Climate
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Sheet Music
A bridge and a stream. What more could Organ Pipe Mud-dauber Wasps (Trypoxylon politum) need than shelter from the rain and a source of their building material? Well, spiders, of course. These wasps paralyze spiders to feed their young inside these mud-nests. Here’s an interesting observation: Tufted Titmouse and Downy Woodpeckers breaking into these to…
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The Fate of Us?
Environmentalist eschatology has it that the world is ending. Nature? I think not. The human world as we’ve known it, undoubtedly — that has been the pattern for as long as there have been humans; it’s just a question of timing. But the planet will abide. Much simplified and profoundly poisoned by humans, true, but…
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Baeolophus bicolor
Wind-tussled Tufted Titmouse in a beech tree with a few old leaves hanging on. *** So last year was the fourth warmest year since 1850. It was slightly cooler than the top three warmest years since 1850… which were, in order, 2016, 2017, and 2015. This data is from BerkeleyEarth; NOAA and NASA haven’t been…
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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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Slicing Up the Sky
On a clear day, we can see New Jersey. Straight across is Newark, over New York Bay and Bayonne and Newark Bay. Newark International is there too. Glancing northwards, as above, the twin cities of Jersey City and Manhattan finger the sky. This particularly clear morning was all sliced by condensation trails, better known as…
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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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Frankenstein’s Planet
I re-read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, recently. The book is 200 years old this year (see the exhibit at the Morgan). If you have not read it, it is profoundly different from the Frankenstein created by the commercial media over the years. The strangest transference may be the naming thing: “Frankenstein” has…
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The Overstory
“What use are we, to trees?” Richard Powers’s novel begins with Roots, separate stories, capsule biographies. These are illustrated at chapter start with leaves of the trees prominent in each story. In one case the tree isn’t named, since the character is oblivious to this tree, but the description is more than suggestive and the unique…
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Twas the Night Before The Argument
Rock Doves in the rain, through a dirty window and screen. Ready to do combat with pig-headed or worse (oh, much worse) relatives for the holiday? Here's some social science to mull over: A brief explanation of why facts — like, say, about global warming — do nothing to convince people. (It was a religious…
Backyard and Beyond 