is full of science-based stories. For those of us who aren’t scientists, however, understanding the context — not to mention the technical jargon — can be a challenge. With that in mind, we asked Harvard science faculty in various fields to recommend their favorite science book for nonscientists. Ideally these accessible reads will give the rest of us a leg up on understanding our changing world. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Croaking Cisticola
Shai Hills Resource Reserve, Ghana
Carl Linnaeus, The Man Who Organized Nature
Thanks to Kathryn Schulz for this review:
The sexual system Linnaeus favored for classifying plants brought a whiff of scandal, which helped spread his name. Illustration by Karlotta Freier
How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?
For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame. Last seen some sixty-six million years ago, before an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the life-forms on earth, it is nonetheless flourishing these days, thanks in large part to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and elementary-school children all over the world. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Common Shelduck
Frauenkirchen, Austria
We Are Stardust, Spreading Rock Dust
Rock dust applied to farmland in California. IRIS HOLZER
It is a concept we have heard about a couple of times previously and the science is catching up. Our thanks to Yale e360 for sharing news of it:
Spreading Rock Dust on Farmland Has Potential to Draw Down Huge Sums of Carbon Dioxide
Adding volcanic rock dust to cropland could help the world reach a key carbon removal goal, a new study finds. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Preuss’s Swallow
Sanaga River, Cameroon
Organikos Taste Of Place, Fruits Of Costa Rica
Mini-jar goldenberry jam
Organikos has focused on coffee varietals, an iconic taste of place product, until now. In addition to supporting farmers all over the country, the sale of these coffees allow travelers to continue tasting Costa Rica once they are back home. We are close to introducing a new line of jams and marmalades using fruits from local farms and typical of what you will find in Costa Rica’s farmer’s markets. Same goal.
Bird of the Day: Verditer Flycatcher
Driverless Taxi, Anyone?
A Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco. Shutterstock/Iv-olga
Apparently there is a market for this service in San Francisco, according to Jeremy Hsu at New Scientist, in spite of the objections:
California approves driverless taxi expansion in San Francisco
Waymo and Cruise can now charge for ride-hailing services throughout San Francisco despite objections that driverless cars interfere with traffic and first responders
Driverless cars have the green light to operate as paid ride-hailing services in San Francisco after the companies Waymo and Cruise won approval from California state regulators. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Common Bulbul
Yaoundé, Cameroon
UK Regenerative Agriculture Festival, Groundswell 2023
Last year’s highlights in the video above, and a review of this year’s festival in the link below to an online magazine:
Lannock Manor Farm, Hertfordshire, SG4 7EE, UK
The Groundswell Festival provides a forum for farmers, growers, or anyone interested in food production and the environment to learn about the theory and practical applications of regenerative farming systems.
The next Groundswell Festival takes place on the 26th & 27th of June 2024. View the Event Guide from 2023 here.
Bird of the Day: Flammulated Owl
rare migratory species in Guatemala
Huehuetenango, Guatemala
Franzen On Motivating Nature Preservation
Illustration by Benoit Leva
Yesterday a writer, whose care for nature is as famous as his books are popular, posted this:
To succeed—to get people to care about preserving the world—it can’t be only about nature.
The Bible is a foundational text in Western literature, ignored at an aspiring writer’s hazard, and when I was younger I had the ambition to read it cover to cover. After breezing through the early stories and slogging through the religious laws, which were at least of sociological interest, I chose to cut myself some slack with Kings and Chronicles, whose lists of patriarchs and their many sons seemed no more necessary to read than a phonebook. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Palm-nut Vulture
Sanaga River, Cameroon
Cats Coming In From The Wild
Wild cats were a big part of our life in Belize, when our business included operating a lodge in the northwest of the country. As a “cat person” I appreciate this evolutionary biologist walking me through the adaptation from wild cats to domesticated:
An African wildcat doesn’t look so different from a domestic cat. pum_eva/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to go on safari in southern Africa. One of the greatest thrills was going out at night looking for predators on the prowl: lions, leopards, hyenas.
As we drove through the darkness, though, our spotlight occasionally lit up a smaller hunter – a slender, tawny feline, faintly spotted or striped. The glare would catch the small cat for a moment before it darted back into the shadows. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-bellied Hummingbird
Hotel Quelitales, Cartago, Costa Rica
Solidarity, Class Traitors & Ambiguity Management
This book comes with a strong pitch by Bill McKibben. It came to my attention while reading this profile by Andrew Marantz. Full of ambiguity, about a balancing act between privilege inherited from fossil fuel wealth and sincere commitment to solidarity movements, what follows is entirely worth the read to get to the last paragraph (which only works if you have made it through the entire text):What Should You Do with an Oil Fortune?
The Hunt family owns one of the largest private oil companies in the country. Leah Hunt-Hendrix funds social movements that want to end the use of fossil fuels.
“Leah was clearly preoccupied with how a person of extreme privilege can live responsibly in the world,” her Ph.D. adviser said. Photograph by Platon for The New Yorker
Let’s say you were born into a legacy that is, you have come to believe, ruining the world. What can you do? You could be paralyzed with guilt. You could run away from your legacy, turn inward, cultivate your garden. If you have a lot of money, you could give it away a bit at a time—enough to assuage your conscience, and your annual tax burden, but not enough to hamper your life style—and only to causes (libraries, museums, one or both political parties) that would not make anyone close to you too uncomfortable. Or you could just give it all away—to a blind trust, to the first person you pass on the sidewalk—which would be admirable: a grand gesture of renunciation in exchange for moral purity. But, if you believe that the world is being ruined by structural causes, you will have done little to challenge those structures. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Hume’s Leaf Warbler
Kumaon Hills, Uttarakhand
The Mind Of A Bee
Bees’ brains are always of interest, and both the publisher below and the author above makes a good case for why this book matters:
Most of us are aware of the hive mind—the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness. Continue reading
Organikos 