Nature (Version 2.0)
The Nazis were only trying to hide a big ship. Anchored in the Norwegian fjords as a deterrent against a northern invasion, the massive German battleship Tirpitz had proven effecting at keeping the British Navy at bay. Its mere presence had also made the sending of conveys around northern Norway to resupply Russia much less …
Continue reading "Nazi Battleships and Anthropocene Entanglements"
Imagine a lizard trying to scamper away from a predator but being unable get a grip on a smooth floor. The cartoonish image of hind legs working fruitlessly to create forward motion has been replicated on actual lizards and filmed in the lab by Kristin Winchell, a post-doctoral researcher at Washington University in St Louis. …
It was when he first heard the call of a red-winged blackbird in the hills north of Fairbanks that John Adams knew something was up. This was a bird he recognized from the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. It was not one he expected to see in the boreal forest only a few dozen miles from …
Continue reading "Warmed up, Flooded out, and Pissed Off: Climate Change Becomes Personal"
In a March 19th article in The Guardian, Mark Boyle wrote about the lessons he has learned from a year spent living entirely without technology. A week earlier in The New York Times, Sam Dolnik profiled a different kind of digital hermit, Eric Hagerman, a man he called with suitable appreciation “the most ignorant man …
Continue reading "Turning On, Tuning In, and Dropping Out of the Anthropocene?"
I swear, it is almost impossible to stop yourself. I promised I would be more disciplined, but I’m not. When someone who cares about climate change gets solar panels on their roof, the temptation to keep looking at how much energy you are generating is virtually irresistible. After a long and dark “La Nina” winter …
Continue reading "Solar Power Nerdiness and the Terrifying Problem of Albedo"
A recent BBC news story documented one man’s efforts to clean up plastic waste in the Arctic. It is the sadness and resignation in this man’s eyes that sticks out. The presence of plastic everywhere you look in the Arctic is leading Norwegian fisherman to fear that their catch will lose its reputation some of …
Continue reading "Worse than Drowning in a Sea of Plastic….."
In a recent essay published in Aeon, Henry Mance asks “can technology mend our broken relationship with the natural world?” At first, it seems, apparently not. Making points that echo those formulated by philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann in an earlier post on this blog, Mance show how technology tends to undercut any native closeness …
Continue reading "Could Technology Make America Wild Again?"
In a recent article for Grist, meteorologist Eric Holthaus claims that we are already locked into a devil’s bargain on climate change. The bargain asks us to weigh a trade-off between two things that pollution in the atmosphere does for us. On the one hand, it causes serious health and respiratory problems that kill over …
Continue reading "Philosopher Meets Meteorologist to Talk About Climate Engineering"
When the Milltown Dam upstream of Missoula, Montana came down in 2008 and the impoundment behind it was drained, a hidden treasure trove of century-old lumber was revealed. Hundreds of logs, buried in sediments, had been accumulating behind the dam throughout its life. The lumber had been cut from the surrounding forests during the early …
On January 25th 2018, CNN.com announced a striking scientific breakthrough in biotechnology with the painful headline “Monkey See, Monkey 2.” A technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) had been used successfully by Chinese researchers to create two genetically identical long-tailed macaque monkeys. This was the first time that SCNT, a technique that arrived …
Continue reading "The Part that’s Not Funny about Cloning Macaques"
