books
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A Cedar Plum
“DID you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating…
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Carbon Democracy
“Humankind has consumed about two trillion barrels of oil since the rise of the modern petroleum industry in the 1860s. It is worth repeating that burning the first trillion took about 130 years, but we went through the second trillion in only twenty-two years. […] The world’s fossil fuels were formed out of 500 million…
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Raptor Us
As I turned the corner onto 41st Street across from the park, preparing for the hike up the moraine, I noticed a big bird take off from the slope above the park’s retaining wall. It was a Red-tailed Hawk, of course, and it landed in a London plane tree anchored in the sidewalk. Crossing the…
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To Bee Or Not To Bee
When Europeans brought their domesticated honeybees to the New World, they joined the 4000 other species of bees all ready here. That’s a lot of different kinds of bees, but the invasive honeybees, the cattle of insects, the serfs of industry, get virtually all the attention. This is a shame. Honeybees are problematic, to say the…
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The Big Book of Eagles
But let’s start… small: the Pygmy Eagle weights about the same as a pigeon. Whaa-ut? Hieraaetus weiskei is found on New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands. Evolutionary pressures on islands can sometimes result in rather small animals. Interestingly, this species is said to be one of the closest living relatives of the largest…
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A Philosophical Botany
In Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany Matthew Hall’s argument doesn’t strike me as provocative, but for others grounded in anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, Cartesian dualities, and very out-of-date biological understanding, it may. “Plants and humans share a basic, ontological reality as perceptive, aware, autonomous, self-governed, and intelligent beings,” he writes. As fellow eukaryotes, plants and animals…
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On Heredity
Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity is an essential read in our present moment. Genetic essentialism and ignorance; fundamentalism and fascism; the revival of eugenic racist thought and strategy by the Republicans; all these combine in the vital necessity of a history and understanding of biological and…
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Leviathan?
“What is to be done?” asked Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the title of his 1863 novel about the situation of Russian. Chernyshevsky wrote, from prison, something of a “handbook of radicalism,” postulating a sort of utopian peasant/commune/industrial socialism. Perhaps, though, the most important thing about the book was the burning titular question, which fired debate…
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The Art of Naming
Last week we muddied the tree of life. This week, the long human attempt to straighten it all out by giving all the pieces names. In The Art of Naming, Michael Ohl explores the history and principles of taxonomic naming. Esoteric? I don’t think so. He dabbles a little in common names, those vernacular names…
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The Tangled Tree
Add some DNA from viruses, bacteria, chimpanzees, and, for some of us, Neanderthals, and pretty soon— well, ok, after a couple billion years — you have human beings. Let’s stress that plural for a second: we really are beings, our bodies covered inside and out with microbes. Some studies say we’re one-to-one bacterial to human…
Backyard and Beyond 