Circumference

I have watched this video so many times in the past week it hurts:

From the author:

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite (55sec) and the stars of our galaxy.

After discovering a distant planet made entirely of diamonds, astronomer Matthew Bailes used some of the media spotlight surrounding this major discovery to express his frustration with the way climate science right back here on earth is being treated:

Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.

How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections. Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science. Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings. People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively proven. There would be doubt cast on the interpretation of our data and conjecture about whether we were “buddies” with the journal referees….But luckily we’re not climate scientists.

Amen. Is it strange that the media and public so readily embrace wild, distant, and mostly unimportant findings like the existence of a diamond planet but often attack, question, or ignore the findings of climate science? Both are derived using the scientific methods and the publishing review process that guides so much of science today, and though imperfect these mechanisms are always pushing for better explanations and responding to proofs against initial findings. It is also alarming to me how readily I have come to accept that climate science is somehow inherently contentious. It’s not, no more than any other science, and the constant furor that surrounds it is due to push back from different interest groups, nothing particularly faulty in climate science.

This video is a fun summary of the perpetual (unsolvable?) debate surrounding the simple question of “how many continents are there?” 5, 6, 7, 9, or 13? I remember first encountering this dilemma in some far off hostel’s travel lounge, where grizzled and less than grizzled backpackers were swapping travel tales when one piped up to say that he had been to all 5 continents. I had always thought that geography, at least, was known and agreed upon, though language, religion, sport, and art divided us. Not so, not so.

My answer to the question? Though brought up believing in 7, I’d vote now for 6 (N. America, S. America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica). Canals amplify what was already true: two big distinct landmasses held on by the most slender of slivers of land. I can see why Asia used to be thought separate, since travel between it and Europe (the rest of its continent) was faster and easier by sea, but that is no longer reason to ignore that they are one great landmass.

IBM 2011 Commuter Pain Index

It’s always a bit of a thrill to see the place you living celebrated (or singled out) for some national or global distinction. So imagine my pleasure on seeing Montreal rated the best (i.e. “least painful”) commute from the latest result of the IBM Commuter Pain Index that surveyed 20 major global cities. The surveyors  asked over 8000 commuters about their habits and problems in their city to come up with these results, focusing on economic and emotional costs in 10 issues:

1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

So… go Montreal! I completely agree with these results. I’ve been to about half of those cities, and would definitely put Beijing at almost 5 times more painful to get around than Montreal. In the three years most things have only improved: bike lanes have exploded, the new bike sharing Bixi service has taken off, and metro/bus passes have stayed cheap, continuing to give excellent coverage to people year round. Montreal’s score is even more impressive considering that of all the cities surveyed it gets by far the most snow and ice each year. Though local bridges and elevated highways have a reputation for collapsing, and people love to complain, it’s good to be reminded that things could be much, much worse.

There are so many environmental problems out there that a kind of depression can seep in. And I am not the only one: a lot of my colleagues and friends who care at all about the environment can have views that border on the apocalyptic. Some seem to perceive the world as being in an inexorable decline, and anticipate that potential environmental apocalypse with resignation as an inevitable outcome of anthropogenic excess.

But however down I may get about environmental issues, I always rebound from that kind of quasi-religious hopelessness, even though I do agree with my peers on just about every point: there are too many people using too many resources, energy is environmentally expensive and wasteful, we produce too much garbage, use land and water inefficiently, and so on. We also agree that humans will never voluntarily give up comforts and pleasures for future, uncertain benefits. And yet I don’t give up all hope – I don’t succumb to any green depression. I actually find comfort in the fact that we waste so much and are so inefficient. Especially in the west, I think that tremendous energy and resource savings could be had by pursuing countless small efficiency-improving measures before ever getting to serious costs. Some are getting a lot of press lately, like painting roofs white and improving insulation. But I kind of think the list is infinite. Here are two examples I found today:

First, via BoingBoing, a brilliant 4 minute TED talk lays out the savings of replacing stop signs with roundabouts and three-way stops with a new “stop/yield” sign:

And then proof from the design gurus at Fast Company that small cultural changes could lead to huge savings in how we use environmental resources:

Under the banner of a campaign called “Super Cool Biz,” [the government is] suggesting that people arrive at work earlier, before the sun beats down. It’s telling them to eat icy desserts. But most notably, as if this were its own sort of after-shock, it’s asking them to wear sandals and shorts and Hawaiian shirts–to work! Attire in Japan is seen as a sign of respect to your superior, but that’s not the government’s concern. To avoid nation-wide blackouts, it must reduce energy use by 15% this summer.

That trying-too-hard title aside, these are smart, free, straightforward ways to deal with less electricity after the tsunami knocked out that nuclear plant. This idea does of course clash against a highly developed culture of etiquette and manners, but it gets at the heart of the issue, which is that cultural behaviour is often at the root of many problems of inefficiency. And as entrenched as it may seem, culture has a long history of bending to accommodate change (smoking is a great example). Countries in the west like Japan use so much of everything already that we have incredible gains to make without making major sacrifices, but instead trimming off the excesses on the wide margins. While I think some painful costs are going to have to be paid at some point, the fact that so much progress can be found in incremental, relatively painless initiatives like these, always leads me back  to the hope that the green apocalypse is not inevitable.

1) Jonah Lehrer points to a fascinating study (within a piece about whether or not money makes us happy) that demonstrates the commuting paradox: that peoples’ subjective sense of well-being vastly decreases with the longer their commute is. You may be able to afford a big house if its far enough from the dense area your job is in, but that will not make up for the pain of the long commute. Chalk this up with things we already knew, but I like it when my hunches are backed up by rigorous science.

2) Canadian environmentalists are opening a new front in their biggest war by lobbying the US government to not allow TransCanada Corp to build a new pipeline from the tar sands to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Probably necessary for continued profitable production in Alberta, this 2,673-km Keystone XL pipe is uniting activists on both sides of the border who are protesting in Washington DC and amassing support.

3) Derek Watkins made a cool map (except for being way too dark) that shows the patterns of generic names for streams (ex: brook, creek, rio, kill, fork) all across the contiguous United States. The different names were mostly derived from the first inhabitants to move into that area, and the map tells the story of how different groups expanded and interacted.

From the northern Inuit town of Iqaluit to New York, by Globaia

Today I learned that geological ages are officially titled by the International Union of Geological Sciences. When they have their next meeting in 2012, up for debate is whether to give new label to the era we are in: out with the Holocene, enter the Anthropocene:

the Earth’s system does not seem to behave the same way as, say, at the time of Hesiod, Dante or Cervantes. The Earth of the 21st century is warming, overcrowded, partly deforested, and more toxic and interconnected than ever. The comforting envelope of the Holocene, which has fostered the birth of civilizations, is now punctured.

Calling this era the Anthropocene would recognize humans’ outsized influence on all environmental systems, and that fact that our activity is leaving a layer that will be be visible far out into geologic time.

In recognition of this is a very interesting mapping project by Globaia that attempts impressionistic (i.e., no scales, legends, labels) cartography. The results are spectacular. They map roads, pipes, railways, shipping lines, underwater cables, cities, roads, flight patterns, and much much more. The maps and videos are beautiful despite the sober message, and worth a look.

1) A classy short film captures the mood on the silent, soggy streets of New York City just after (?) the storm.

2) Elizabeth Kolbert asks the right question: not is Irene a sign of global warming, but instead “are more events like Irene what you would expect in a warming world?” She says yes, that such events are happening more frequently and are precisely in line with scientific predictions. Of course we cannot know if any one weather event is due to global warming – there are too many factors to ever say. But we can take stock of recent years and as Kolbert says “acknowledge the truth, which is that we are making the world a more dangerous place and, what’s more, that we know it.”

3) And on the other side of wisdom, presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann may or may not have been joking when she said at a campaign stop that Irene and the earthquake were messages from god.

Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska (Geoeye via Wired)

Who doesn’t love national parks? These satellite photos over at Wired show how 20 of the United States’ most famous ones look from above. They are all colour and geometry, and really stunning. They remind me of the BBC’s 3-part Yellowstone documentary that I just saw recently (very much worth a watch if you enjoyed Human Planet or Planet Earth).

National parks are great – I spend most vacations in one or another – but they always leave me with a strange feeling. As rugged, wild, and beautiful as they can be, just the fact that we have to designate land as off-limits reminds me that if they weren’t, they’d be overrun. I mean, national parks were invented about a hundred years ago (some attribute them to Teddy Roosevelt). Not long ago there were endless landscapes full of animal, vegetable, and mineral, landscapes that were not yet monetized or even marked as containing “natural resources.” Why would you need to make land off limits when there was so much of it? Someone thankfully realized that we had to do something to protect them, but its only because we are using up everything else so quickly.

This is obvious now, but I think it is important to remember that it wasn’t always so. Visiting Yellowstone or Algonquin is amazing, but their very existence points to much bigger problems. When I visit these big parks I keep thinking that it is becoming something like a zoo: patches of ecosystems, surrounded by a ploughed-over world, with humans pushing and prodding from all sides. We’ll never lose them, thankfully, but as they become increasingly boxed in, they’ll become more and more idealized relics of a lost world.

Image courtesy of the U. S. Army

The US and its allies have waged a decade-long war in Afghanistan in large part to replace the medieval Taliban’s rule with new national and local governments espousing western values. But what values are they trying to deliver exactly? Democracy for sure, and market capitalism, and women’s rights, and children’s rights, but not basic waste management:

What is it like living so close to an American base?…[the shopkeepers] tell me about a strange odor they say comes from the base. It smells of plastic.

The odor, the Afghans said, comes from a burn pit, a huge open dump site used on U.S. bases to consume mountains of trash, unleashing harmful chemicals. Burning plastic, for instance, releases carcinogenic substances that may increase the risk of heart disease and respiratory ailments, cause rashes and damage the nervous system. Computers, television sets and mobile phones release cadmium, lead, and mercury, which can also damage the nervous system and the kidneys.

The public health and environmental impacts of disposing of trash in burn pits are diverse but pretty serious, and that’s why the EPA bans burning of just about anything (including grass, food, leaves, not to mention anything obviously hazardous) in the US. So why are there 114 burn pits on US bases in Afghanistan? These could have a slew of short term effects on air and water quality, as well as very serious long-term health impacts on soldiers and civilians living nearby.

Now of course this kind of problem isn’t straight forward: a lot changes in war-zones, and basic concerns aren’t the same as in other places. But this isn’t a story about a little littering on the western front. Despite ongoing causalities, the majority of the war in Afghanistan involves community development, capacity building, police training, patrolling, and all the other hallmarks of country-constructing. about 100,000 US soldiers, countless contractors, and other foreigners burning 10lbs of garbage per day, per person. After ten years of war and development, of trying to rebuild a devastated country’s institutions and infrastructure, it is frustrating to see basic environmental and health concerns being ignored. It seems like these could be adding up to be additional legacies of this endless war.

Everyone knows that Canada is water rich, but with great abundance comes great irresponsibility. Water’s Next is one group seeking to push against that freshwater tide of willful waste and bad policy. It is a big contest held by Water Canada where anyone can nominate people, businesses, projects, and innovations that are changing the way Canadians use water (full disclosure: I am on the selection committee). Head over to nominate anyone or thing that demonstrates whole new ways of using water resources: it could be a smart policy, innovative research, a community that’s harnessing new ideas, or an individual pushing the conversation forward.

My only question: why not have communities as a category instead of innovation? Every category has people providing innovations I think, and town and cities are where much of the problem is, and so where change needs to be made.

• BBC Business explains why environmental protection isn’t just for hippies anymore, but really just makes good business sense. Not sure what they would suggest if environmental problems were solved and good business sense returned to its old predilection for squander and scorched earth.
• “Being Dead in Pittsburgh” is a short photo-essay on what one man turned up by comparing old maps with new in his quest for forgotten corners in his hometown.
• Bill McKibben argues the obvious yet overlooked fact that American conservatives should be the greatest champions of intelligent environmental stewardship, but instead are generally climate skeptical.
• And the New York Time’s Christoph Niemann tells insightful stories using chalkboards and a very wry understanding of physics and physical relationships.

“Meander” is one of those verbs so often assigned to rivers that it loses almost all meaning (like “babble” to brook). But rivers do meander, and few so much as the mighty Mississippi. There’s a 1944 report now hosted online by US Army Corps of Engineers that contains, in a feat of elegant technical abstractionism, a history of Mississippi meanders. The multi-coloured loops are mesmerizing; the white course snaking in between is the latest iteration of the river’s movement. I am curious to know if this river-wandering has been entirely clamped down upon by the Corps, a tale well told by John McPhee in Control of Nature. Though if McPhee’s book holds any clues, whatever engineering has accomplished is certainly to be temporary and the river’s footprints are likely to continue their weave in the future.

You can download the entire 1944 report in super-high resolution, or see below for samples.

(more…)

Remember ChatRoulette? Seems like it was just yesterday that all anyone could talk about was the amazing, creepy idea that brought endless untold strangers into your home (and you into theirs) for the brief moment before someone hit next.

Well MapCrunch is CR’s friendlier geographic cousin. Using Google StreetView, MapCrunch offers up a random image from any one of dozens of countries everytime you reload the page. You can narrow the possibilities by country, continent, or even try to remove all country roads (for more big city action?), but limiting your options really takes the fun out of it. Click a few times and you’ll be whisked from a rainy day in Singapore to women with buckets on their heads walking along the road in South Africa to a penguin colony in Antarctica to a field of flowers in France. It’s a wild and surprising tour that only dulls when you get thrown into several cloudy, suburban landscapes one after another.

It’s a wonderful website for a few minutes of mindless clicking, not to mention smart use of a little bit more of the piles of data Google’s new toys leave in their wake.

MapCrunch randomly drops you everywhere Google StreetView goes

1) Fighting back against was he calls immappancy (lack of geographical knowledge), Greg Osuri threw together this map that offers a sense of Africa’s true scale. Not sure what projection he used, but click through for other details:

2) I’ve seen global maps distorted before to represent embedded data, but one digital cartographer/blogger seems to be doing it full time. He’s got some great examples up:

3) Last of all: I have never used an online dating site  but I love the wild findings OkCupid comes up with when they sort through the reams of data their users submit The OkTrends Blog is always chock full of charts and figures, but today they included an excellent heat map showing gay-curiosity across the US and Canada:

I love how Canada is entirely swathed in dark reds except the blue-green southern tip of Labrador that just shows on top of the map. In the US, it’s no surprise that Vermont, Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon are heavily covered in red – but New Mexico, wow, that’s a lot of heat. Otherwise, urban areas reliably light up as curious while the Bible belt represents, demonstrating shades of blue that get darker the closer you get to Mississippi.

Bloomberg has a report on the dismal state of American meat production. Amidst all the cattle futures, pork bellies, and “troublesome beef” jargon is news that prices are soaring on virtually all domestic meat products, and its largely because of high corn prices. If you aren’t already familiar with our corn-based economy then order Michael Pollan’s classic ASAP. If you are, then you know that the tremendous bulk of animal feed is corn-based, as are countless (literally countless) other food and cellulose products. Unfortunately, this reliance is undermined by the unwavering growth commitment propelling forward our agriculture industry. From the FT:

It’s not every day that an official forecast for one of the biggest corn harvests in history sends traders scrambling to secure supplies. But that is what is unfolding in the world’s commodities markets.

Late last week, the US government’s crop forecast propelled the price of corn in Chicago sharply higher for a second day in a row. Monday’s powerful rally marked the biggest daily rise in prices since 1973 and sparked fears of a repeat of the food crisis which occurred in 2007-08.

What’s the problem you ask? The continuing rise in demand for corn-fed meat,   ethanol, and other corn products is so high, and we are already so close to the limit of current production quantities, that to break even we need a record harvest every year. This year’s bountiful harvest  just isn’t enough:

Abdolreza Abbassian, senior grain economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, says that “anything other than a record crop” is now a problem because of the need to meet rising food, livestock and ethanol fuel demand.

“We need a record crop every year. If not, we are in trouble,” he says.

This is terrifying stuff. It feels like someone pulled back a corner of the rug we’re standing on to reveal a massive void underneath, a glimpse into the vacant foundations we’ve built our lives upon. Recent Monsanto attempts to improve production have failed, and its a fair question to ask if the  great strides made over recent decades in boosting production per acre aren’t reaching their practical limits. Ultimately, of course, there are always diminishing returns. We can only squeeze so much from an acre; there are only so many acres. And yet even this doesn’t begin to take into account external  factors, from blights to droughts to climate change, that every economy should have built in buffers to protect against. But we have no buffers in our agricultural system. We are playing on the margins and betting on a future where boundaries expand infinitely. This strategy might bite us in the ass in the short term; it certainly will in the long.

So Sun Chips, the healthy Frito-Lays alternative to potato chips, was recently given a biodegradable plastic bag that you could throw out with your compost. Brilliant, right?  I wish I had known about it before today though, yet this has only become news recently since the bag was bagged.

Why? Perhaps the costs of the new bag technology were not recovered? Or an industrial chemical leeching was into the chips or compost, you might think? No such luck: Sun Chips will again be packaged in resource-intensive, century-surviving garbage because consumers do not like how noisy the biodegradable bags were.

You can’t make this stuff up. Apparently the smart bags just rustle and crumple too much for snackers nationwide.

This is provoking an unsurprising rustle of outrage across the blogosphere, and Stephen Colbert chimed in with his own glorious sarcasm. Few though have written better on what it all means than Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic:

And as this dawns on you… You think with the soaring, half-serious tone that we reserve for visions of collapse: This is what happens to a country that no longer dreams, that has lost it’s sense of national purpose or greatness. You think: Maybe we do need a space program, so that we start looking up again.

You imagine arch historians glossing the year: And in 2010, the most powerful country in the world was consumed with the show Glee, whether or not a political candidate was or had been a witch, and the sound of a bag of not-quite potato chips.

It’s a sharp article, but he ultimately misses the larger point: this whole episode is most succinct example of why countries like the US and Canada are not making meaningful headway on environmental problems. Plastic wrapping and packaging are incredible sinks of resources and energy, beginning with the oil, metals, and power required in production, to the immortality they attain when their short shelf lives are finished and they are left to rot (or, truth be told, not-rot) in garbage mountains or the great oceanic garbage patches.

There are a lot of angles to this story, angles that should redden the face of any member of the species. A compostable sack is brilliant; our binning of the concept , shameful. That it is being dropped because the bags are too noisy.. well, there is not much more to say. Humanity may be smart enough to invent Sun Chips and even biodegradable bags, but I’d trade in a whole lot of that ingenuity for just a little more foresight.

Say what you will about the ol’ US of A, but they do provide reams of data. I took it for granted most of my life, but experiences in Europe, Canada, and abroad have shown just how much free, easily accessed data is available in the States – and what a difference it can make. Whether its USGS, NASA, or NOAA, if you want US data there is sure to be a heavily-acronymed  group out there with just what you need. But all the data in the world was of limited use before the internet.

The latest among a slew of cool online data tools is Abogo.  This site helps you find “how transportation impacts the affordability and sustainability of where you live” by mashing transit costs, census data, and CO2 emissions. The results are clear and high-grained, contextualizing costs and focusing on problems across the US and even providing estimates for transportation costs at any given address.

Check it out – especially if you live in the US. I’d hope to see them expand to Europe and Canada, but is this much data freely available anywhere else?

Check out the screen captures below – the gradient from cities to suburbs is shocking.

Los Angeles transport costs

New York City transport costs

Staten Island transport costs

Project NOAH (Networked Organisms and Habitats) is the latest tool to  snatch a ride on the flying coat tails of online networking, this time by simply allowing ecologists and amateur naturalists to post sightings of organisms. The growing data set is becoming a fast and free field guide for anyone interesting in local wildlife, but it also has serious potential use as a kind of scientific crowd-sourcing:

Professional ecologists quickly adopted the product. Before the launch, [founder Yasser] Ansari had reached out to urban ecologist Steve Sullivan, who runs Project Squirrel, a partnership between the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Project NOAH supplied precise locality data that otherwise would be impossible to obtain. Sullivan now gets about 70 squirrel observations a week from Project NOAH, with a 90 percent accuracy rate for identifications. The app also began hosting a mushroom-mapping project in New York City and the Lost Ladybug mission at Cornell University. “We don’t want to be this walled garden of data. We’re more like a holding tank that reroutes data to other places and to curious people who want to see what’s around them,” said Ansari…

One of the coolest part are these specific tasks, like the Lost Ladybug Project, that can explicitly harness the hobbies of thousands of people. And now with National Geographic investing in NOAH, all they need is that critical mass of users to get on board.

mmmmmm... alphabet soup!

Science, universities, corporations, NGOs, medicine, government: is there any area that doesn’t rely heavily on acronyms? My days are painfully hobbled with them, and I can think of few careers that are acronym-lite. ‘Twas not always so:

Acronyms have become so ubiquitous that we look for them even where they don’t exist. They are a major source of the folk etymologies that ping around the internet, etymologies for words that aren’t actually acronyms. “Fuck” isn’t short for “for unlawful carnal knowledge”, “posh” has nothing to do with “port out, starboard home”, and a “tip”, while it might be to insure promptness, certainly doesn’t derive its name from that phrase. All these words are much older than the profusion of acronyms in English.

Discussing what he calls the “the seductive quasi-certainty of the caps-lock key,” Robert Lane Greene lays out a very interesting history of acronyms (its America’s fault)  and their influence on how we think, act, and write.

Maps can be surprisingly sharp vehicles for satire, as Yanko Tsvetkov shows with his Mapping Stereotypes series. He has made up a dozen or so maps of Europe each labeled according to the stereotypes of a specific country or group. See examples below of the German outlook or click through for many more.  I love these and hope to see more – perhaps a version for the US? or even a global map? Can’t think of any place that isn’t richly inhabited with many grossly inaccurate stereotypes.

Europe according to Germans

Europe according to Germans (detail)

Monbiot declares that “the process is dead:”

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It’s not just that we have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and grand announcements we spiralled backwards.

Slate is insisting on (and sponsoring) more discussion about geoengineering:

The only thing more reckless than embracing geoengineering, however, would be to dismiss it. Yes, it’s a dangerous, crazy idea. In a rational world, we would never consider it. But we don’t live in a rational world. (If we did, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t be12 times greater than subsidies for renewable energy.) We live in a world that likes quick fixes and easy answers, and in that world, geoengineering has a lot of political and economic appeal. The real question is: Will we pursue it in an intelligent way that helps us manage the risks of global warming and deepens our understanding of how the climate system works, or will it simply turn into, as one blogger put it, “a ramifying suite of mega-engineering wet dreams” that leads to a whole new dimension of chaos?

And some scientists have devoted countless hours and dollars to model the likelihood of scientific explanations of how Moses parted the red sea:

“And the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided,” reads Exodus, chapter 14. Sounds unlikely? Probably, but apart from the “LORD” bit, physics doesn’t think it’s impossible.

Sigh. That’s all for this week.

Love them or hate them, ecological diversity isn’t something we often associate with cities. And yet,  that just what this New York Magazine article does. Turns out that in addition to those grubby species that do extremely well in crowded, over-constructed, garbage-rich environments (I am looking at you, pigeons), a number of other wild creatures are drawn to all that cities offer:

(The coyote) was as at home in the city as she might have been anywhere else. This can sound backward. You would expect coyotes to be perfectly happy living in the wilderness, if not in Rye Brook then at least a few hours north on the Taconic, far beyond Westchester County. But people who study coyotes are finding that the creatures are drawn to cities, with their large woodland areas, small rodents, and lack of large predators.

The article draws interesting parallels between the dense human diversity of modern NYC with its pre-urban past:

Like most large cities, New York was built where river meets ocean. But the network of waterways and islands that make up our harbor—the Hudson, Bronx, Passaic, Hackensack, and Raritan rivers; the creeks, kills, narrows, and tidal straits; the bays, inlets, basins, and coves—is one of the most intricate and ecologically complex estuaries in the world. This variety of place attracted a variety of species, all living in proximity, and as a result, New York was vibrant, dense, and diverse before it even was founded. We were a natural capital first.

Ultimately, however, the authors go perhaps too far:

An ecological feedback loop is a natural extension of the idea that nature exists in the city, but it requires a change of thinking that is equally profound: There is no difference between urban nature and rural nature. It is all one ecology, adjusting and cross-pollinating in the face of change. This can be disturbing, since local stresses threaten to disrupt wildlife hundreds of miles away. But it is, in fact, a hopeful idea. If New York City’s ecology has taught us anything, it is that nature likes intrusions—counts on them, even. Change makes for vibrancy. We are not just a city of bedbugs and rats; we are a wellspring for regional vitality.

I’ll grant that it is all one ecology, and that differentiating between human and the animals, what is built and what is natural, isn’t helpful or even true, but whatever “vibrancy” nature gains via “intrusions” and “change” related to the urban is a pale shadow of what existed before concrete smothered forests and streams became streets.

Still, these ideas are reminiscent of other unintentional examples of when places written off as lifeless or ecologically useless turn out to be exotic habitats (such as military firing ranges and the DMZ supporting species that had otherwise gone locally extinct).

Also, my vote for best line in a piece of journalism this week: “(The New York Police and Parks commissioners) are quietly ironing out interdepartmental coyote protocols.”

In a talk about climate change policy today Gwyn Prins, a professor from LSE, mentioned in passing a  journalistic gem from the failed Copenhagen Conference last spring that I had completely missed. It’s a recording from the inner sanctum of the climate conference, a cramped office space where Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, and other representatives from the richest countries tried to hash out the basics of the agreement that never was. It’s titled “How China and India Sabotaged the UN Climate Summit,” but really it’s so much more: it is a glimpse into a political world we read about everyday but can rarely get past the gloss and into the nitty-gritty. Hearing how these leaders speak to each other, as well as how national stereotypes emerge, is fascinating. It’s also amazing just to hear how much English is used – we all know it as the world’s language, but to actually hear most of these very diverse people use it is still surprising. But more than anything its worth listening to for the negotiations themselves, listening in like a fly on the wall to the play by play as hope died for any kind of meaningful policy to emerge out of Copenhagen.



It may be small comfort to anyone (and really, who hasn’t?) who has ever gotten lost in an endless suburban development full of identical houses and looping streets, but some of these communities create gorgeous geometries when seen  from above. Christoph Gielen, a German photographer, has flown above dozens of these and other sprawling complexes in the American southwest taking photos that capture another perspective of their rigidly planned urbanism:

The Sun Belt suburbs depicted in these photographs are “absolutely self-contained,” Gielen suggests; many of them, he adds, are “not changing anymore.” They are static, crystalline and inorganic. Indeed, some of these streets frame retirement communities: places to move to once you’ve already been what you’ve set out to be. This isn’t sprawl, properly speaking. They are locations in their own right, spatial endpoints of certain journeys. (NYTimes)

Check out the entire article here and the companion slideshow.