EARTH DAYS: PBS Monday 4/19 at 9pm

WGBH Preview here.

News From South America: James Cameron goes Native

See this audio slideshow of James Cameron in the Amazon, with his face painted like a native here:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/11/world/americas/20100411-brazil-cameron-amazon/index.html?ref=americas

On a more serious note, Cameron teemed with native inhabitants of the region to fight the construction of the Belo Monte dam on the Amazon River, which the Brazilian government plans to build, that would be the 3rd largest dam in the world.

The natives were shown the movie "Avatar" shortly before Cameron's arrival, as most of them did not know who he was.

The accompanying article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/americas/11brazil.html?src=me

- Sarah

The economics of climate change

Just saw this article in today's New York Times Magazine, written by Paul Krugman. I haven't yet read the whole thing but the crux of his argument seems to be this:

"once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost."

The link to that article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_macfarquhar

An interesting tidbit about Krugman, who I know a lot of people love to hate (I'm rather ambivalent). Apparently his wife is also an economist, and the reason for his success. According to a recent New Yorker article, she is the brains behind many of his NY Times columns, edits each of them, and is essentially the reason for his success. Why isn't her name listed alongside his byline?
(that article - here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_macfarquhar)

Friends of Nature (China)

Here is a great place to read about current Chinese environmental issues. I visited the place in the summer of 2008 while in China. It is one of, if not the first, Chinese NGO. It has an English-language quarterly. It is run by a lovely couple (both scientists) who are fluent in English if anybody chooses to contact them. (Husband was educated in the U.S., and the wife in the U.K.) I tried to find the clip I took of his lecture but it is trapped on my dead laptop. Sorry.

http://www.fon.org.cn/channal.php?cid=616

Silent Spring/Rachel Carson

Hello! Here are two good sites for Carson. The first is the organization set up to celebrate her legacy. The second is the one Professor Deese referenced in class, an "anti-Carson" site. Apparently, she was the devil - or not. You decide.

http://www.rachelcarson.org/

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ02/Carson.html

This third one, nobody will visit. It's dry and boring but it will give you idea what is going on in the scientific realm of chemical use. It's for the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

pubs.acs.org/journal/jacsat

Joachim Radkau gives me food for thought

On page 68, Joachim Radkau writes:

"Nomadism is not a primeval way of life, nor is it likely to have evolved directly out of the stone age hunting way of life; instead, nomads generally live from trade with sedentary cultures and already presupposes [sic] the domestication of animals. For those nomads who moved across the wide expanses of the desert, the fundamental innovation was the domestication of the camel, presumably achieved around 3,500 years ago".

I recently asked myself how it could be that in the region with the longest, arguably richest history of sedentarism nomadism-- a philosophy in which people refuse to be settled-- could be stronger than anywhere else in the world. For those not all that familiar with the credentials of the Middle East in the history of sedentarization, Catal Huyuk, located in modern-day Turkey, is recognized as mankind's first major attempt at settling-down; the crops cultivated earliest anywhere were figs in what is now Israel; the pioneer cities on Earth were in "the land between the rivers" in present-day Iraq; Egypt, which today could be called part of the Middle East with little argument, was of course the site of the most mythologized, perhaps most revered early riverine civilization; and Damascus, the capital of Syria, is said to be the municipality that has been continually occupied for the longest time. I was not aware of how dependent on settled peoples and processes associated with settlement Middle Eastern nomads likely were in laying the groundwork for their way of life until reading the above passage. Now, I can see that one could argue that Middle Eastern nomads are so seemingly set in their ways (and adept at violently defending them if need be) because they have had such a lengthy history of interaction with the settled communities in their vicinity, which are of the greatest antiquity of any on the planet.

I am always trying to come up with subjects about which I could possibly write books, and the sedentarism-nomadism paradox of the Middle East, which before struck me as one such subject, now seems to me to be a matter already settled (pun). So, as for the subjects of books that could possibly come from me, I am now left with my plan for Africa, my theory about the psychology of evaluating people's physical attractiveness (it hit me in 2006 and has only gotten stronger since), and something relating to my first (and what will almost certainly prove on my deathbed to have been my only) love, professional wrestling. If there is any interest at all out there in responding to this, I would like to know from other people in the class what books (preferably ones unlike others already out there) they think they could write.

intellectual history of the environment

Has anyone read this? Seems a bit like Worster's "Nature's Economy" - Bill McKibben covers romantics, imperialists, mechanism, and the crucial shift from thinking about nature as a spiritual subject to considering it a valid object of scientific, empirical study. But this book comes with some modern updates to Worster's study - the incorporation of significant people who are not dead white guys, including Alice Walker as well as Al Gore (ok, he is a white guy, but he's still alive and active in shaping current environmental thinking). It looks like he's very interested in showing the internal conflicts in the field of environmental policy-making and demonstrating that activists do not now and have not really ever agreed on what the "right way" of thinking about the environment is. Plus, McKibben even specifies right there in the title ("American Earth") that this is going to be a history of AMERICAN environmental thought...something I wish Worster had done.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207168/