In anticipation of his next series, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, David Attenborough sits down with the BBC. Attenborough speaks personally about evolution and how great discoveries in his lifetime have validated Darwin’s works. There’s an additional clip about how Genesis has affected humankind’s view toward the environment.
Hat tip to Pharyngula, which I highly recommend to readers of science.
REFERENCE
Tags: Charles Darwin, David Attenborough
We went into the Ocala National Forest on horseback this weekend. I had never been to the area and the landscape was very new to me. The most common tree in the area is live oak with thick winding branches that sometimes crawl along the ground. Live oak was most easily recognized, however, by the spanish moss hanging from it making it look more like a willow tree.
This has been a very dry winter in these former wetlands. Small patches of swamp are hidden throughout the woods. The grass and low growth is dried out.
The longleaf pine is a protected tree in Florida. Here, planted pines are coming of age in nicely organized rows. The longleaf pine sports a 13-15 inch long needle and the pine cones are the size of nerf footballs. It’s like a holdover from the dinosaur era. This area received a controlled burn three months ago. There’s still ash everywhere and the lower trunks of the palms are charred black.
Afternoon sunlight on winding branches of a live oak…
The greatest treat was seeing the oldest magnolia tree in Florida in the Ocklawaha Prairie. The story is that Indians are buried beneath it and making contact with the tree gives you spiritual guidance. An aside about magnolia: I was speaking with an old groundskeeper who told me magnolia trees grew so slowly, he stopped planting them ten years ago.
Wildlife we saw on our Ocala trip included an armadillo, a turkey vulture, white-tail deer (of course) and any untold number of crazy-colored cranes and water birds that Florida is known for. Oh, and I also found fire ants… the hard way.
Tags: Ocala National Forest
While not as big a news story as the new President or the economy, there has been an underreported mass contamination in our food supply… again. This time it’s salmonella in peanuts. After a few weeks of warnings and recalls, the trail still leads back to how the food has been processed:
Food and Drug Administration officials called for a recall of all products containing peanut butter, peanut paste and peanut oil manufactured since Jan. 1, 2007 at the Blakely, Ga., processing center operated by Peanut Corp. of America.
That could vastly increase the number of recalled food and other products in the nation’s consumer supply.
Additional strains of salmonella also have been detected at the plant, although federal officials emphasized they have confirmed no illnesses beyond those associated with the current Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak.
“Peanut Corp” is too good to be true, a parody of the industrialization of food.
This mass contamination may well be the biggest in America yet. But the scariest part is that we do not yet know the full scope of the
More than 500 people have gotten sick in the outbreak, which has been linked to at least eight deaths. More than 400 products containing peanut butter or peanut paste have been recalled so far. They range from Asian-style cooking sauces, to ice cream, to dog treats.
“It’s among the largest recalls that we’ve had,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. “We don’t have a good idea how much of that product is still out there.”
My goodness, that’s a lot of peanuts. It’s remarkable to see how dependent America’s peanut craving is on one ‘processing center’ in Blakely, Georgia. What would happen if this was tomatoes, for example, which show up in many more processed foods? By centralizing our agriculture and food production for efficiency, we have put ourselves at risk.
Not only is that processing center susceptible to an outbreak, it is also susceptible to terrorism. The next think you’d like to know perhaps is how the security is around these facilities. You wouldn’t like the answer.
In reaping the benefits of mass produced foods through lower prices, have we also accepted nationwide warnings on our kitchen staples? Not to mention the illnesses and deaths that alert us to the contaminations?
So presently all the fuss is that Nutter Butters are unavailable but the fuss should be about why they aren’t available. If this is going to be a new era of responsibility, we should take a long hard look at how we produce and distribute food.
Tags: peanuts, salmonella
Queue up an anxious violin concerto because National Geographic has posted dusk-to-dawn time lapse footage of the northern lights…
Growing up in upstate New York (that is, far away from the north pole), I saw the northern lights only a couple times. And they were so dim, you had to be staring into the sky in the right place at the right time to see them. They were always ghostly but I don’t remember them being exclusively ‘Slimer’ green.
The northern lights, or aurora borealis, are caused by charged particles from the sun being sucked down through the ionosphere by Earth’s magnetic field. I’m probably wrong on this but, when I was kid, I believe the phenomenon was still unexplained. (Science nerds, chime in here.)
But before there was science, one can see how the northern lights would captivate (read: scare the bejeezuz out of) primitive audiences. For every northern civilization throughout history, there’s another folk legend about the northern lights. Adolf Hitler, obsessed with unexplained phenomena, sent scientists to northern islands like Svalbard to find the hole in the Earth from which the northern lights were emanating. His reason? To conquer the civilization that lived inside the core of the Earth. That Hitler.
REFERENCE
Tags: aurora borealis, northern lights
The forests of the American west benefit from large federal and state park protections and even large private forested estates. From the tropical rain forests of the Pacific Northwest to the seas of Montana and Wyoming pines, the great western forests have resisted the destruction that comes with humankind better than their cousins to the east.
But multiple reports this week have bad news for our western woods. The US Geological Survey explains in the latest Science that the loss of old-growth forests has doubled in recent years. Warming has promoted the spread of insects like the pine beetle and human development has drained the water supply. Alarming news:
The trend is happening at every elevation, in trees of different sizes and of various species, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey and universities reported in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
“Our long-term monitoring shows that tree mortality has been climbing, while the establishment of replacement trees has not,” USGS scientist Phil van Mantgem, a co-leader of the research team, said in a statement.
Tree mortality doubled in just 17 years in the Pacific Northwest and 25 years in California. Mortality rates in states farther inland took 29 years to double.
The authors ruled out several factors — including air pollution, crowding and fire suppression impacts — as being significant drivers since the trend has been consistent in all areas and among all age groups studied.
Moreover, “because mortality increased in small trees, the overall increase in mortality rates cannot be attributed solely to aging of large trees,” the researchers wrote in Science.
The grim tale of deforestation has been told over and over (usually the story of the Brazilian rainforests): animal habitats are destroyed, food chains are irreparably broken, erosion and landscape degradation accelerate, etc. Not to mention the loss of the aesthetic, the majesty and mysticism of “the woods”.
What’s just as worrisome is that our dying forests become dry wood to fuel fires. The Associated Press reports that just Colorado and Wyoming have 3 million acres of dead forest.
Because America’s forests are in graver danger than ever, we have immediate need of an aggressive, coast-to-coast reforestation strategy.
Tags: climate crisis, deforestation, pine beetle
Around the world, it is very common for the portraits of heads of state to be mounted in places of official business. This is more prevalent, obviously, in monarchies and countries where dictators enjoy a cult of personality. In Great Britain, the Queen’s portrait hangs in households even. When I was in Morocco, I noticed the same portraits of the king AND his son over and over - probably a portrait released by the state. We can have no doubt that at some point in history - maybe even now - a dictator of some banana republic has a law obligating citizens to live under his portrait or suffer grim consequences.
Growing up in a predominantly Catholic part of America, I remember there was always John Kennedy and the Pope… and sometimes Jesus and Mary. John Kennedy’s portrait was everywhere but I saw it mostly in homes and at school.
To this day, federal offices hang the portraits of the President and maybe even the department’s Secretary. I presently work in the same building as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation; peeking out the elevator, I can see the portraits of Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg displayed prominently over the reception.
I respect naysayers to this tradition who warn against cult of personality and the trappings of unquestioned leadership. But this page believes that it should be more acceptable for young folks to display portraits of leaders who they feel have earned that honor. To that end, as I have a tremendous amount of trust and respect for President Obama, his portrait now hangs in our living room.
Obama’s transition team released his official Presidential photograph last week. The resolution was good enough to print a poster from it. I put the file on a disk, brought it to the photomat and in an hour had a 8×12 photo-quality portrait of President Obama. I took the portrait down to the frame shop and it matted and set in a mahogany frame et voila… an Inauguration Day present for Caitlin!
For you anachronists who are inclined to do the same, you can find Obama’s portrait here. You might want to just download it now in case; the transition team has slowly begun taking their website down.
PS - And that’s where we’ll wrap this page’s coverage of America’s peaceful transfer of power.
Today is a very special Martin Luther King Day that culminates with the inauguration of the first black President. (Doesn’t it feel like Christmas Eve?) We remember him now as much as ever…
I have a lot of respect for those - first among them, Barack Obama - who are trying to transform this day into a National Day of Service. It’s an appropriate way to recognize King every year: trying to give as much to your community as you can.
Tags: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, National Day of Service
In reading an article by greendem at daily kos today, I learned that the original lyrics of “This Land is Your Land” as written by Woody Guthrie are much different from the song that we all learned in school.
Those missing rebellious lyrics go something like this:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
Today, at the Inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Pete Seeger restored those lyrics to the song with everyone on the mall singing along (and with a little help from Bruce Springsteen).
Big hat tip to greendem for the find.
Barack Obama is riding a surge of approval right now and he took advantage of it with some tried and true political theater today: the whistle stop tour. Since railroad tracks began crossing our great land, politicians have taken advantage of trains. Most commonly, they’ve been used by state and national candidates who want to cross swaths of a region by stopping in several towns in a day.
Whistle stop tours are particularly popular in the north. Most every President in the modern era has campaigned from the back of a train including Obama who did a couple whistle stop tours this year in Pennsylvania. Today, Barack Obama is the first President-elect to arrive in Washington, DC, for his inauguration by rail since Harry Truman. But I’m sure it was Abraham Lincoln, who took a 12-day train ride to Washington, who influenced Obama in this case.
Whistle stop tours make for great show and can generate a lot of press - especially if you have a captive audience like Obama. Cable news this afternoon was one long story about Obama’s trip… and therefore about him. In fact, any sample of today’s cable news chatter doesn’t sound far different from that Roosevelt news reel I shared with you the other day.
CNN had an eight-hour segment of programming today dubbed “Obama Express”. And the Obama team gave them a full day of reporting. The Presidential Inaugural Committee had major events planned at a few stops along the way including Wilmington, Delaware, where they picked up Joe Biden, and Baltimore.
I don’t think today’s news, however, portends anything special for the future of rail in this country. That subject has come up on cable quite a bit today largely in part because of Biden’s Amtrak commute. Both Obama and Biden are committed to the success of rail as a clean, efficient form of transportation. Transportation legislation is something that this page will watch very closely over the next four years.
Roosevelt had a great love of trains (not as much as ships) and traveled very frequently by rail.
As did Teddy Roosevelt.
Tags: Barack Obama, Inaugurations, Joe Biden, whistle stop tour
The painter Andrew Wyeth died this week. Wyeth was recognized for his realist style depicting everyday American life. He was regarded as the “painter of the people” particularly as post-war American painting went in the direction of abstraction.
I first learned about Andrew Wyeth when, on a trip to New York during college, I saw Christina’s World at MOMA…
His was deeply connected to the American painting tradition. Still lifes, window paintings, farm scenes, windowside portraits, etc. His expression on the subject matter is the subtle sense that this scene is not what it is, that there is danger. It is American Gothic. And it’s definitely anachronist.
REFERENCES
Tags: Andrew Wyeth
