India and water scarcity
Since someone in the comments mentioned water stress, The Wall Street Journal has a piece up right now, ‘We Can’t Waste a Drop.’ India Is Running Out of Water. The article focuses on Leh, in Ladakh, which I think is a little deceptive since Ladakh has…
The western wolves are back, did you notice?
Tensions rise on the range after wolf kills cow in California for the first time in a century: A wolf has killed a California rancher’s cow for the first time in more than 100 years, raising tensions in the newly reclaimed wolf country in California’s rugged northeastern corner. California now has two packs in the […]
This time it was different
As a child I was a consumer of a fair amount of environmentalist alarmism. Not the standard stuff you see on the news, but books like The Population Bomb. I also read the science fiction classic Stand on Zanzibar. Stand on Zanzibar is about an overpopulated Malthusian world. It is the world of 2010, and […]
The macaque’s voyage?
The Monkey’s Voyage was one of the more interesting books I’ve read in the past few years. Basically the author shows that the idea that islands like New Zealand are living mengaries of a lost Gondwanaland is false. Due to extinction islands have high turnover rates, and most species in New Zealand descend from relatively […]
The macaque’s voyage?
The Monkey’s Voyage was one of the more interesting books I’ve read in the past few years. Basically the author shows that the idea that islands like New Zealand are living mengaries of a lost Gondwanaland is false. Due to extinction islands have high turnover rates, and most species in New Zealand descend from relatively […]
Evolution, not ecology
One of my major gripes with my friends in ecology is that there is a tendency to look at every problem through the lens of ecological models. Garrett Hardin, who popularized the term “tragedy of the commons” is an exemplar of this. People i…
Money vs. Science
Everyone who has been paying attention knows that there is a strong anti-science movement in this country — driven partly by populist anti-intellectualism, but increasingly by corporate interests that just don’t like what science has to say. It’s an old problem — tobacco companies succeeded for years in sowing doubt about the health effects of […]
The old Amazon
Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World: For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may […]
Noisy Systems and Wandering Canines
There are three types of scientific explanations: those involving cats, those involving dogs, and those that aren’t very interesting. Via Andrew Revkin, here’s a well-done animation that uses a dog to explain the difference between a long-term trend and a short-term variation. Show this to your local climate denialist when they get confused about the […]
A world full of children
The figure to the left is from a new paper in Science, When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition. It reports the findings from 133 cemeteries in the northern hemisphere in regards to the proportion …
Through the lens of a glass house
Nature has a very interesting piece up right now, Don’t judge species on their origins, which addresses the periodic bouts of hysteria which are triggered by ‘invasive species.’ I’ve addressed before the issue of biological term…
Why the Amazon Rainforest is species rich
A monkey frog
The Pith: The Amazon Rainforest has a lot of species because it’s been around for a very long time.
I really don’t know much about ecology, alas. So my understanding of evolution framed in its proper ecological context is a t…
Nuclear power as the “shark attacks” of energy
Image Credit: Stefan Kuhn
I was at a coffee shop recently and a SWPL couple (woman had dreads to boot!) a number of tables away were reading a newspaper, and the husband expressed worry about the Fukushima disaster. The wife responded that “n…
Natural selection in our time
Last month in Nature Reviews Genetics there was a paper, Measuring selection in contemporary human populations, which reviewed data from various surveys in an attempt to adduce the current trajectory of human evolution. The review didn’t find anything revolutionary, but it was interesting to see where we’re at. If you read this weblog you probably […]
Decline in forest cover
I’ve spent most of my life in relatively forested areas, and took forestry courses in secondary school (which is why I can still distinguish doug fir from spruce by looking at the needles). In my youth I even had friends who were loggers during the summer. But I haven’t taken a deep scientific interest in […]
Animal Apartheid
Here’s an article from Canada on the debate about whether hybridization should be discouraged. I understand the impulse toward preserving nature as it is, but the drive for presumed purity seems almost fetishistic. Consider this sentence: ” Or could hybrids actually weaken genetically pure populations of disappearing wildlife?” What does “genetically pure” mean in a […]