Musings
Biodiversity—the variety of all life, from genes and species to ecosystems—is intimately linked to Earth’s climate and, inevitably, to climate change. Biodiversity and poverty are also inextricably connected. For instance, changes to natural ecosystems influence both climate change and people’s ability to cope with some of its damaging impacts. And in their turn climate change, as well as people’s responses to it, affect biodiversity. Unpicking all these strands clearly shows that conserving and managing biodiversity can help natural systems and vulnerable people cope with a shifting global climate.
Is this assertion by Hannah Reid and Krystyna Swiderska in the abstract of a paper for the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) correct? Certainly, the first instinct is to say yes.
But.
Let’s start with biodiversity: it is not fixed, but instead something that has always fluctuated, both through time and across space. The assortment of species we see today and their home ranges have no special or sacred qualities—in fact, they were different five hundred years ago, ten thousand years ago, etc. (let alone, say, thirty million years ago).
So, yes, among the many factors that influence biodiversity, climate is one.
Here’s where I start to struggle: “people’s ability to cope with some of its damaging impacts”…. Climate change is both damaging and enhancing, because those words evidence judgemental perspectives. “Damaging” assumes any change is only negative. Not so.
You sorta have consider the history of the human species as a long, complex trail of significant human-induced landscape change (maybe more of a spreading blotch). These alterations accelerated with the shift away from subsistence that was exclusively from gathering and hunting, and with concomitant demographic increases. Duh. The flip side of all this is that humans are around in such numbers as we see today because we are good at this adaptation stuff, aka coping. But. [Hope I don’t come off as flip.]
It is virtually impossible to prioritize preserving biodiversity as the most important or wisest goal in our reaction to climate change. It may be a wise goal to promote the preservation of biodiversity as leverage to induce people to be more responsible about impacts on the environment within their control, but otherwise the argument evinces more rhetoric than logic.
Posted at 5:16 PM |
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Over at the High on Val’s Day I learned a new word— oinochoe, sometimes spelled oenochoe.
I knew krater (sometimes crater; Greek*: κεράννυμι)—those are the big vase-shaped vessels (sorta) with vertical sides and big open mouths (usually), with paintings on those straight sides (the art museum versions, anyway).
What I hadn’t retained was how kraters were used: they’re the Greek version of wine party-kegs. That’s where the wine was cut with some water, then the liquid was dipped out for the partiers. I guess kraters were probably important and central to the party scene, somewhat like a huge functional floral arrangement….
The oinochoe (Greek*: οινοχόη) was another part of the wine-party ritual and ceramic assemblage. It’s a smaller jug used to transport watered wine from the krater to the partiers. It has a curvier shape than the krater, and the examples I saw also had painted scenes on the shoulders and bulbous sides, and sometimes were decorated near the rims, too.
Anyway, the big take-home message here is that the Greeks (the haves, anyway) were big into the party scene complete with an assemblage of wine vessels, both decorative and functional. The partying was for more than simple pleasure (whoopee!). The various vessels also were placed in burials, so wine-feasts were linked not only to religious rituals but to funerary activities, too…. In a sense, this connection to wine undergirded the ancient Greeks’ sense of self and cultural identity, and they shipped wine to their colonies so they could continue to, well, be Greeks.
A corollary is that in the art museum setting, lovely archaeological artifacts lack their context (there I go again!), and are, for the most part, reduced to being just objects. Pretty, sometimes. Interesting, sometimes. But soulless. Spot-lit for aesthetics and little more….
* Greek translations are from Wikipedia….
Posted at 6:03 PM |
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As the link mentions, the bookstore is in the former Advance Gloves building….
My bonus for forgetting my passport (which meant I couldn’t travel with JCB to Windsor to do errands, including snagging a case of Tanqueray in a lower proof than available in the US of A for my FIL) was several hours browsing in John King Books, the (almost) original downtown Detroit location. I wandered the first and second floors, skipped the third floor (looked like all fiction), and climbed to the fourth. I had my heavy coat. Ya gotta love a bookstore with limited heating and lights over each aisle that you turn on while you’re there and off when you leave.
I behaved myself and only snagged seven volumes; that’s restraint!
And, no, I didn’t see Jay Leno or Teller in the stacks….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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A lovely bottle of bubbly we shared on Xmas Eve; hand-carried to us all by S. from Germany.
The OLPC laptops are making a (positive) difference, the WP reports; kids favor especially using the camera and video capabilities. Their story is from very rural Peru. Give one (or more) here. You can choose to get one for yourself, too!
The snooty discriminating French may bow to market pressure and expand the geographic area that can produce effervescent wines that can legally be called champagne. Well, at the earliest in 2009, and the vines won’t come on line until, um, at least 2015…leaving them plenty of time to reverse or adjust the decision….
The NYT has finally published (dated yesterday; hmm, I was too busy to read the paper and missed it then) an article that explicates the anthropologist’s analysis of Diamond’s “Collapse”—basically too much environmental determinism and an unbalanced argument about human decisions. Diamond is a geographer, and gets it a bit, well, skewed (you’ve probably gotten that from me eight or ten times; apologies for the repetition). Yes, climate change is a factor, but, the complexity of cultural evolution isn’t addressed properly in D’s volume. [Reminder to self: get that MS finished!]
Posted at 9:09 AM |
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If…*
You’d think that by now biologists agree on what a gene is and have moved on.
Apparently not.
And the reason is both historical and scalar.
It’s historical in that the term was originally used in biology and genetics in a particular way that made sense at the time. Then, as research continued, scientists uncovered additional complexity in the role of genes and genetics. In addition, they began to look at genes from new scales and perspectives.
Thus, while a geneticist tends to still see genes as locatable regions of genomic sequences, those who delve into phenotypes and function tend to find that an insufficient definition. For example, DNA, that old workhorse considered the master molecule of life, is now seen to be sometimes quite passive (meaning other factors can act or dominate), and just plain multifunctional in ways that weren’t known when the locatable regions concept was developed.
If you want to read more (I’m not being sarcastic!), check out this 2007 paper by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel in PLoS ONE, one of the free, on-line Public Library of Science journals (hence: “PLoS”).
My take on this: see, scale makes all the difference (sorry to flog this idea, but, as I’m sure you’ve discerned, this is one of my truths).
Corollary: it may be difficult to match your language and concepts to the scale of analysis. If you’re using the words already in use, they may no longer suffice if defined in old ways. On the other hand, if you introduce new vocabulary, you may introduce layers of confusion. Still, the latter may well be the best choice.
Philosophical question: does this topic link somehow to my current “off-duty” reading that has settings in China, Tibet, and Turkey?—three different volumes….
Keller, Evelyn Fox, and David Harel (2007) Beyond the Gene. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1231. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001231 [Apologies to AFK if she’d prefer to be “Fox Keller, Evelyn”; I see both in the Google-able world.]
Sidebar: I see pink champagne, rechristened rosé champagne of course, is très chic, but I remain a prosecco gal! (Especially at those prices!)
Okay, one more. How could I not link to this, on a huge ice skating rink in Mexico City’s main plaza, created atop forty-six miles of chilling tubes, energized by ten truck-generators? Did they make the rink because the US border is harder to cross these days?—so they import the cold?
* If your eyes are sharp and your screen is good, you’ll see ice—the picture is from several years back, but right here in good ol’ ATL….
Today’s vocabulary—peripeteia
the sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, often used referring to fictional narrative.
Posted at 7:16 PM |
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Doh!
I can hardly believe it took me until today to realize that burning candles, fireplaces, and campfires add to the carbon footprint!
Posted at 4:59 PM |
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The share of the population possessing college degrees in the 1970s is the best predictor of which northeastern and midwestern cities have done well since then.
That is, northeastern and midwestern cities in the US of A….
Edward L. Glaeser says this in an article about Buffalo’s potential for “coming back” from the decline of this once-important manufacturing and transshipment hub.
Glaeser makes the point that however much tax/government money flows into the community, and however wise and effective are the projects that money is used for, what really makes the difference are citizen-originated entrepreneurial undertakings that effectively use human capital. Glaeser cites Boston and Minneapolis as examples of that kind of turn-around.
What Glaeser doesn’t mention, at least in this article, is that both those cities also have important, prominent, and vibrant university and medical communities that maintained their eminence throughout the second half of the last century. I keep thinking both have to have been important components of the mix of factors that allowed the reinvention/survival of those cities—factors that aren’t prominent in dear old Buffalo….
You will not be surprised to know that I read Glaeser’s article while thinking about Detroit and other cities in my home state. Same huge population and economic declines as Buffalo. Same elevated percentages of poor(ish) and generally poorly educated people. And the educational and medical training and treatment nexuses of the state are not in Detroit. Not good odds….
I also wonder if there are parallels among European cities, once prominent in transportation networks webbed among ports along coasts or rivers….
Posted at 11:12 PM |
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Mexican field turned over with moldboard plow (rather 16th C in design), probably pulled by an ox.
The Byzantine plow was, technically, not a plow at all, but a sole ard.
Boy, there’s a term you don’t see every day. “Sole ard.” Kinda makes your knees weak, doesn’t it?
FYI, apparently a sole ard scratches the surface rather than turning it over like the plows we see today. The tool is suitable for shallow tilling, as in arid areas, and requires less effort to use than moldboard plows (less force is needed than to overturn the soil).
Bryer, Anthony. 2002. “The Means of Agricultural Production: Muscle and Tools,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, Studies, vol. 39. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, pp. 101–13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Page 107.
Posted at 6:13 PM |
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We learned many new vocabulary words at the Corning Museum of Glass, which I should have expected but didn’t.
Some words describe the glass objects, or parts of them. Others derive from the manufacturing process. All of them are not in the vocabularies of most of us. Take these two words: goblet and prunt. You are most likely familiar with the first and probably not with the second.
Technically, a goblet is a bowl on a stem supported by a foot.
Prunts are dabs or blobs of glass attached to the stem. They are both decorative, and sometimes embellished with a stamp, and can help improve the drinker’s grip.
This goblet (sorry, I didn’t photo the identification tag, but I suspect, hmm, maybe German?) has green prunts that have been stamped with a knobbly texture.
These goblets are fairly large, would have been relatively costly for most households, held alcoholic beverages, and may have been passed among diners—all the more reason for increasing the likelihood of safe passage by enhancing the grip.
Posted at 4:56 PM |
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The other day in western PA we were surprised by a smallish yet chubby black bear that scrambled across a guardrail and zipped across the road in front of us (no photo, sorry) in a mad dash for the woods on the other side (add your own riff on the old chicken-crossed-the-road joke here), but this snow we found in PA? in NY? is more evocative of winter for me. In our part of Atlanta, we see snow on the ground maybe every two or three years, although I guess with global warming that frequency may decrease. On the other hand, during the Little Ice Age, there was more snow across the Southeast, so that DeSoto and his bunch suffered a cold and unpleasant winter in 1539 and 1540 (I think) in southeastern North America. Can you tell I’m thinking about cycling and fluctuations (actually, both in nature/climate, and in societies)?
Posted at 11:22 PM |
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