Over millions of years, evolution by natural selection has produced adaptations in humans: biological and psychological traits that improved human survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. For example, ripe fruit was an infrequent but calorically rich part of the human ancestral diet. We therefore have a sweet tooth that rewards us when we eat ripe fruit.

But evolution works slowly and gradually, over many generations. Sometimes, the environment changes so quickly that our adaptations can’t evolve quickly enough in response to these changes. This is called an “adaptive mismatch.” Today, modern society presents us with many sweet-tasting goodies, like candy, that aren’t healthy for us. And yet, we continue to crave these unhealthy treats because they “parasitize” our sweet preference—an adaption that was designed to reward ripe fruit-eating.

But, what do adaptive mismatches have to do with pornography? A lot.

Heterosexual men become sexually aroused from seeing naked, fertile women. This sexual arousal is an adaptation that motivates men to prepare for the possibility of sex.

Like candy, pornography creates an adaptive mismatch. For a moment, try to see the world not from “human eyes” but from the eyes of an animal biologist. You might think that men’s enjoyment of pornography is bizarre: men are sexually aroused by the sight of ink that’s splattered on magazine pages, or computer pixels that display light. Nobody would argue that men evolved to have sex with magazines or computers. Adaptive mismatch? Quite.

Pornography is a formidable industry, with men as the primary consumers. And because pornography exploits slow-to-change adaptations, investigating men’s preferences in pornography can inform us about those adaptations.

A previous study documented that pornography depicting two men having sex with one woman (MMF) was more prevalent than pornography depicting two women having sex with one man (FFM). However, a different study documented that men report viewing FFM pornography preferentially over MMF pornography. To reconcile these contradictory findings, we recently published in Behavioral Ecology a paper documenting that adult DVDs containing more depictions of MMF on the DVD cover achieve better sales rankings than DVDs containing more depictions of FFM. Our results indicate two important things about men’s sexual psychology: (1) The type of pornography men say they view may differ from what they actually view, and (2) men’s greater sexual arousal from viewing MMF pornography may be a consequence of another adaptive mismatch: adaptations to sperm competition.

Sperm competition occurs when a woman has sex with two or more men within a sufficiently brief period of time, and the different men’s sperm compete to fertilize the ova. Men have evolved adaptations to increase their chances of success in sperm competition. Some adaptations to sperm competition involve increasing sexual arousal. For example, when men estimate a greater likelihood that their romantic partner recently had sex with another man, they ejaculate more sperm the next time they have sex with her, report greater interest in having sex with her, and sometimes, sexually coerce her.

To tie this all together, men’s preference for MMF pornography is evidence of adaptations to sperm competition. Men who see MMF scenes are “witnessing” sperm competition unfold between the two men in that scene. And as sperm competition theory predicts, men have adaptations that cause them to become sexually aroused by the risk of sperm competition, motivating them to purchase adult DVDs that contain depictions of it.

Sperm competition theory may help solve other puzzles about male sexuality. Notably, it may inform the question of why men become jealous—yet simultaneously, sexually aroused—by the thought of their romantic partner having sex with another man.

Michael N. Pham is a graduate student in evolutionary psychology at Oakland University. William F. McKibbin is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan—Flint. Todd K. Shackelford is chair and professor of psychology at Oakland University. They are the co-authors of the paper ‘Human sperm competition in postindustrial ecologies: sperm competition cues predict adult DVD sales’, published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.

Bringing together significant work on all aspects of the subject, Behavioral Ecology is broad-based and covers both empirical and theoretical approaches. Studies on the whole range of behaving organisms, including plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, and humans, are welcomed.

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Image credit: Spermatozoons, floating to ovule. By frentusha, via iStockphoto.

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By Sebastian Amyes

 
Bacteria have achieved many firsts; they were the first cellular life-forms on the planet, they are the primary biomass on the planet; they are the most prevalent cell type in and on the human body outnumbering our own cells; they are responsible for more human deaths than any other infectious agents; and, in some parts of the world, they are the premier cause of all deaths. How did these small, single-cell organisms, that are invisible to the naked eye become so successful? Essentially this has been through rapid evolution leading to adaptability. All living organisms evolve. The speed at which they can do this is dependent on the generation time; for humans this is about 25 years whereas for bacteria it is often measured in minutes, sometimes as little as 20 minutes. It is believed that 99% of the species that have lived on the planet are now extinct; this is often because their generation time was too long for the necessary evolutionary adjustments needed to survive changes in their environment. Every year yet more species of animals and plants become extinct because they have been too specialised to adapt.

The rapid division of bacteria means that they can adapt overnight to changes in their surroundings. A prime example has been the development of antibiotic resistance in clinical bacteria. It has often been reported that the US Surgeon General indicated in the 1960s that the discovery, first of penicillin, and then of the rest of antibiotics heralded the end of clinical bacterial infections. It is now common knowledge that such a view was fatally flawed. Simple mutations in key genes during cell division provided the bacteria with a means of escaping the action of the antibiotic (resistance). Once learned and part of the bacterial DNA, these genes could then be passed on to other bacteria by the process known as conjugation (bacterial sex) so that these new bacteria benefited from the resistance “learnt” in earlier bacteria. Seventy years ago, almost all clinical bacteria were sensitive to all antibiotics; now many bacteria are resistant to some, some bacteria are resistant to most, and a few bacteria are resistant to all antibiotics. Within one human lifetime, clinical bacteria have evolved the means of overcoming all the antibiotics we can produce.

electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae

Witnessing this remarkable adaptive ability, it is hardly surprising that bacteria have been able to inhabit all parts of the planet, from hot springs to the Antarctic, from mountain tops to the bottom of the ocean. The demise of any species is often dependent on the loss of its food supply. Bacteria evolve so quickly that they can adapt to use different nutritional sources. They have evolved so that they can live off virtually any organic matter, they can even adapt to use crude oil. Like some insect populations, bacteria form colonies. Many bacterial colonies comprise one billion individual cells or more. Total eradication of that number of bacteria is difficult and often impossible. Unlike bees, ants, and wasps, for example, the survival of that colony is more egalitarian and is not dependent on a single individual, the queen. If there is a catastrophe, any one of the individual bacterial cells in a bacterial colony can go on to form a new colony if it can survive the eradication of the previous colony. When it has formed a new colony and the next threat comes, the same survival tactic is engaged.

Bacteria preceded mammals by nearly four billion years. It is almost certain that they will be predominant long after humans and other mammals are extinct. There have been suggestions that bacteria arrived on Earth on meteorites; this may be true but it is more likely that they evolved here. However, we have already sent our bacteria into space on satellites and these may, at some time, colonise other planets. Here on Earth, our own bacteria will continue to thrive. As we have unearthed the fossil record, we have classified different eras in geological time, which are often colloquially rephrased as epochs such as the “Age of the Dinosaurs” or the “Age of the Fish”. As they have always been the largest biomass, the truth is that from the Precambrian era, four billion years ago, the Earth has always been in the “Age of the Bacteria” and probably will be forever.

Sebastian Amyes is Professor of Microbial Chemotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. He has specialised on the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. He has published more than 500 papers on bacteria and written a number of books on the subject, including Bacteria: A Very Short Introduction.

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Image credit: electron micrograph of Vibrio cholerae [Public Domain] via Dartmouth College

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Bird Day began in 1894 as part of the wildlife conservation movement that sprang up in response to the slaughter of the bison and the Passenger Pigeon. Birds always had a large role, for they were threatened but also familiar and fascinating. More than any other form of life they drew and held people, becoming for many a lifelong interest, passion, and even obsession. This generation made identifying birds by sight or (less frequently) song a popular hobby, and with it a new kind of book: the field guide. Birding now draws more people than any other outdoor recreation, from every part of the country and ranging from those who want to see every bird on earth to the much greater number who keep a field guide on the windowsill and a casual eye on the bird feeder in the backyard. They buy guides of every kind and check websites with up-to-date information on migration, rarities, and oddities. Some birds become celebrities. “Pale Male,” one of a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting in New York City, attracted a local, then a national following, and their courtship and nesting led to a book, Red-tails in Love.

Birders always went with bird conservation for Audubon’s founders saw the hobby as a way to get women outdoors and interested in nature so they would support bird conservation. Their political work began with campaigns against market hunting and for the protection of songbirds, went on through work for nature reserves, then the banning of pesticides like DDT, and saving the ecosystems on which birds—and all of us–depend. Birders’ cooperation with science goes back as far and has a rich a history. In 1900 amateurs sent their observations to ornithological journals; in the 1920s they joined the national bird-banding program organized by the Bureau of Biological Survey; in the 1980s signed up for the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Breeding Bird Survey; and now they contribute to citizen science programs gathering data to analyze changes in bird populations across the continent. In a world of climate change and growing human populations, birds provide one of our best windows on we affect nature, and birders serve as the eyes and ears and the interested hearts of that effort.

Reed’s sparrows Reed’s shirt pocket-sized books were easy to carry. From Chester A. Reed, Bird Guide: Part Two, Land Birds East of the Rockies from Parrots to Bluebirds (1906; reprint, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1912).

Because the world keeps changing research never stops, but what keeps the scientist active also makes birding a continuing adventure, as much an exploration of nature as a matter of checking off species. Even on their home grounds birders see annual variation as birds expand their ranges or move out of their area, and occasionally the spectacular irruptions of new species or the occasional collapse of established ones. In the 1950s the self-introduced cattle egret spread through the country, and now the introduced Eurasian collared dove is doing the same. Cave swallows began nesting in the square drainage pipes under large highways, and ornithologists and birders remade their range maps. Recently West Nile virus devastated birds in many parts of the United States. As residues of the banned pesticide DDT leached out of the environment, bald eagles and peregrine falcons returned to parts of their old ranges, and now we can hope to see a eagle soaring over Minneapolis or an urban falcon taking a pigeon over Fifth Avenue.

Birders support conservation and work for it, but they go to the field because birds fascinate them, and here we come back to Bird Day’s original purpose — celebrating birds and inviting us to learn more. Those who want to learn about birds have many more resources than their ancestors. The few field guides available in 1894 treated a small selection of birds, had poor illustrations, and gave only hints about how to tell one bird from another—not surprising when even experts could not reliably distinguish all species in the field. Now every bookstore has shelves of guides with the latest tips on field identification, illustrated with digital photographs or expert paintings even more expertly reproduced, arranged to guide the reader to the right name, and catering to every interest and level of expertise. Roger Tory Peterson’s books, written for people with some experience but not a great deal, sit on bookstore shelves next to David Sibley’s guide, the National Geographic guide, and a dozen more for those who have outgrown “Peterson.” Further along we find volumes on identifying hawks at a distance or sorting out immature gulls, and a new form that offers on one page a dozen or more views of the species sitting, standing, and soaring — a miniature library of images. Audio guides make learning bird songs as easy as sorting out their distinctive plumages, and software puts field guides on our phones. Those tired of identification or just interested in birds in other ways can consult handbooks about birds’ lives, their evolution, and their development.

Seton’s raptors, Auk 14 (Oct. 1897): 395-396

Birders can pursue their passion as far and in as many directions as they wish, for the hobby, though identified with listing, gives us a way to pay attention to the natural world. We can wander, study, and marvel in whatever ways attract us. It has never been a better or more important time to be involved with birds and never a better time to celebrate Bird Day.

Thomas R. Dunlap is Professor of History at Texas A&M University, He is the author of In the Field, Among the Feathered: A History of Birders and Their Guides and Faith in Nature: Environmentalism As Religious Quest.

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Image credit: Both images in the public domain and courtesy of the author.

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If I have learned anything as a lifelong student of the world’s multitude of religious traditions, it is that reality for humans is malleable and quite varied — nothing is essential in human experience. Almost everything gets filtered through and shaped by a particular cultural lens. Something as simple as a tree is not so simple after all. From a biological perspective trees have much in common worldwide, but from a cultural perspective there exists an immense difference between them. Human perception and understanding of any aspect of the world seems to be determined largely by the particular interpretive lens through which it is viewed. Importantly, different cultural perspectives result in different experiences and behavior. What is a tree when seen from another cultural viewpoint? What range of interactive experiences is possible with it?

Historically tree worship has been a vital feature of much religious activity worldwide, and trees are still commonly found at the center of religious shrines in India. In this context they are typically regarded as powerful sentient divine beings with whom humans can have mutually beneficial relationships.

A religious shrine in India.

The personhood of trees is taken seriously as people interact with them in a variety of ways. The pipal or bodhi tree is often considered to be the most sacred tree in India. Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment under this tree and many Hindus consider it to be an embodied form of the mighty god Vishnu.

The bodhi tree

Because of its highly beneficial medicinal qualities, the neem tree is frequently called the village pharmacy. It is commonly regarded as the body of the goddess Shitala. In some parts of India this tree is dressed with colorful cloth and a metal facemask is attached to the trunk of the tree as a way of honoring it and facilitating a more intimate connection with it.

The neem tree with a metal facemask attached

Banyan trees are often identified with the god Shiva and are associated with longevity and immortality, since they have the ability to live indefinitely. They send down aerial roots, which over the course of time become massive trunks that in turn send out aerial roots of their own, creating an ever-expanding and self-perpetuating forest. They too are the recipients of a wide range of religious offerings and worship.

A banyan tree

Trees are clearly amazing forms of life that have captured the human imagination in a number of ways. A question we might ask on this Arbor Day is: what possibilities would be available to us in our relationships with trees if we were to expand our understanding of them, inspired by the perceptions of our own ancestors or those of people living in different cultures today, such as the many tree worshipers of India?

David Haberman is Professor of  Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India.

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All photos courtesy of the author.

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Happy World Penguin Day! And what better way to celebrate than by looking at photos of penguins waddling, swimming, diving, and generally looking adorable. Penguin facts are lifted from the Oxford Index’s overview page entry on penguins (on the seabird, not the 1950s R&B group).

Penguins!

Adelie penguins moulting. First Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914. From the collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

 
There are seventeen species of this flightless seabird.

African Penguin at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Photo by Arjan Haverkamp. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
They belong to the family Spheniscidae, which are almost exclusive to the southern hemisphere.

Danco Island, Antarctic Peninsular. Photo by USEPA Environmental-Protection-Agency. Public domain.

 
Penguin wings are developed into powerful flippers for swimming.

King Penguin photographed in Asahiyama Zoo. Photo by saname777. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
The legs are far back in the body so on land they walk upright.

Penguin. Public domain via Pixabay.

 
Since they no longer fly, there are no restrictions on their weight, so their bodies are invested with blubber.

King Penguin at Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. Photo by Dave Morris, 2005. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
This insulates them in the water, but means they tend to overheat on land, so the warm tropics are a barrier to their spread into the northern hemisphere.

Image by NatGeo-GIFs.

 
The largest, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands over a metre high and weighs more than 40 kilograms (98 lb).

Emperor Penguin, Atka Bay, Weddell Sea, Antarctica. Photo by Hannes Grobe/AWI, 2004. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
Emperors have a unique life history. They breed in rookeries of up to 50,000 pairs on the Antarctic ice shelf.

A Chinstrap penguin rookery. CIA World Factbook. Public domain.

 
The young are left in large crèches to overwinter hundreds of kilometres from the ice edge.

Adelie penguins. Photo by Chadica (cyfer13), 2005. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
They can dive to depths of 265 metres (870 ft).

Antarctic. Photo by Jerzy Strzelecki. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

 
Underwater they swim at speeds of 9–11 kilometres an hour (6–7 mph).

A Gentoo Penguin swimming underwater at Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. Photo by Debs from England, 2010. Creative Commons License. via Wikimedia Commons.

Georgia Mierswa is a marketing assistant at Oxford University Press and reports to the Global Marketing Director for online products. She began working at OUP in September 2011.

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When I started researching the environmental history of Russia’s steppes, I planned my visits to archives and libraries for conventional historical research. But I wanted to get a sense of the steppe environment I was writing about, a context for the texts I was reading; I needed to explore the region. I was fortunate that several Russian and Ukrainian specialists agreed to take me along on expeditions and field trips to visit steppe nature reserves.

The scientists took the time to explain to a visiting historian how they conducted their research into the steppe environment: studying the flora, fauna, climate, and soil; monitoring human impact; and above all observing the interconnections between all of these. I learned, a little hesitantly, to identify the main wild grasses and that different types of plants grew on different types of soils. On one expedition, I was even permitted to help collect samples of soil for analysis (and carry them back to the expedition’s van).

On my first visit to the Rostov steppe nature reserve in the arid southeast of the region, I felt disorientated in a landscape of almost unbroken flatness that extended to the horizon with no shelter from the hot sun. Later, I visited more rolling countryside with a high steppe bisected by ravines and the valleys of steppe rivers, including the Don, Kuban’, Volga, and Dnepr. On my last visit, to the Askaniya Nova nature reserve in southern Ukraine, I explored the area of unploughed steppe that has been protected since the end of the nineteenth century and also the woodland park planted at around the same time.

In between the field trips, I was reading about expeditions of  naturalists and scientists to the steppes going back to the eighteenth century. I visited some of the locations they had and compared my impressions with theirs. Like me, visitors from outside the steppe — from the more humid, forested lands to the north and west — at first felt disorientated and exposed in the flat lands with no shelter.

The steppes have few trees (in spite of attempts to plant them), low and unreliable supplies of water (my spring and summer in Rostov coincided with a serious drought), burning hot sun and winds in the summer, but very fertile soil that yielded bumper harvests in good years. The lands to the northwest, in marked contrast, are heavily forested, have abundant supplies of water, especially in the spring when the snow melts, long, cold winters, and not very fertile soil. The steppes were conquered, settled, and ploughed up by people from the northwest who coveted their fertile soil and warmer climate, and expelled the indigenous, nomadic, population.

Not all farmers who worked the land or authorities who governed them appreciated the environment. When things went wrong, which they did periodically, bumper harvests were replaced by dust storms, crop failures, and famines. People agonised over who was to blame. Was it the farmers’ fault for ploughing up the steppe and felling the small areas of woodland? Or were the recurring droughts natural phenomena?

Over time, scientists came to understand the steppes environment, in particular the origins of its very fertile soils. Over time, moreover, they learned the need to work with the steppe environment, rather than against it, in order better to promote sustainable farming.

David Moon is Anniversary Professor, Department of History, University of York, UK, and the author of The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914. He recorded a podcast ‘A transformed landscape: the steppes of Ukraine and Russia’ for the Exploring Environmental History podcast on his methodology. A specialist on Russian history, in recent years his research has focused on environmental history in a transnational context. He combines conventional historical research in archives and libraries with field work in the environments he studies. He has spent much of his career teaching at universities in the north of England and Scotland. He also has extensive experience of both Russia and the USA. While a postgraduate student at Birmingham University, he studied for a year at Leningrad State University in what was then the Soviet Union. He makes regular visits to Russia and Ukraine, including the steppe region, for research and field work. For more information listen to his podcast on the steppes of Ukraine and Russia.

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Image Credits:(1) The steppe at the Askaniya Nova nature reserve. Photo by David Moon. Do not reproduce without permission. (2) Feather grass blowing in the wind, southeastern Rostov region. Photo by Antonina Shamareva, Rostov Botanical Garden. Do not reproduce without permission. 

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Forty-three years have passed since Senator Gaylord Nelson’s teach-in first made its mark on America. Since then, Earth Day has become as regular a fixture on the US calendar as Labor Day and Halloween, albeit without the shopping and candy. As Adam Rome explains in his new book, The Genius of Earth Day, the original event in 1970 mobilized millions of students, teachers, and housewives and brought together a broad, bi-partisan coalition. It seemed that half the population had become environmental activists, at least for a day.

While Earth Day made waves around the US, a few miles across the Canadian border a different kind of environmental activism was taking shape. Its focus was on stopping a very real and potentially destructive wave, one that would emanate from a giant nuclear bomb that the US military was planning to explode on Amchitka, a small island in the North Pacific. In Vancouver, a group of self-exiled American peace activists and draft evaders had begun to mingle with younger Canadians who were part of the city’s burgeoning counterculture. Together they formed a protest group with the evocative, if somewhat cumbersome name, the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, and they started making plans to sail a protest boat to Amchitka the following year to bear witness to the insane ecological destructiveness of nuclear weapons testing.

One of the DMWC’s founders was Irving Stowe, a 54-year-old American lawyer who had become a full-time activist. As he was leaving one of the group’s meetings, Stowe flashed the two-fingered V-shaped hippie salute and mumbled “peace.” Bill Darnell, a young Canadian social worker, spontaneously replied, “Make it a green peace!” Stowe’s wife, Dorothy, recalled that those final two words “lit up the room,” and the group resolved to name their ship the Greenpeace.

Despite an epic attempt, the Greenpeace, an aging halibut seiner the DMWC hired from a local fisherman in Vancouver, never made it to Amchitka. Nevertheless, the campaign gained considerable coverage in Canada. As a result, Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Bill Darnell, and the other activists felt that the DMWC could become a vehicle for a unique new style of direct action protest against environmental destruction throughout the world, particularly in difficult to reach places such as remote nuclear testing sites. So in early 1972, they changed the DMWC’s name to the Greenpeace Foundation. Within a decade, it would become the most well-known environmental organization in the world, with multiple branches in numerous countries and a global headquarters in Amsterdam.

The older generation of American activists, such as Irving and Dorothy Stowe, imbued Greenpeace with the ideas and tactics of the American peace movement, particularly the style of nonviolent protest that Quakers had adapted from Gandhi’s program of civil disobedience against British rule in India. The Amchitka protest, for example, was directly inspired by similar campaigns that various Quaker organizations had mounted during the 1950s, all of which were based on the Quaker idea of “bearing witness” to the injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak.

The younger generation of predominantly Canadian activists was equally important in shaping Greenpeace’s values, tactics, and priorities. Chief among them was a chain-smoking, acid-dropping, I Ching-reading journalist named Bob Hunter. Hunter shared the ecological apocalypticism that characterized much of the environmentalism of the era. He fervently believed that the only way to save the world from destruction was to foment a consciousness revolution that would completely alter the way that humans viewed themselves in relation to other species on the planet. This new consciousness would reflect the holistic worldview of ecology—at least the kind of popular ecology with which Hunter was familiar—and would help humanity reach a stage of sustainable co-existence with the rest of nature.

Hunter felt that the North American counterculture, with its openness to alternative worldviews, its embrace of Native American spirituality and other forms of holistic thought, and its rejection of crass consumption, was already well on the way to achieving the new consciousness. But how could the values held by a relatively small minority reshape the entire world? The media—and particularly television—was the key. Hunter was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications scholar who developed such enduring concepts and aphorisms as “the global village” and “the medium is the message.” By using the mass media as a vehicle for what Hunter called “mind bombing,” groups like Greenpeace could help fast-track the countercultural consciousness revolution throughout the world. While revolutionaries of the past had required armed struggle as a means of achieving their ends, the modern mass communications system provided a “delivery system” through which the agents of the new consciousness could “bomb” people’s minds, creating new archetypal images and reframing standard narratives of human progress. Television, Hunter argued, could be “targeted with complete accuracy to strike at a point precisely two inches behind the victim’s eyes. No bullet flies so fast, so far, with such unerring accuracy. Not even a hydrogen bomb can affect so many people at once.”

This combination of mind bombing and bearing witness was subsequently employed against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, Soviet and Japanese whaling, and numerous other environmentally destructive activities around the world. Greenpeace’s small cadre of professional environmental activists alerted millions of people to environmental problems that were often remote and hidden from public view. Eventually, they created a powerful international NGO with branches in over 40 countries. Subsequently, Greenpeace diversified its repertoire. Its activities now also include sponsoring scientific studies and environmentally-friendly technology, as well as political lobbying. When combined with the judicious use of mind bombing, Greenpeace’s environmental activism still exerts a degree of political influence, albeit at the cost of a more bloated administrative structure than Irving Stowe or Bob Hunter would have liked.

Earth Day and Greenpeace offered two very different models for raising environmental awareness. Earth Day was based around mass participation and focused on local issues in people’s communities. Its goal was to create an environment conducive to widespread political reform at all levels of government. The Greenpeace model, by contrast, relied on a small cadre of activists to carry out spectacular direct action protests, frequently in remote regions or against difficult targets, in the hope that the striking visual images would embarrass the perpetrators of environmental crimes, as well as generally altering people’s perception of humanity’s relationship to its environment.

Despite its global profile, Greenpeace has never really been a social movement. True, it has a substantial worldwide support base, but it is largely a checkbook membership. For most supporters, participation involves sending money to finance the activities of professionals. Thus the evolution of a more corporate structure, with its attendant hierarchy and managerialism, has in many ways strengthened Greenpeace’s ability to carry out its work. Hunter’s dream of a consciousness revolution has been diluted, but Greenpeace remains a reasonably effective NGO, particularly in Europe and Australasia, where its profile is higher than in the US.

Like Greenpeace, Earth Day is today also a global phenomenon. But is it a successful one? Rome argues that the subsequent professionalization of Earth Day, with its top-down directives, its governmental seals of approval, and emphasis on marketing at the expense of concrete participation, diluted its effectiveness. Unlike Greenpeace, Earth Day started as a broad social movement; it had little to gain from professionalization. Perhaps it’s time take Earth Day away from the politicians and marketers and give it back to teachers, students, and local communities.

Frank Zelko is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and History at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Make it a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism, which has just been published by OUP.

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I have been pondering this question since asking my seven-year-old son (who for the record is not an environmental law scholar) what Earth Day was about and he told me ‘That’s the day you think about climate change and stuff’. His description might not be the most accurate and Earth Day has a complex history, but he is correct in the general sentiment. The problem of course, is that like all environmental law scholars, I am thinking ‘about climate change and stuff’ every day and so having a special day to think about these issues seems a bit gratuitous.

Or maybe not. Earth Day, if it is anything for a scholar, is a day to take stock and reflect on how environmental protection policy and law have evolved over four decades. That reflective process is not as easy as most would think; the speed and scale of environmental debate often leaves scholars, decision-makers, and ordinary people with little time to think about the bigger picture. Different areas of environmental law have become specialized and compartmentalized. There is no such thing as a generalist environmental lawyer or environmental law scholar anymore; rather there are experts working in specialist areas of environmental protection. In such circumstances it becomes very difficult to see how environmental law has evolved overall. So let me use this Earth Day to reflect on that process of evolution and progression.

The first thing to note is that the process of evolution in relation to environmental law and policy has not been linear. The first Earth Day in 1970, celebrated primarily in the US, was at a time when there was bipartisan support for environmental protection in many Western jurisdictions. Much of this arose out of the appreciation that environment degradation placed real limits on economic growth. That appreciation developed into the concept of sustainable development with the Bruntland report in 1988 and the Rio Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. The situation now is far more complex. On the one hand, there have been the development of quite ambitious environmental law regimes; the UK Climate Change Act 2008 is a good example. On the other hand, environmental protection has less political traction than it once did and there is now a perception that environmental law, not environmental problems, provides limits on growth. Another example is public participation. While it is recognized as an important feature of regulatory regimes in theory, that does does not mean that it is an accepted part of the landscape in practice.

Paysage à Port-Goulphar, Claude Monet, 1886. Art Institute of Chicago.

Second, it is clear that over time the governance structures for environmental decision-making have become more polycentric and require a more nuanced account of governance structures. Within any one jurisdiction, a number of different regimes that address different issues will exist and these will overlap and interrelate. Likewise, the national, transnational, and international levels of environmental regulation interact in complex ways. Thus for example, the nature of regulatory competition in the environmental context is multi-dimensional and national decisions about nuclear energy don’t take place in a jurisdictional bubble.

Finally, environmental law scholars must really get to grips with the legal detail. We must dig deep into the infrastructure planning regime so as to understand what role public participation is really playing in that context. You cannot understand the prospects of the Climate Change Act 2008 without understanding the legal and political nature of devolution. Scholars must move past simple understandings of regulatory competition. The evolution of environmental law is thus really about its increasingly complexity, and thus the need for greater expertise on the part of legal scholars. This of course is one of the reasons for the compartmentalization of the subject; it is hard to foster expertise right across the vast landscape of environmental law.

Such fragmentation and specialization does not mean that environmental law scholars in different areas cannot and should not communicate with each other. Rather the challenges of interacting across these specialized areas need to be faced head on. Likewise, any attempt to develop overarching approaches to environmental law should not be at the expense of the legal detail.

So all in all there is great merit in my son’s perception of Earth Day. There is a lot of ‘stuff’ to think about, and think hard about. That ‘stuff’ requires careful and critical reflection and the process of thinking is by no means easy. That of course makes Earth Day important for environmental law scholars.

Liz Fisher is General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law. Read a special collection of journals articles for Earth Day.

Condensing essential information into just three issues a year, the Journal of Environmental Law has become an authoritative source of informed analysis for all those who have any dealings in this vital field of legal study. The journal exists for both legal practitioners and academics, but also proves accessible for all other groups concerned with the environment, from scientists to planners.

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Today is Earth Day. At least, that’s the date of the official International Mother Earth Day, as adopted by the United Nations in 2009. It’s a day when we’re asked to reflect on the interdependence of all living things, our responsibility to restore damaged environments to health, and to cherish the world around us.

It was in the 1960s, the decade in which the modern environmental movement emerged, that the idea was born of dedicating one day of the year to celebrating the natural world and publicizing the injuries being inflicted on it. There had been several recent spectacular disasters. In 1967 the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Scilly Isles, causing the world’s first major oil spill. Between 1953 and 1960, people living near Minamata Bay, Japan, were slowly poisoned by eating fish and shellfish contaminated with mercury compounds in effluent from a chemical factory. Londoners had long experience of the winter smog, a mixture of fog and smoke, which afflicted most industrial cities, but in December 1952 the smog killed some 4,000. It was so dense that a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells Theatre had to be cancelled because the audience couldn’t see the stage. Cinemas closed because no one could see the screen. Gaylord Nelson, a US senator from Wisconsin, saw the damage caused in 1969 when an oil well blew out not far from Santa Barbara, California, releasing between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude oil, and called for an ‘environmental teach-in’ to be held on 22 April 1970 to raise awareness of the harm being done. That was probably the first Earth Day.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books and articles appeared around that time, warning of the dire consequences of allowing the situation to continue. And in June 1970 the first edition of The Ecologist magazine hit the newsstands, dedicated to describing and analyzing what many saw as an impending crisis of existential proportions. It all came to a head early in 1972, when The Ecologist devoted the whole of its January issue to one long article called ‘A Blueprint for Survival.’ Meanwhile, the United Nations was preparing for its first major international conference, which was also the first conference on the state of the global environment. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment—the Stockholm Conference—was held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972.

June in Stockholm was sunny and warm, and the summer days were long. I was there as a member of a team from The Ecologist that collaborated with the recently formed Friends of the Earth to produce a daily conference newspaper, the Stockholm Conference Eco. Each morning we set out to attend meetings, returning in the evening to our office at a technical college in a Stockholm suburb to type our stories—no desktop computers in those days. The reports were cut out, pasted down, headlined, and finally taken to a Stockholm daily where it was printed. The following morning, volunteers distributed copies to all the hotels where delegates were staying and after the first few days they were allowed to take it into official conference premises.

The ‘Stockholm Conference Eco,’ (c) Michael Allaby.

The Stockholm Conference exposed the conflict between environmental protection and the need for economic development, a conflict that still remains unresolved. But it also encouraged governments to work together in addressing the most urgent environmental problems. Mainly under the auspices of the United Nations, a series of treaties followed, and in subsequent years there were more environmental conferences. Stockholm led to the creation of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme, which coordinates much of this activity.

On 22 April, as we mark the forty-third Earth Day, we can perhaps take stock of what was achieved. There are no more London smogs. Factories are no longer permitted to discharge their untreated effluents into rivers, so the rivers are cleaner. There are fish—lots of fish—in the Thames. Nor are industries allowed to release harmful dust and gases into the air. The condition of regional seas, such as the Mediterranean, is monitored and regulated by the countries bordering them. Pesticides are rigorously tested for their effects on non-target organisms before being licensed for use. The list of improvements is a long one, and the improvements are very real.

It is not to say that no problems remain. Of course they do, and some are serious. But they are acknowledged and serious professionals dedicate their lives to finding and applying solutions, and environmental protection and nature conservation now offer rewarding careers. There is always more to be done. But experience shows that we can advance, and that a better, healthier, and more interesting environment is within our grasp.

Michael Allaby has written many books on environmental science and especially on climatology and meteorology. He is an editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, and the General Editor of several other Oxford Dictionaries, including the Dictionaries of Earth Sciences, Ecology, Plant Sciences, and Zoology.

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The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law is a comprehensive online resource containing peer-reviewed articles on every aspect of public international law. Written and edited by an incomparable team of over 800 scholars and practitioners, published in partnership with the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and updated through-out the year, this major reference work is essential for anyone researching or teaching international law. The articles in the quiz above are available to read for free for a limited time.

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This year we will celebrate Earth Day for the 43^rd time.  Where have we come in those years in dealing with the environment, and how has Earth’s environment fared? I have been an ecological scientist since 1965, five years before the first Earth day. Many improvements have taken place in how the major nations deal with the environment. People the world over are much more aware of the environment, but ironically, some of the ways people think about it have not changed. There are still major gaps, concerns, confusions, and misunderstandings about ecology and the environment.

On the positive side, today in the United States we have strong environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection Agency was created, and all the federal agencies that deal with land and water have major programs for environmental protection and improvement. Most states too have environmental protection departments under a variety of names. Non-governmental organizations, most of them small and little known in 1970, have grown into billion dollar enterprises, taken seriously by governments.

So why is it that after all this progress we have difficulty solving so many environmental problems? And why is there so much controversy about them? How could something that seems basically a set of scientific questions have been politicized and made into ideologies, to the point that each side in the environmental debates views the other side as immoral and worse? Why can’t we just engineer our planet like we do airplanes, cell phones, televisions, and automobiles? Why can’t the planet run as steadily and smoothly as the spinning blades of a hydroturbine as it produces electricity from one of our major dams?

Some of the answers may surprise you.

We have lost touch with nature in a direct, personal sense: many of us are no longer deeply aware of nature, alert with all our senses. Although the word “environment” may be on our lips daily, few of us have the deep connection to nature that moved Cicero two millennia ago. Without that, environmental issues become abstracted, appearing as just another special interest with a backing politician, like Al Gore, telling us what to believe and whom to disapprove of.

Yes, environmental issues are so popular and affect so much of our lives and economy that many spokesmen have come forward. But some of those who claim to know the truth about it have no training or experience about it. They are today’s snake oil salesmen, feeding us phrases that capture our attention on whichever environmental position they champion. As a result, we ignore many of the key issues we should be thinking about. At the moment, we are captured by climate change, our current morality play. Meanwhile, our forests and fisheries suffer from too little attention and care. Invasive species hitch rides on our commercial jets, but we ignore these dangerous traveling companions. 

In our technological age, we know more about the environment than any previous civilization. We are drowned in facts. But we are also drowned in “facts” that aren’t facts. As a result, we seem to be the civilization most confused about what nature really is, how it really works, what it means to us, and where we fit into it — if at all. Before the scientific and technological age, most civilizations had their own firm beliefs about nature, how it worked, and where people fit in. They mostly got it wrong, at least from our modern scientific understanding, but in each civilization most people agreed about it. It was not a center of moral debate.

Perversely, although our information about nature has increased greatly, we hold on to the dominant fundamental myth that nature is perfect, fixed, constant, unchanging, except when we tinker with it. Our major laws and policies and even many of our scientific premises assume this constancy. Meanwhile, nature in all its forms—climate, oceans, forests, individual species—has gone on changing, has always changed.

In every environmental issue I have worked on, I have been shocked to discover that although we are drowning in environmental information, some of the most basic and essential information has never been gathered. For instance, the state of Oregon passed a special bill to fund a study of the relative effects of forestry on salmon. I was asked to direct it and quickly discovered that the basic facts we needed in order to answer the question were unknown. Of the 23 rivers we were asked to study, salmon had been counted on only two. The state did not have a map of its forests. Logging permits were given by counties, which did not record the logging methods, area to be cut, or any other information necessary for an ecological assessment. All the blame for the decline in salmon was attributed to human actions though salmon live in perhaps the most changeable series of environments of any animal.

Does this matter? Such mistakes cost big money and lead to endless political and ideological debates without solving problems. As the leader of an environmental group in Oregon told me, “When the government said they could manage salmon, we thought that meant we could manage to have salmon.”

Unless we deepen our personal connection with nature, unless we get away from the folktales that dominate our beliefs about nature, unless we get involved and monitor what is around us, we will continue to see each environmental issue as just another political special interest and not know how to judge what is said, nor care deeply about it.

The bottom line: contact nature, think about it, feel it; seek facts, not slogans; understand science’s methods, not the catchphrases of its pseudo-spokespersons.

Daniel B. Botkin is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered and Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark.

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Image credit: Richie Run Vista (1) by Nicholas A. Tonelli from Pennsylvania, USA. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources by advancing the view that humans exist apart from and above all the rest of creation, whose sole purpose it is to meet the needs of humanity.

As a scholar of the emergence of science and technology in medieval Europe, White’s primary interest was to show how Christian views of humanity’s relation to nature gave rise to Baconian science and technology, which treated nature as an object to be investigated and mastered for human benefit. With a quick dig at Ronald Reagan’s alleged anti-environmentalist quip, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all,” White wrote:

To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.

At a time when many assumed that technological solutions could be found for the mounting problems caused by industrialization, White argued that more technology would not solve anything. What was needed was a fundamental shift in worldview and values.

Sacred grove near Sikupati, courtesy of author.

White’s controversial essay inspired a flurry of response. Some scholars argued against his damning critique of Christianity and described the many expressions of Christianity that foster a less exploitative approach to the environment. Others pursued the hints scattered throughout his essay that non-Western religions might promote more sustainable values in relation to natural resource use.  My own research on the sacred groves of India was initially inspired by the hope that these diminutive islands of biodiversity might teach us something about how Hindu values put deliberate limits on consumption, even in a context of enormously pressing material need.

In the forty years since White’s essay was first published, we have learned that the deep values undergirding our actions are remarkably impervious to change. It’s even doubtful that our minds harbor any single, coherent foundation for our actions. Rather, our deeds are more likely motivated by a welter of thoughts, needs, desires, and impulses, many of which are not even under our conscious control.

Consider the discouraging fact that even those of us who espouse values of sustainability live lives of flagrant contradiction. We jet off to far flung lands, wearing clothes from China and eating food from Mexico, quietly oblivious of our carbon footprints ballooning out like the shoes of some perverse circus clown. Once made aware of the effects of our choices, we are able to rationalize them away with ease. If White argued that greater scientific understanding and more sophisticated technological fixes would not reverse the damage of industrialization, our inability to change even the most egregiously destructive behaviors—transcontinental airline travel, eating strawberries in January—suggests that consciousness-raising exercises alone aren’t going to do much either.

Yet, with it’s punchy prose and sweeping argument, White’s article not only inspired the creation of an academic subfield—religion and environmentalism—it also inspired the religious environmentalism movement, a more pragmatic if equally fragmented effort to enlist religion in the service of ecology. Organizations of people of faith such as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation based in the UK, Eco-Friends in India, and the US-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), among many others, bring people together to educate, advocate, and implement concrete changes in their communities.

These movements demonstrate several crucial aspects about religion that make it a potent force for catalyzing the kind of radical changes that White anticipated, and that we so desperately need today. First, religion is more than just beliefs or ideas. Beyond equipping people with cosmologies that orient them to each other, to the divine, and to the non-human world, religions offer a way for people to act in groups. Privatized responses to the dire environmental threats we face today are largely ineffective. But when they are multiplied by thousands, and by millions, they can have a profound effect.  Love it or hate it, religion has an excellent track-record for motivating this kind of collective action.

Second, religious people are motivated by many things besides what we might define as religion. Rural residents of India who preserve (and sometimes cut down) sacred groves are driven by many things: needs for agricultural land, fodder and fuel-wood, aspirations for a better life, desires to conform to new or transformed identities. The same could be said for religious urban dwellers in the United States faced with competing interests, like whether to expand the church’s parking lot or preserve 75-year old maple trees that give shade to a picnic area.

This is not to say that religion acts as a mere ideological cover for materialistic motivations, as when the felling of a sacred grove to build a modern concrete temple, or a maple tree to build a parking lot, is seen as a way to bring in more people and more revenue. Or that people are being simply pious when they enforce the sanctions that protect sacred groves from overuse, or put solar panels on the roof of their churches. Rather, more truthful understandings of how faith, religious practice, community, and natural resource use are intertwined are only possible when we recognize that religious people are also workers, family members, citizens, and residents of places that are precious in manifold ways.

Eliza F. Kent is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University and the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India and Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.

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By the late 1960s, air and water pollution had already achieved serious environmental damage in the USA. Acid rain damaged forests, smog plagued cities, and suburban sprawl in its own paved-over way extended urban blight. Yet little appropriate national legislation existed. There was no Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Clean Water Act, or Endangered Species Act. Land, rivers, and people — whether in city or countryside — were all dumped on.

In 1969 that changed as two events grabbed the headlines: California’s pristine coast at Santa Barbara played host to a massive oil spill and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire. US Senator Gaylord Nelson, known from previous public service as Wisconsin’s “Conservation Governor,” flew back from Santa Barbara with an idea and on 22 April 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated by 20 million Americans across the nation.

Earth Day quickly went global. By the 30th anniversary in 2000, people in 184 countries were holding Earth Day celebrations. That year the focus was clean energy. A decade later, the 40th anniversary saw attention shift to climate change. It also recalled Nelson’s address to a huge throng on the National Mall twenty years earlier: “I don’t want to have to come limping back here twenty years from now on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day… and have the embarrassing responsibility of telling your sons and daughters that you didn’t do your duty—that you didn’t become the conservation generation that we hoped for.”

The conservation generation hoped for? If the aim then was conservation, where is Earth Day now?

Earth Day 2013 marks a different age. The destabilization of climate change alongside the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity dramatizes an altered planet — so deeply altered that the “sweet spot” of sufficient planetary stability to host all the human civilizations ever known, the late Holocene, is exiting. Scientists have already given its successor a name: “the Anthropocene.” If the mark of the Holocene was relative climate stability conducive to life, then the tattoo of the Anthropocene is cumulative human activities powerful enough to alter Earth’s core surface processes: atmosphere, ocean, or land. While humanly-induced, these core changes even occur where humans have little or no presence—at the polar ice caps, in ocean depths, in upper regions of the atmosphere. Everything—air, water, soil—is sufficiently impacted so as to render Planet Home passing strange.

The consequence is a familiar geological age moving so far out of phase that the planet can no longer be counted on for steady seasons of seedtime and harvest; for glacial waters feeding great rivers; for sea levels trustworthy enough to permit the building of great cities; for sufficient time for flora and fauna to adjust to new insect predators and diseases, or drought and deluge; for governments capable of marshaling resources to handle disasters of greater number and intensity or to allay the conflicts that arise when desperate people are rendered helpless and homeless en masse; for rainfall and snowpack and enough resources to assure that future generations will survive and thrive on a diminished and destabilized planet; and for ocean biochemistry stable enough to maintain eons-old underwater rainforests. (We are losing ocean eco-systems faster than terrestrial ones.)

In a word, Earth Day 2013 finds the third rock from the sun undergoing a transformation inimical to the very civilization that creates that transformation. Nature’s economy is deeply at odds with the global human economy. The result is not, as in 1970, a conservation crisis that threatened the pleasures of a way of life firmly in place. The result is a civilizational crisis that begs for a different way of life. What was, on that first Earth Day, full-blown confidence that industrial-technological civilization and 3.7 billion people could right itself has in 2013 become a troubled doubt that global consumerism for the nearly doubled population—7 billion—can. For some, uncertainty that never occurred in 1970 now looms. Because “planetary health is primary, and human well-being is derivative” (Th. Berry), and because “the first law of economics is the preservation of Earth’s economy” (also Berry), it has yet to be proven that we are a viable species for the very age we helped give birth. What is the faith and manner of living that takes us where we must go, from fossil-fueled industrial civilization to ecological civilization? Earth Day then and Earth Day now are ages apart.

Larry Rasmussen is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key.

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Image Credit: View on Earth. Photo by Heikenwaelder Hugo, Austria. Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons.

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Monday 22nd April is Earth Day 2013. To celebrate in advance, here’s an extract from The Earth: A Very Short Introduction.

By Martin Redfern

Attempts to calculate the age of the Earth came originally out of theology. It is only comparatively recently that so-called creationists have interpreted the Bible literally and therefore believe that Creation took just seven 24-hour days. St Augustine had argued in his commentary on Genesis that God’s vision is outside time and therefore that each of the days of Creation referred to in the Bible could have lasted a lot longer than 24 hours. Even the much quoted estimate in the 17th century by Irish Archbishop Ussher that the Earth was created in 4004 BC was only intended as a minimum age and was based on carefully researched historical records, notably of the generations of patriarchs and prophets referred to in the Bible.

The first serious attempt to estimate the age of the Earth on geological grounds was made in 1860 by John Phillips. He estimated current rates of sedimentation and the cumulative thickness of all known strata and came up with an age of nearly 96 million years. William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, followed this with an estimate based on the time it would have taken the Earth to cool from an originally hot molten sphere. Remarkably, the first age he came up with was also very similar at 98 million years, though he later refined it downwards to 40. But such dates were considered too recent by uniformitarianists and by Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection required more time for the origin of species.

By the dawn of the 20th century, it had been realized that additional heat might come from radioactivity inside the Earth and so geological history, based on Kelvin’s idea, could be extended. In the end, however, it was an understanding of radioactivity that led to the increasingly accurate estimates of the age of the Earth that we have today. Many elements exist in different forms, or isotopes, some of which are radioactive. Each radioactive isotope has a characteristic half-life, a time over which half of any given sample of the isotope will have decayed. By itself, that’s not much use unless you know the precise number of atoms you start with. But, by measuring the ratios of different isotopes and their products it is possible to get surprisingly accurate dates. Early in the 20th century, Ernest Rutherford caused a sensation by announcing that a particular sample of a radioactive mineral called pitchblende was 700 million years old, far older than many people thought the Earth to be at that time. Later, Cambridge physicist R. J. Strutt showed, from the accumulation of helium gas from the decay of thorium, that a mineral sample from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was more than 2,400 million years old.

Uranium is a useful element for radio dating. It occurs naturally as two isotopes – forms of the same element that differ only in their number of neutrons and hence atomic weight. Uranium-238 decays via various intermediaries into lead-206 with a half-life of 4,510 million years, whilst uranium-235 decays to lead-207 with a 713-million-year lifetime. Analysis of the ratios of all four in rocks, together with the accumulation of helium that comes from the decay process, can give quite accurate ages and was used in 1913 by Arthur Holmes to produce the first good estimate of the ages of the geological periods of the past 600 million years.

The success of radio-dating techniques is due in no small way to the power of the mass spectrometer, an instrument which can virtually sort individual atoms by weight and so give isotope ratios on trace constituents in very small samples. But it is only as good as the assumptions that are made about the half-life, the original abundances of isotopes, and the possible subsequent escape of decay products. The half-life of uranium isotopes makes them good for dating the earliest rocks on Earth. Carbon 14 has a half-life of a mere 5,730 years. In the atmosphere it is constantly replenished by the action of cosmic rays. Once the carbon is taken up by plants and the plants die, the isotope is no longer replenished and the clock starts ticking as the carbon 14 decays. So it is very good for dating wood from archaeological sites, for example. However, it turns out that the amount of carbon 14 in the atmosphere has varied along with cosmic ray activity. It is only because it has been possible to build up an independent chronology by counting the annual growth rings in trees that this came to light and corrections to carbon dating of up to 2,000 years could be made.

Martin Redfern is a former science producer at the BBC Science Radio Unit and author of The Earth: A Very Short Introduction. He is now a freelance science writer.

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Thousands of years after the last woolly mammoth died, some bioengineers dream of resurrecting the species. When I first heard their arguments, these folks struck me as the modern, high-tech version of snake-oil salesmen. The product they’re promoting is not what they lead people to believe it is, and it won’t do what people like to imagine it will.

Mammoths and mastodons once roamed throughout the Americas, as well as much of Europe and Asia. There were several species, but the best-known is the woolly mammoth, a creature of the far north. Well-preserved carcasses have been discovered melting out of the permafrost in Siberia and the Yukon. There’s been a lot of talk of ‘cloning’ a mammoth by using DNA recovered from bodies preserved in permafrost.

However, the genetic material in even the best-preserved mammoth specimens has been broken to bits, devoured by cold-adapted bacteria and shattered by thousands of years of freezing and thawing. No mammoth sperm cell holding intact DNA—a prerequisite for cloning—has ever been found. Using bits of ancient mammoth DNA, and referring to the genome of living elephants, researchers have pieced together much of the coding genome of the woolly mammoth—the segments that direct the building of proteins. But the vast majority of the genome, whose functions are little understood, remains unmapped.

Still, it’s now theoretically possible to create a pseudo-mammoth. This could be done by taking the genome of an Asian elephant, the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth, and splicing some sequences of mammoth DNA into it. This hybrid DNA could be inserted into an elephant sperm cell, which could then be used to artificially inseminate a female elephant. If the embryo developed and was carried to term, a mammoth-like animal would be born. This is a big ‘if’, because elephant reproduction is slow and complex. Even in efforts to clone living animals, there are often multiple abortions before a live infant is born. And those babies often don’t live long.

“We’d propose to make a hybrid elephant with the best features of modern elephants and of mammoths,” George Church said at a recent TEDx conference on De-Extinction.  A genomics pioneer based at Harvard, Church is a master of genetic manipulation. His motivation for trying to raise the mammoth is obscure.  When I spoke with him a couple of years back, he told me, “You can be very fussy and insist on getting the genome exactly right. Or you can go for something that has the main visible characteristics: the hair, the size, the tusk shape.” So, like many who imagine mammoths once again roaming the far north, Church was hung up on appearances.

Experiments using ancient mammoth DNA sequences have shown that these cold-adapted elephants had a different form of the blood protein hemoglobin compared to their modern cousins. Mammoth hemoglobin, which picks up oxygen in the lungs and offloads it in the tissues, was designed to release oxygen under cold conditions, a feat that modern elephant hemoglobin can’t perform. So a gene for cold-adapted hemoglobin is now on Church’s list of characteristics to splice into a mammothified elephant. But how many other subtle factors made the mammoth what it was?  To believe that human technology can fabricate an animal that will fill the lost niche of the mammoth takes a lot of blind faith—or hubris.

Mammoths lived in cold, dry prairies, an Ice Age habitat that Palaeoecologists call the mammoth steppe, and that once covered great swathes of the planet. Today, the mammoth steppe has vanished. So if bioengineers managed to produce pseudo-mammoths, they’d likely have no place to go. With a lot of luck, they might help to create their own habitat. Ecologist Sergei Zimov is running a long-term experiment in northeastern Siberia which he calls Pleistocene Park. His goal is to bring large herbivores into the soggy tundra in the hope that their grazing will transform the landscape back into the productive grassland that existed in the days of the mammoth. Large herbivores can shape their own habitats, a phenomenon that’s been observed in African savannas as well as in the Arctic. Zimov has seen some signs of success with horses and muskoxen. But whether mammoth-like animals could survive there is unknowable.

While some dream of raising the mammoth, living elephants are under siege. Poaching has reached a new peak; 62 percent of forest elephants in Central Africa were killed for their ivory over the last decade. (It’s worth noting that mammoth tusks were considerably larger: meaning a bigger pay-off of ivory for every animal killed). Elephants often die in clashes with subsistence farmers in Africa and Asia.  They need large stretches of habitat to survive, and land unoccupied by humans is becoming a rare and precious resource.

Even bringing back species that were deliberately wiped out in much of North America within the last century remains controversial. The reintroduced gray wolf population in Yellowstone National Park is by many measures a great success: the animals thrived, and have helped to restore an array of other creatures, from beaver to songbirds. Still, as the wolf population has expanded beyond the park’s boundaries, they’ve been met with outrage and gunshots. Yellowstone’s bison, the last free-roaming herd in the United States, gets the same reaction when the animals migrate out of the park in winters of heavy snow.

Conservation efforts for these living megafauna are chronically under-funded. So it’s hard to take the notion of raising a pseudo-mammoth, or any other long-extinct species, as a serious conservation move. The mammoth has been a favorite for resurrection, not because the idea is practical, but because the lost creature has such a strong hold on our imaginations.

Still, it’s probably not fair to compare all advocates of this idea to snake-oil salesmen. After watching a number of speakers at the TEDx De-Extinction conference passionately describe their dreams of raising not only the mammoth, but the thylacine and the passenger pigeon, I think many of these people are sincere. They believe they can raise dead species, and set them free to function in the wild. But they’re so focused on this vision that they seem disconnected from the reality of here and now.

Sharon Levy is a freelance science writer who specializes in making natural resource and conservation issues accessible for a broad audience. She is the author of Once and Future Giants, a book that introduces the idea that Ice Age megafauna extinctions hold important lessons for modern conservation. She lives in Humboldt County, California.

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Image credits: Smithsonian Woolly Mammoth. Photo by Kevin Burkett. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons; Woolly Mammoth. Photo by Flying Puffin. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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The balancing act that keeps ecosystems intact results from interactions, not only among the animals and plants, but also among their many smaller pathogens, parasites, symbionts, and pollinators. Taken together, all these interactions among the visible and invisible world produce an ecological balance, a green equilibrium.

I traveled to Sri Lanka to visit colleagues who are working in a tropical rainforest. While I was there I visited Bundala, a bird sanctuary in the southern part of the island. Bundala’s green equilibrium has produced an unusual cross-species cooperative interaction that also depends on the invisible world. If you paddle around a coral reef, you will often see tiny fish or shrimp removing and eating parasites from the mouths and gills of larger fish. The large fish, which are sometimes fierce predators, go to specific regions of the reef known as cleaning stations. There they temporarily shelve their aggressive behavior while the small fish operate on them.

Such clearly cooperative behavior across species boundaries is common in the marine world but less obvious on dry land. Oxpecker birds, which clean parasites from the ears and nostrils of large grazing animals in East Africa, often stray over the line between beneficial symbiotic and harmful parasitic behavior. They can actually prey on the slow-moving grazers, opening wounds and drinking their blood.

At Bundala I was lucky to see a much clearer example of dry-land cross-species cooperation. In an open area fifty yards from our truck, a black-naped hare crouched down and half-closed its eyes while a common mynah walked across its back and plucked clearly visible ticks from its ears. My camera equipment was just adequate enough to get pictures. In Brazil, jacana birds have been photographed removing ticks from the tummies of capybaras, but so far as I know this is the first time such unequivocally cooperative behavior has been photographed outside of South America.

For this behavior to happen, there must be so many ticks in the park’s grassland that the hares, tormented by their itching, will permit the birds to administer a painful remedy. And the hares and mynahs must interact with each other often enough that trust can build up between them. We saw many jackals nearby, so the cooperative behavior must take place in open areas where the hares are safe.

The hares, mynahs, jackals and ticks have together shaped this remarkable interaction. Bundala’s green equilibrium is providing opportunities for such complex equilibria to evolve, opportunities that will be lost if we damage this precious ecosystem.

Christopher Wills is a Professor Emeritus, Section of Ecology, Behavior and Evolution at the University of California, San Diego. He has published numerous books including The Darwinian Tourist and the soon to be released Green Equilibrium: the Vital Balance of Humans and Nature.

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Image Credit: Copyright Christopher Wills. Do not reproduce without permission.

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In the fall of 1994, I was invited to offer my university’s first environmental history course. Entering this unchartered territory, I scrambled to find sample syllabi and appropriate books. Nearly two decades later, environmental history is a standard course offering and my university, like so many others, boasts a thriving Environmental Studies major as well as a major in Environmental Science. Environmental history books, textbooks, articles, blogs, podcasts, and documentary films are flooding the market. The ASEH/FHS has grown by leaps and bounds, and Environmental History is recognized as a leading journal.

Some historical fields have evolved slowly, with movement like a glacier’s—meaningful, but slow. Environmental history has been more like an avalanche—fast, furious, and undeniable. Some of this growth can be attributed to timing, as environmental history and the information revolution took hold almost simultaneously. Tools like GIS made unique contributions to the field’s success. And like all fields, environmental history reaps the benefits of the internet, such as immediate access to articles and essays. H-Environment has created a global community of scholars in which questions are raised and answered, and opportunities to present and publish scholarship are widely circulated. More importantly, even as some traditional fields of historical study are increasingly denigrated as no longer crucial to the historical canon, appreciation of the practical value of environmental history is on the rise on campuses all over the world. Many universities offer not only environmental courses, but are dedicated to applying lessons learned, making their campuses as green as possible. Their success is judged (and celebrated) by publications including E-Magazine and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One of the best changes is the increasing interdisciplinarity of environmental history and its incorporation into a variety of related studies. This sets it apart from other relatively new disciplines. Women’s history, for example, too often still finds itself isolated in a kind of pink ghetto as professors (and texts) of history courses with more traditional emphases (political, economic, and specific periodization) either ignore women’s history entirely or incorporate it only superficially. Environmental history, on the other hand, has more quickly been accepted as crucial to the historical enterprise and is given considerable coverage in a wide variety of courses covering a range of places, historical periods, and topics (including science, religion, gender, race, economics, and politics).

Autumn scence. 6 October 2012. Photo by Dmitri Popov. Creative Commons License.

There are some drawbacks to all this exciting growth, and not just that it’s impossible to keep up with the mounting supply of new information. A common complaint among environmental history professors and students alike is that the courses are just so depressing. Students complain that, having gained a true understanding of the breadth, depth, and life-threatening nature of the problems, they feel overwhelmed and helpless. In the face of rapid global warming, their individual efforts, including recycling their bottles and cans and bringing their reusable containers to Starbucks, seem akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

One of the new challenges facing this thriving field is to replace, or at least temper, the doom and gloom with a sense of practical empowerment. In delineating the human role in the creation of our current environmental crises, some historians are taking care to teach, rather than preach or scold, and highlight the roles that people have played in responding constructively to those crises, and in heading off others entirely. Such approaches create not a false sense of security, but inspiration, instilling feelings of responsibility and providing tools to help implement positive change.

Environmental history continues to experience a variety of growing pains, but its growth, and its ability to inspire, challenge, and promote genuine understanding and meaningful reform, reveals in new and dynamic ways the profound value of the study of history.

Nancy C. Unger is Associate Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History and the prize-winning biography Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer, and book review editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

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Our world is dominated by colours and patterns that provide information about how to behave and survive. These are a product of how our sensory system and brain interpret the physical properties of the environment. For example, how people see and describe colours can depend on whether they have ‘normal’ colour vision or not, what culture they come from, and even what their emotional state is. Colour is in the eye of the beholder!

However, the differences in perception among humans are a drop in the ocean compared to how other animals view the world. Even animals with the same sensory modalities (e.g. vision) have substantial differences across species. Take vision and ultraviolet (UV) light. We can’t see UV because our lens blocks these very short wavelengths before they can reach the photoreceptors. In contrast, many animals detect and use UV for a variety of tasks. For example, flowers may look beautiful to us, but seen through the eyes of a bee they take on a whole new appearance. Many petals have lines that are only visible in UV that run towards the centre of the flower. These ‘nectar guides’ act like landing lights, directing insects to the pollen and nectar. Birds also use UV. Many of us will have seen kestrels hovering at the side of a road or field. They can detect the presence of voles by picking up UV light that’s reflected by vole urine along trails. Blue tits provide another example. They look identical to us but the male plumage reflects more UV than females, and males with greater UV are more attractive in mating.

The same flower can look quite different to human eyes and other animals. The photo on the left is taken in human visible light, whereas the photo on the right encompasses the range of wavelengths bees can see (ultraviolet, shortwave, and mediumwave light, but not longer wavelengths that humans perceive).

Ultraviolet light is just one example of differences in vision among animals. Some of the most extreme cases come from the deep ocean. Longer (‘red’) wavelengths of light fail to reach here, making the conditions blue (rich in short wavelengths). In addition, almost all bioluminescence in the ocean is blue or blue-green, and because it doesn’t make sense to have a visual system that detects light that isn’t there, most animals in the depths can’t detect red light. Dragon fish, however, produce red bioluminescence and have a visual system to detect it. This means that they can signal to each other without attracting unwanted attention, and even use their red flashlights to hunt without the prey knowing that they’re there!

So far, we’ve focussed on vision. But humans have other senses too – touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Unfortunately, there’s nothing exceptional about any these either. We can hear sounds roughly in the range of 15-20,000 Hz (20 kHz), but this fails to match many species. For example, bats navigate and detect prey using ultrasonic echolocation (sometimes well above 100 kHz), which can be so refined that they can determine the size, texture, speed, and even wing beat frequency of their insect prey! Ultrasonic sounds are used by other animals too, such as mice and rats in aggressive encounters, mate attraction, and even to beg for food.

Animals also differ in what sensory systems they have, with humans lacking electric and magnetic senses that are found in other species. Birds are particularly well studied for how they use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Bees and other insects can also orientate based on magnetic cues, and as if echolocation wasn’t enough, so too can some bats. Equally fascinating is the use of electric information. Sharks and rays, and even some ‘primitive’ mammals like platypus and echidna can detect the electric fields generated by other animals (usually prey). Some fish from South America and Africa can even produce electricity and use this to navigate, find prey, identify their own species, and assess potential mates. Just as male and female blue tits look different to bird eyes, many electric fish have different electric signal forms for males and females.

Many animals including birds can see ultraviolet light. The top photos are human visible images of a parrot and budgie, whereas the images below show their striking colour patches in ultraviolet.

What drives differences among animal sensory systems? We don’t have all the answers to this important question but it’s clear that the environment that an animal evolved and lives in plays a major role. For example, electricity isn’t well conducted by air and so an electric sense would be useless to most terrestrial animals. Many fish with an electric sense live in murky disturbed waters or are nocturnal. Here, vision is more limited so they use other senses. Animals have also evolved sensory systems that are tuned to specific tasks. For example, some primates, including humans, evolved the ability to see differences between reds and greens (which most mammals don’t) for finding ripe fruit against green leaves. Finally, sensory systems take up significant resources and energy. There’s simply no reason to invest in a sensory system that’s not useful – natural selection doesn’t like waste! It’s why cave animals like blind cavefish lose their visual systems when they move into dark environments.

These are exciting times to study the perceptual worlds of animals. New technologies have made it possible to eavesdrop on once hidden modes of communication and to appreciate how other species interpret their environment. Above all, we are obtaining a much better picture of how sensory systems shape animals’ lives and the role they play in evolution, and even how we can learn from them to improve our own lives.

Martin Stevens is a BBSRC Senior Research Fellow, based in the Centre for Ecology & Conservation, University of Exeter. His research focuses on sensory ecology and behaviour, especially animal coloration and vision, across a range of organisms. It covers bird vision, anti-predator defences such as camouflage and warning signals, brood parasitism and cuckoos, and sexual signals and vision in primates. He is the author of Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution (OUP, 2013). Find Martin Stevens on Twitter: @SensoryEcology.

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Image credits: Both images  © Martin Stevens, all rights reserved. 

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It is an interesting juxtaposition that World Meteorological Day should come immediately after World Water Day. World Water Day has been an event in the United Nations calendar since 1993, and the involvement of the international organisation and its topic for 2013 (‘Water Cooperation’) evokes the thought of ‘water wars’: arguments between nations over the use of this precious resource, efforts to actually map water resources, and of the extreme strife that can arise, even within developed nations such as the United States, over access to water.

For 2013, the World Meteorological Organisation has chosen their topic as ‘Watching the weather to protect life and property’ and is also celebrating 50 years of World Weather Watch, the coordinated, world-wide system that provides access to weather data to meteorological services around the world, so essential for monitoring weather systems and, in this context, rainfall, or as it is known to meteorologists in a broader context: precipitation.

Rainfall in excessive quantities or in an unusual location may give rise to flooding – as we have seen only too frequently in Britain in the past year – but quite apart from such problems and its many other uses, water is absolutely essential for agriculture – particularly in tropical countries where the onset and progress of the monsoon is anxiously awaited, and in regions where agriculture is utterly dependent on precipitation brought by the less predictable tropical cyclones – known as ‘cyclones’, ‘hurricanes’, or ‘typhoons’, depending on their location around the world.

Yet the source of the world’s water may be expressed in a single word: ‘Rain’. (To be pedantic, we should really use two words: ‘Rain’ and ‘Snow’.) It is a persistant urban myth that the Inuit have a vast vocabulary of different words for ‘snow’, and there may various sayings about the intensity of rain: ‘soft rain’; ‘raining cats and dogs’; ‘raining pokers’; and ‘raining stair-rods’ – I wonder how many people nowadays are familiar with stair-rods? – but ‘rain’ is just simply ‘rain’. However, meteologists do sometimes, slightly light-heartedly, refer to two types of rain ‘warm rain’ and ‘cold rain’. These have nothing to do with the actual temperature of the eventual raindrops, but are a form of shorthand for the way in which the rain originates.

The technical terms for these two processes are coalescence, or ‘collision-coalescence’ responsible for warm rain and the Bergeron process (the ‘Bergeron-Findeisen process’ or ‘ice-crystal theory’) that produces cold rain. Raindrops have a typical range of 0.1—9 millimetres in diameter, yet the cloud droplets from which many form are extremely tiny, with typical diameters of about 1–100μm (1μm – a micron – being one thousandth of a millimetre). Vast numbers of cloud droplets are therefore required to form a single raindrop. In ‘warm rain’ this growth occurs simply through collisions and the coalescence of two droplets. Such collisions occur only when clouds are the site of extremely vigorous convection and turbulence and are not subject to freezing (glaciation) in their upper levels. (We will come to glaciation shortly.) Convective clouds of this sort are very deep cumulus congestus and cumulonimbus, and such clouds, and the warm rain that they generate, occur all year round in the tropics. In Britain, the vigorous convection and other conditions required to create these deep clouds tend to be confined to the summer.

Deep, summertime cumulus congestus clouds over the English Channel, which shortly afterwards produced a slight shower of ‘warm rain’. Later in the day, convection had reached higher levels and glaciation set in, giving rise to heavier ‘cold rain’. © Storm Dunlop 2013, all rights reserved.

‘Cold rain’ by contrast, does involve freezing. But this is not completely straightforward. In the absence of any suitable nuclei on which to freeze, water may exist in a liquid state at temperatures well below 0°C. This condition is known as supercooling and such droplets may survive at temperatures as low as -40°C, before they freeze spontaneously. (Clouds, such as altocumulus that often consist of supercooled droplets form a major icing hazard for aircraft, because the droplets freeze instantly on contact with a solid surface.) When a cloud is in such a state, any ice crystals that may have formed on suitably shaped solid dust or other nuclei grow rapidly at the expense of supercooled water droplets. Eventually the crystals become so large that they begin to fall towards the ground, and may subsequently melt into raindrops, or else, if temperatures are sufficiently low, be deposited as snow.

Glaciation occurs in many different forms of cloud, with the ice crystals turning into raindrops on their descent, but is most clearly seen in operation in the tops of cumulonimbus clouds. Here the cloud towers turn from vigorously growing cells, like those seen in cumulus congestus to a form known as cumulonimbus calvus, with slightly softer outlines – a slight misnomer, because ‘calvus’ actually means ‘bald’ – before going on to become cumulonimbus capillatus, where striations are clearly visible. Both states are signs that freezing is taking place. If the cloud towers reach the tropopause they may flatten into an ‘anvil’ shape, known as cumulonimbus incus. Depending on the wind shear at altitude, such anvils may grow, often explosively, to cover large areas of the sky.

Glaciated, cumulonimbus incus clouds limited in vertical extent by a relatively low, wintertime tropopause. © Storm Dunlop 2013, all rights reserved.

Ice crystals may form in various ways and in different sizes, the largest of which may be regarded as the hail pellets that are created by repeated passage through freezing layers, with the pellets being carried up to higher layers in strong updraughts, before eventually becoming so heavy that they fall out of the cloud. The very largest raindrops result from the melting of individual hail pellets. Small droplets are approximately spherical in shape, but the larger ones become flattened as they descend, somewhat resembling buns in shape. The very largest recorded reached diameters of 10 millimetres, but large drops (over about 5 mm in diameter) normally fragment into smaller droplets during their descent.

A large cumulonimbus cluster over the Isle of Wight, over which rain was falling. The ice crystals in the glaciated anvil top were spread across a wide area of sky by the strong, upper winds. © Storm Dunlop 2013, all rights reserved.

Trails of precipitation that do not reach the ground (known as virga) may often be seen below a number of different types of cloud. When the precipitation (of whatever type) does reach the ground, it is known technically as praecipitatio.

A very shallow, precipitating cumulonimbus cloud over the English Channel in an extremely cold, winter air stream. © Storm Dunlop 2013, all rights reserved.

Storm Dunlop is the author of A Dictionary of Weather, which is also available online as part of Oxford Reference. He is a fellow of both the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Meteorological Society.

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Kathleen Taylor will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23 March 2013 at 2pm to discuss what the new science of the brain supremacy means for us. More information and tickets.

Q&A with Kathleen Taylor

What is the brain supremacy?
I use the phrase ‘the brain supremacy’ to  describe the increasing relevance of neuroscience. It foresees an era – whose birth is already well underway – when the balance of power within the sciences will shift from the natural to the life sciences, from physics and chemistry to the fast-moving sciences of the mind and brain. Neuroscience used to be a subfield of human physiology. It is now a fully-fledged research discipline, and its influence in everyday life is only beginning to be felt. As the era of the brain supremacy unfolds, it will change us in ways unmatched by any science outside the realms of science fiction.

The brain supremacy has been gathering pace for a while. It is driven by the convergence of three great technological advances: in computing power, in genetics, and in neuroimaging. Computing provides the ability to record, store and process the vast amounts of data generated by an organ made up of some 170 billion electrically-signalling neurons and glial cells. Genetics offers the promise of precise manipulation of those cells, switching genes on and off on demand, and controlling the activity of the proteins they encode with unprecedented accuracy. And neuroimaging has opened up the black box between the brain’s sensory inputs and its motor outputs, allowing researchers to study living human brains as they process and react to incoming data.

Why does the brain supremacy matter to you?
A change within science which pushes brain research up the status hierarchy may not seem important to anyone except scientists, but it is. The ways we respond to science, our expectations of its capabilities, our moral judgements of its achievements and our fears about it, all are shaped by ideas which have, so far, come primarily from the natural sciences. Think of a scientist, and chances are it’s Einstein or Newton who springs to mind – not Darwin, let alone a neuroscientist. Yet it is the neuroscientists who are likely to have the greatest impact on us in the 21^st century.

Why? Because in the brain supremacy, the material which researchers analyse and manipulate is not inanimate matter, nor even the living organisms used in animal research. The stuff of these new sciences is us, and that changes everything. The ability to understand and control a human brain, once we possess it, opens up extraordinary possibilities. Neuroscience is by no means there yet, but it has made extraordinary progress even in the last ten years. Yet the ethics of studying people, which ultimately come from medicine, are not the same as the traditional scientific ethics of studying material. We cannot simply react to brain research as we would to any other science, because its implications for human nature are so profound.

What new technologies will the brain supremacy provide?
I use the term ‘digitised neural experience’ (DNE) to cover all digitally-recorded measures of brain activity, and to make the point that brain activity has much to do with minds. (Change one, and you can change the other, even though we do not fully grasp the nature of the link between them.) There are two kinds of future DNE technologies: recording and programming. Once these are developed, they will give us the power, among other things, to lessen or heal the damage done by brain diseases, to record and share dreams, to achieve practical telepathy, and to reshape not only our bodies – as we do already – but our feelings, beliefs and personalities. What we now manage slowly or not at all, with education, experience and self-discipline, will be attainable much more quickly by technological means.

But isn’t this pure speculation?
The answer is: we don’t know. We do know that brain research has a long way to go before it is able to manipulate DNE as precisely as we would like. There are many difficulties in the way of precision thought control, and there may yet be some obstacle which proves fatal to the entire DNE enterprise. Ethical objections are easy to imagine, but given the attractions of DNE technologies, it is less easy to see how moral qualms will stymie their development. So by ‘obstacle’, I mean some scientific or technological limitation which stalls research progress.

At present, we know of no such limitation. We also know that ideas which, two decades ago, would have been derided as impossible are now being calmly considered in the research literature. For example, neuroimaging researchers have already begun to decode brain activity patterns, allowing them to know which image a person is looking at, or where an animal is in a virtual environment, simply by analysing brain data. Work is also being done on linking brain activity patterns to specific words, and to movements. This is the basis of ‘thought-controlled’ games, wheelchairs, and artificial limbs, which are already being made available to the public.

Why did you write ‘The Brain Supremacy’?
Neuroscience is the most fascinating science on the planet, because it is the science of us. Brains are not only amazingly complex organs in their own right, they are the physical ground of everything we cherish most. In this century, we may well achieve the capacities of DNE recording and programming, allowing us to manipulate living human brains with unprecedented ease and precision. That prospect is glorious, but, as so often with new science, it is also double-sided. There are the hopes of self-improvement and of healing dreadful brain disorders … and then there are the less pleasant uses of DNE control. Governments, the military and corporations are intensely interested in neuroscience. It isn’t hard to see why.

To ensure that we get the best from the new science, while restraining its darker side, we need much more public interest and involvement. Thus The Brain Supremacy expresses a sense of urgency, a need to catch up with the research. We need to talk about neuroscience, and to do that we need a guide to its cutting edge, and to the methods which will drive the brain supremacy.

Kathleen Taylor has written on a range of topics from consciousness to cruelty. Her most recent work, The Brain Supremacy: Notes from the frontiers of neuroscience, published in 2012.

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Klaus Dodds will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Thursday 21 March 2013 at 1:15 p.m. to provide a very short introduction to the Antarctic. The event is free to attend.

By Klaus Dodds

When I wrote The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction, I wanted the book to be something of a provocation.  The aim, in short, was to highlight things that often get neglected in the midst of stories and images of past and present explorers, melting ice caps, tourists and the penguin. The reality is rather more disturbing.

The first inconvenient truth is that the Antarctic is a deeply disputed space. It is not a place where everyone co-operates straight forwardly just because there is no indigenous human population. We might be worried about the future stability of the polar ice sheet, but in the meantime a host of countries are busy cementing their sovereign claims. Britain has renamed a vast area of British Antarctic Territory Queen Elizabeth Land. The Chilean president visited the Antarctic in January 2013 to inaugurate a new research station to be manned by the Chilean air force. And Argentina believes that any resources lying off the Antarctic Peninsula belong to it and no one else. Alongside those three states, four other countries, Australia, France, New Zealand and Norway also believe that they enjoy sovereignty over large sways of the polar continent and surrounding ocean. The United States and Russia reserve a right to make a claim in the future while other members of the international community believe that the Antarctic is a global common.

The second inconvenient truth is that the parties to what is called the Antarctic Treaty System are struggling to manage resource exploitation. Fishing in the Southern Ocean is worth millions of pounds a year. Fish such as the Patagonian Toothfish are highly lucrative and the Commission for the Conservation on Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) struggles to get agreement on how best to manage such a fishery. And even then that does not even begin to address the problem of illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing in the Southern Ocean. Whaling, although addressed by the International Whaling Commission, is also a fractious affair. Australia and Japan are at loggerheads over whaling in the Southern Ocean, and there is currently a case pending in the International Court of Justice.

The third inconvenient truth is that some countries are perfectly prepared to investigate the Antarctic for its mineral potential. The Antarctic Treaty parties proudly announced to the world that the Protocol on Environmental Protection would ban mining in the Antarctic. The Protocol entered into force in 1998, and this was considered to be instrumental in reducing diplomatic and political pressure on the ATS from environmental organizations and members of the Global South who feared that an elite group of nations might exploit the continent for their own self-interest. In 2012, the Russian delegation submitted a paper to the 35^th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, which blithely mentioned that their scientists were interested in the ‘Determination of structure, geological evolution and potential mineral resources of the Antarctic lithosphere’.

The fourth inconvenient truth is that the Antarctic is heavily commercialized. As with the Arctic, the Antarctic supports a tourist industry involving multiple ships and planes transporting at its peak some 40,000 per year. The tourist industry is an important source of revenue for so-called gateway ports such as Christchurch, Punta Arenas and Stanley in the Falkland Islands. There have been accidents and emergencies in the Antarctic region caused in part because of poor sea conditions but another contributory factor might be the pressure on tour operators to go to ever more remoter parts in order to generate an ‘authentic’ expeditionary experience. A number of countries such as Chile are trying to cash in on this trend and establish hostels and other forms of accommodation to cater for wilderness holidays. It also helps to cement sovereign claims.

The fifth and final inconvenient truth is that there is a growing anxiety about the role of China in Antarctica. While everyone associated with the Antarctic Treaty System is eager to emphasize the consensual nature of decision making and scientific co-operation in the field, there is a worry that a new phalanx of countries led by China, and including Brazil, India and Korea, is going to challenge the political and scientific hegemony previously enjoyed by an alliance involving the United States, Europe and countries such as Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, the media has been full of stories about China’s growing polar footprint – bases, networks and place names. The Antarctic map is being changed as Chinese, Indian and Korean place names lie adjacent to Euro-American naming traditions.

So by all means enjoy the nature programs and continue to revel in the exploits of past explorers and their contemporary avatars but be aware that the geopolitics of the Antarctic is lively. This icy wilderness is being claimed, coveted, exploited by a growing numbers of nations.

Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is author of a number of books including Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction (2007) and The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction (2012).

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Does the world have a voice? Do particular places have a distinctive vocabulary, grammar, and syntax all their own? Can we learn this language, learn to attune our ears to its music and perhaps in this way come to inhabit the world with more care and feeling? These are not new questions, nor are they original to me. The ancient Stoics had a sense of the Logos or Word as a fiery substance moving through all matter. Early Christians (and Jews before them, although not in quite the same way) spoke also of a Word through whom the world came into being and continued to be sustained. Medieval visionaries such as Hildegard of Bingen have expressed this intuition in terms of a prima vox or “primary voice” whispering through all living things. For Henry David Thoreau, one of the critical tasks for anyone wanting to know the world is learning to attune the ear to the gramática parda or “tawny grammar” arising from the life of wild beings. Similarly, the great French writer Jean Giono spoke of the necessity of becoming sensitive to what he called simply “le chant du monde.”

No, these are not new questions. But they have taken on new meaning and urgency in the present moment as the fabric of world continues to fray and ever-greater numbers of places are at risk of falling silent forever. The need to listen, to learn the language of the world has become one of the urgent moral tasks of our time. But what precisely are we listening to or for? A Voice behind or within the world? The simple eloquence of the world itself? And what of the silence behind and within things? A silence that some have argued is primordial, the sources of all language. How might the contemplative practice of listening contribute to the work of repairing the world?

This, as it turns out, is where Chet Raymo and I recently picked up the thread of a conversation begun many years ago at a small Thai restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We had been invited to Cambridge in the fall of 2000 by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (from the Forum on Religion and Ecology) to participate in a conference on “The Ecological Imagination: Nature, Place and Spirituality.” I had read Chet’s work before [Honey from Stone: A Naturalists’s Search for God (Cowley, 1995); Natural Prayers (Ruminator Books, 1999)], but this was my first time meeting him. We hit it off, the scientist and theologian finding common ground in our love of particular places (the Dingle Peninsula) and literatures (the Catholic mystical tradition). And we stayed in touch over the years.

Recently Chet sent me a note to let me know he had been reading The Blue Sapphire of the Mind and had written about it on his “Science Musings” blog. I read his comments and sent him a response, which he also posted on his blog. The debate on the possible relationship between science and religion (or spirituality) has become one of the most fraught areas of our contemporary public discourse, and it seems unlikely that this modest exchange will make any significant difference, especially for those who are convinced that there is little point in even attempting a rapprochement between them. Still, there is something worthwhile in the simple act of listening to another speak of his or her own subjective experiences of and feeling for the natural world. Listening and perhaps offering a response arising out of what may well be a very different kind of experience. I make reference to it here as a gesture toward the possibility of further engagement with these questions by anyone who may wish to take them up.

A note about the place and the context that gave rise to the conversation: I refer in the book to a place called the Sinkyone Wilderness (or Lost Coast), one of wildest and most remote places on the northern California coast, a place where I have spent part of every summer for the past fifteen years. It is there that I became acquainted with the White-crowned Sparrow, a bird common to many parts of the Pacific Coast and whose lilting song I came to associate with the plateau overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the Sinkyone Wilderness. Almost every day I would sit on the gnarled, bleached branches of a fallen eucalyptus tree in the field below our cabin. Sooner or later I would hear the song of that sparrow, sharp, sweet, insistent. It became for me an essential part of the “tawny grammar” of that place. And on the occasions when I wandered up the road to Redwoods Monastery to sit in silence and chant psalms with the members of that community, the song of the sparrow subtly entered into and became part of another, sacred grammar. After a while I had a hard time distinguishing them from one another.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Douglas E. Christie is Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University, and the author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology and The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism.

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Image credit: Photo of the Sinkyone tree by Douglas E. Christie. Used with permission.

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A few days ago, the President of the United States used the State of the Union address to call for action on climate change. The easy way to do so would have been to call on Congress to take action. Had President Obama framed his remarks in this way, he would have given a nod to those concerned about climate change, but nothing would happen because there is virtually no chance of Congressional action. What he actually did, however, was to put some of his own political capital on the line by promising executive action if Congress fails to address the issue. The President, assuming he meant what he said, has apparently accepted the need for a strong policy response to this threat.

Not everybody agrees. There has long been a political debate on the subject of climate change, even though the scientific debate has been settled for years. In recent months, perhaps in response to Hurricane Sandy, the national drought of 2012, and the fact that 2012 was the hottest year in the history of the United States, there seems to have been a shift in the political winds.

Oblique view of Grinnell Glacier taken from the summit of Mount Gould, Glacier National Park in 1938. The glacier has since largely receded. In addition to glacier melt, rising temperatures will lead to unprecedented pressures on our agricultural systems and social infrastructure, writes Andrew T. Guzman. Image by T.J. Hileman, courtesy of Glacier National Park Archives.

In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described the “five stages” of acceptance:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. For many years, climate change discussions seemed to be about getting our politics past the “denial” stage. Over time, however, scientific inquiry made it obvious that climate change is happening and that it is the result of human activity. With more than 97% of climate scientists and every major scientific body of relevance in the United States in agreement that the threat is real, not to mention a similar consensus internationally, it became untenable to simply refuse to accept the reality of climate change.

The next stage was anger. Unable to stand on unvarnished denials, skeptics lashed out, alleging conspiracies and secret plots to propagate the myth of climate change. In 2003, Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma said, “Could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” In 2009 we had “climategate.” More than a thousand private emails between climate scientists were stolen and used in an attempt (later debunked) to show a conspiracy to fool the world.

Now, from the right, come signs of a move to bargaining. On 13 February, Senator Marco Rubio reacted to the President’s call for action on climate change, but he did not do so by denying the phenomenon itself or accusing the President of having being duped by a grand hoax.  He stated instead, “The government can’t change the weather. There are other countries that are polluting in the atmosphere much greater than we are at this point. They are not going to stop.” Earlier this month he made even more promising statements: “There has to be a cost-benefit analysis [applied] to every one of these principles.” This is not anger or denial. This is bargaining. As long as others are not doing enough, he suggests, we get to ignore the problem.

It is, apparently, no longer credible for a presidential hopeful like Senator Rubio to deny the very existence of the problem. His response, instead, invites a discussion about what can be done. What if we could get the key players: Europe, China, India, the United States, and Russia to the table and find a way for all of them to lower their emissions? If the voices of restraint are concerned that our efforts will not be fruitful, we can talk about what kinds of actions can improve the climate.

To be fair, Senator Rubio has not totally abandoned denials. While engaging in what I have called “bargaining” above, he also threw in, almost in passing, “I know people said there’s a significant scientific consensus on that issue, but I’ve actually seen reasonable debate on that principle.” In December he declared himself “not qualified” to opine on whether climate change is real. These are denials, but they are issued without any passion; his heart is not in it. They seem more like pro forma statements, perhaps to satisfy those who have not yet made the step from denial and anger to bargaining.

If leaders on the right have reached the bargaining stage, the next stage is depression. What will that look like? One possibility is a full embrace of the science of climate change coupled with a fatalistic refusal to act. “It is too late, the planet is already cooked and nothing we can do will matter.”  When you start hearing these statements from those who oppose action, take heart; we will be close to where we need to get politically. Though it will be tempting to point out that past inaction was caused by the earlier stages of denial, anger, and bargaining, nothing will be gained by such recriminations. The path forward requires continuing to make the case not only for the existence of climate change, but also for strategies to combat it.

The final stage, of course, is acceptance. At that point, the country will be prepared to do something serious about climate change. At that point we can have a serious national (and international) conversation about how to respond. Climate change will affect us all, and we need to get to acceptance as soon as possible. In short, climate change will tear at the very fabric of our society. It will compromise our food production and distribution, our water supply, our transportation systems, our health care systems, and much more. The longer we wait to act, the more difficult it will be to do so.  All of this means that movement away from simple denial to something closer to acceptance is encouraging.  The sooner we get there, the better.

Andrew T. Guzman is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International and Executive Education at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change and How International Law Works, among others.

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The 11th of February marks the opening of Westminster Kennel Club’s 137th Annual All Breed Dog Show. First held in 1877, the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is America’s second-longest continuously held sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby. The Westminster Dog Show epitomizes our long-standing tradition of domestication of dogs, but how did we arrive at such a moment in human and dog relations? The Encyclopedia of Mammals, edited by David MacDonald, offers some explanation as to how this species went from being wild prey-hunters to “best in show,” and from defending territories to defending last year’s titles.

The Dog Family

Canids originated in North America during the Eocene (55–34 million years ago), from which five fossil genera are known.

Canids evolved for fast pursuit of prey in open grasslands, and their anatomy is clearly adapted to this life. Although the 36 species and 13 genera vary in size from the tiny fennec fox to the large gray wolf, all but one have lithe builds, long bushy tails, long legs, and digitigrade, four‐toed feet with nonretractile claws.

Life in the Pack

The most striking feature of the canids is their opportunistic and adaptable behavior. This is most evident in the flexible complexity of their social organization. Remarkably, there is in this respect almost as much variation within as between species. Though African wild dogs, and possibly dholes and bush dogs, almost always hunt in packs, gray wolves, coyotes, and jackals feed on prey ranging from ungulates to berries. Partly as a result, they lead social lives that vary from solitary to sociable – gray wolves may live in isolated monogamous pairs, or in packs of up to 20 members.

These species, and some others like red and arctic foxes, live in groups even where large prey does not abound and where they hunt alone. Indeed, there are many other reasons for group living – cooperative defense of territories or large carcasses, communal care of offspring, rivalry with neighboring groups. This is clearly illustrated by the Ethiopian wolf, which lives in packs but almost never hunts cooperatively, its prey being largely rodents.

Dogs under Threat

For all their adaptability, members of the dog family cannot escape the indirect threat of habitat destruction. The small‐eared dog and the bush dog are seen so rarely that there are fears for their futures. The Ethiopian wolf numbers some 500 individuals, the African wild dog 5,000 individuals, and the maned wolf a few thousand in its Argentine and Brazilian strongholds. These species are all threatened. The plight of the sociable canids is especially intense insofar as they are victims of the so‐called Allee Effect – that is, at low numbers they enter a downward spiral to extinction. African wild dogs depend on cooperation, so packs with fewer than about five members enter a vortex of decline because they are too small to simultaneously hunt, defend kills, and babysit. Thus, the African wild dogs are even more threatened than their population of 5,000 might suggest, this being equivalent to no more than 700 viable packs across the continent.

Domestication

Various origins have been proposed for domestic dogs, and doubtless many different canids have been partly domesticated at one time or another. Even so, the wolf is generally accepted as the most likely ancestor of today’s domestic dogs. Domestic dogs are thus known to science as a subspecies of wolf – Canis lupus familiaris. The earliest known archaeological indication of domestication comes from a single canine jawbone unearthed at a site in Germany. More foreshortened than that of a wolf, with the teeth more closely packed together, this find is thought to be around 14,000 years old. Other early remains of what are believed to be domestic dogs include a specimen from Coon in Iran, which dates back over 11,000 years. These various discoveries demonstrate that the wolf entered into domestic partnership with man before any other animal species and before the cultivation of plants for food. Indeed, recent molecular evidence suggests that dogs may even have been domesticated as much as 100,000 years ago.

The precise circumstances of domestication have been the subject of considerable speculation. Various theories have been advanced that center on our ancestors’ deliberate use of wolves for practical purposes: hunting, guarding, tidying carrion and refuse around settlements, or even as food items. However, it is equally likely that domestication simply came about by accident, with hunter–gatherer societies capturing and raising young wild animals as pets.

Adapted from the entry on the ‘Dog Family’ in The Encyclopedia of Mammals edited by David MacDonald, also available online as part of Oxford Reference. Copyright © Brown Bear Books 2013. David MacDonald is Founder and Director of Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit.

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Image credit: Photos via iStockphoto

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Below, you can listen to Bill McGuire talk about the topics raised in his book Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. This podcast is recorded by the Oxfordshire Branch of the British Science Association who produce regular Oxford SciBar podcasts.

Listen to podcast:

[See post to listen to audio]

Or you can download it directly from Oxford SciBar podcasts.

Bill McGuire is an academic, science writer, and broadcaster. He is currently Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at UCL. Bill was a member of the UK Government Natural Hazard Working Group established in January 2005, in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and in 2010 a member of the Science Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE) addressing the Icelandic volcanic ash problem. He was also a contributing author on the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) report on extreme events. His books include Waking the Giant: How a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, Surviving Armageddon: Solutions for a Threatened Planet, and Seven Years to Save the Planet. Read his previous blog posts.

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