Posts tagged “Environment”
Figures Lie and Liars Figure – On Discussing Climate Change with Relatives
Many of my relatives don’t believe that climate change is occurring. As a scientist interested in what climate change means for the ecosystems humans rely on, this is a mite frustrating. One of my aunts is actually interested in learning more. In our last discussion, I realized that a lot of things that I think […]
Prairie Fen
Also at MacCready Reserve is a prairie fen restoration project. Before I visited the reserve, I had never heard of a prairie fen. That’s pretty sad, because prairie fens are awesome. Lots of people get excited about them because of their insect diversity, but I was more excited about the plants! First of all, what […]
The crisis: put down the pruning shears
Part of applying to graduate school is figuring out who I want to work with and what questions I want to try to answer. To do this, I’m reading a lot of papers. I’d hate for all this paper reading to keep me from blogging, so I’ve decided to share some of the more interesting […]
The last tree
We ask what the Easter Islanders thought as they cut the last tree down, implying that they were somehow stupider than us, that we would certainly recognize the value of a resource and preserve it before it got to that point. But species are going extinct every day and even many common species are in […]
What I’ve Noticed
Frank Fenner thinks we’ll go the way of the Easter Islanders in the next 100 years. I disagree that humans will go extinct, but I agree that we’ve waited far too long to address energy and population issues to avoid dramatic and involuntary reduction in our population. And it’s already happening: resource competition, exacerbated by […]
What I’ve Noticed
Hurricanes are going to make the oil spill that much harder to deal with. This Is your Copilot Speaking makes me feel better and worse about flying. Also, it’s a problem when airlines treat their pilots nearly as badly as their passengers. Another animal disappears in the 6th great extinction, this time it’s the Alaotra […]
What I’ve Noticed
Mining companies like to claim that they’re bringing economic benefits, but cleanup and health costs far outweigh positive contributions to the economy. After thousands of years, we’ve finally discovered what the argonaut octopus uses its shell for – it’s essentially a ballast tank. HUGE step: we’ve synthesized life. Autism doesn’t have anything to do with […]