The Natural Patriot

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Over the last few weeks, while piddling around the project site (i.e., yard), pulling weeds, attempting to ferret out the invaders from the natives, puzzling over bugs, and pondering where I might site a small pond (and how to sell the idea to my spouse), I’ve had occasion to dust off my venerable Golden Nature Guides, beloved little books of childhood.

For me, there are few physical objects that can conjure the idyllic, big wide world of childhood gone by than these wonderful little gems of natural history. They were frequent companions for me as a youngster and I still take them out with a certain reverence to look through the pages, one for each species, each a marvel of textual and pictorial concision, with a short description of the creature’s habits and natural history, a map of its distribution, and a simple but beautiful painting of it in its characteristic habitat. These books somehow hit on the perfect formula for conveying the beauty and fascination of living things to kids.

And we owe it all to a guy named Herbert S. Zim.

Not exactly a household name. But if you still have a dog-eared copy of one of the dozens of Golden Nature Guides that were eventually published over the decades starting in 1949, you will notice that virtually all of them were written, co-written, or edited by Herbert S. Zim. His curriculum vitae, in brief, from Wikipedia:

“Zim was born 1909 in New York City, but spent his childhood years in southern California. At the age of fourteen he returned to the east, and took his degrees (B.S., M.S., Ph. D.) at Columbia University. Zim wrote or edited more than one hundred scientific books, and in a thirty-year career teaching in the public schools, introduced laboratory instruction into elementary school science. He is best known as the founder, in 1945 (and for twenty-five years, editor in chief) of the Golden Guides, pocket-size introductions for children to such subjects as fossils, zoology, microscopy, rocks and minerals, codes and secret writings, trees, wildflowers, dinosaurs, navigation and more. He was the sole or co-author for many of the books, which were valued for their clarity, accuracy and attractive presentation—helped by the illustrations of his friend, Raymond Perlman.”

Consider the impact that this single unsung man (so unsung, in fact, that the pixelated snapshot above is the only one I could find of him online!) has had on the environmental awareness of an entire generation — perhaps even two or three generations — of American citizens. Who can say how many kids in the 50s and 60s and 70s decided, while browsing through one of these little books, to spend the afternoon outside hunting for caterpillars instead of yielding to the seductive stupor of the cathode ray tube? Who can say how many of today’s alternative energy entrepeneurs and scientists and educators and conservationists caught fire as a result of a spark generated by one of these books? I can’t, but I know one: me.

By way of illustration, three personal anecdotes:

When I was a kid, my family drove cross-country (in a van without air-conditioning that was prone to overheating in the desert and climbed the Rockies at about 18 mph, etc.), from Arlington, Virginia to LA, every three years, where we spent the bulk of three weeks visiting my aunt and her family. When I tell people this they think my parents were crazy. But it was a the adventure of a lifetime and an incomparable learning experience for kids. We saw a lot of the country, did a lot of camping, and my parents occasionally allowed us to visit the cheesy fake Indian trinket shops that were common along the dustier stretches of Route 66 in the olden days. One day when I was probably about seven (this would have been the late 1960s), we were visiting Walnut Canyon, which is somewhere in the southwest, and I convinced my parents to buy me the Golden Nature Guide to Rocks and Minerals. I felt so grown up to have a real book instead of a kid’s book. It was an early watershed moment in my life as a bookworm and naturalist.

Nevertheless, I was not destined to be a geologist. For one thing, rocks are dead. Or so they seemed to me. I found animals much more interesting. Second anecdote: Around the same time, in second grade, I became obsessed with turtles. I take this herpetophilia to be a common, though poorly understood, genetic trait located somewhere on the Y chromosome, since it is so commonly expressed among young boys. This is despite the fact that my white-bread suburban neighborhood turned out, to my dismay, to be nearly devoid of reptiles. I saw maybe two or three box turtles, and no snakes at all, in the wild while I was growing up despite frequent expeditions mounted for that purpose to the local park where I spent much of my youth. But I can remember sitting rapt with the pocket-sized Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, studying the pictures, memorizing what they ate, looking at the ingenious maps that showed purple where the summer (pink) and winter (blue) ranges overlapped. This genetic propensity has in fact been transferred to my son, who latched on to my antique Reptile guide in an uncannily similar way and spent a lot of time with it (it is now bound with duct tape).

Anecdote three: One of the standard operating procedures of the cross-country trips was that, periodically, we would take a rest stop and every kid (of which there were ultimately six, though we never made the trip as a complete group) got to choose a magazine or coloring book or something to keep them quiet for 6 or 8 minutes after we hit the road again. On this trip, I think I was about ten and, instead of getting the standard Mad magazine or puzzles or comic book, I chose the Golden Nature Guide to Birds. Paging though that book as we droned along the highway, through southern Canada if I remember correctly, was the first time I actually noticed that birds (and other animals) had distinguishing marks that could be used to identify them. Perhaps the first tentative roots of my later interest in taxonomy.

It appears that I’m not the only one with such fond memories. Evidently the original versions of the Guides have recently become “collectible“. Many have since been reprinted, albeit without the engaging covers of old, and are available from St. Martin’s Press.

Now then: I was appalled to read, as I was surfing the web in search of intel on Dr. Zim, that the famous PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame had disparaged the gentleman’s name — simply because as a lad PZ lost a library copy of Zim’s Golden Guide to Mammals and got into deep doo-doo with the librarian. Even today, these decades later, the Golden Guides have traumatic associations for him.

Note to PZ: Dude, Herb didn’t lose your book — you did! Suck it up.

So I am here to clear the man’s name. Let us lift a glass to the late great Herbert S. Zim, pioneer of biophilia and Natural Patriot: we salute you.

OK, not exactly live – It’s a day after the fact.  But who would have paid attention if this read: Yesterday from EarthFest!

Yesterday I participated in EarthFest 2008, sponsored jointly by NASA Langley and Christopher Newport University here in Tidewater, Virginia.  I was part of the “Ask a scientist” panel, answering questions from the brave-hearted studio audience of about 20 people who had forsaken the fabulous spring weather to sit in a darkened lecture hall and ask questions such as these of scientists.

And a shout-out to the VIMS Green Team and the Williamsburg Climate Action Network, among the many other organizations represented there.  I’m told that parts of our panel discussion will evntually be posted in YouTube - stay tuned.

Following is the text of the two-minute presentation with which I began my part:

 

“What makes Earth different than any other body in the known universe is the presence of life. From space, life appears only as an impossibly thin green film on the rocky surface of the planet.  Yet life has changed everything about this planet profoundly—creating the oxygenated atmosphere that allows us to live here, regulating its temperature within narrow bounds that make it comfortable for us, and so on.     

Locally, for you or I standing here on the ground, life is not a thin green film. It’s a fantastic variety of plants and animals and microbes that have become linked in complex networks of interactions that we call an ecosystem.   

We usually take the ecosystems around us for granted because we are so much a part of them that we don’t even think about it.  But we need to. 

Ecosystems are like nature’s factories. Living organisms provide the natural infrastructure that creates natural products and services essential to our comfort and even our survival—food, clean water and air, favorable habitat in which we can live, and of course the stable climate that we hear so much about these days.

We’re now at a critical turning point in earth’s history.  For the first time in the 3.8 billion years of life’s tenure on this planet, a single species literally controls the fate of all the others, and of the biosphere itself.  That species is of course us.  It’s a mind-boggling responsibility. 

 

 

And — sad to say — we’re dropping the ball. When we dump our wastes into the air and water, when we destroy natural habitat, and harvest animals faster than they can reproduce, we are throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of Nature’s factory and its parts get broken.When that happens the machine stops working, and the products and services disappear. 

But that doesn’t have to happen.  Humans are incredibly ingenious.  We’ve sent people to the moon.  We’ve invented the internet, and cars that run on french fry oil.  We need to harness that ingenuity to make the world safe again for our fellow creatures.  Because, in the end, we literally cannot live without them.”
 

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

 

See also here to get involved. The US House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee is currently considering the No Child Left Behind Act (summary of the Act here, complete text here), which would promote environmental literacy and education integrated into an environmental context (as shown in the video).  Write your Congressperson and help raise the next generation of Natural Patriots!

[Editor’s note: This just in — and in time for Earth Day (barely). I reprint below an extract from the new, second edition of Richard Louv’s classic and inspirational book, Last Child in the Woods.  The new edition is expanded and contains more practical suggestions (here are a few more), as described below. I intend to use them since this week is my son’s “TV turn-off week” (this also includes computers) suggested by his school. I sure had a lot of fun with dirt when I was a young’un.]

BEYOND NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER
It’s Time to Turn Consciousness into Action
By Richard Louv
Author of Last Child in The Woods

Got dirt? “In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!” reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a small pickup-load of dirt for his daughter and friends.

McGee is turning consciousness into action. So is Liz Baird, who keeps a “wonder bowl” available for her children.

When Baird was a little girl she would fill her pockets with natural wonders — acorns, rocks, mushrooms. “My Mom got tired of washing clothes and finding these treasures in the bottom of the washer or disintegrated through the dryer,” Liz recalls. “So she came up with “Liz’s Wonder Bowl”, and the idea was that I could empty my pockets into the bowl. I could still enjoy my treasures, and try to find out what things were, and not cause trouble with the laundry.”

McGee and Baird are among the thousands of parents who have joined — and are leading — an international children and nature movement. Sometimes known as Leave No Child Inside, the effort is bringing together people from all walks of life, who are creating grassroots regional campaigns, state and national legislation, and changes in their own families to help children become happier, healthier and smarter.

An emerging body of scientific knowledge links nature time to longer attention spans, better cognitive functioning, reduction of stress, and strengthened family bonds. What better way to enhance parent-child attachment than to walk in the woods together, disengaging from distracting electronics, advertising, and peer pressure?

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently describes the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being.

“In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he says. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act.”

If you’re a parent who missed out on nature as a child, now’s your chance. Indeed, all the gifts of nature that come to children also come to the good adult who introduces a child to nature.

Young people are acting, too, by becoming natural leaders in the movement. For example, a seven-year-old girl in Virginia rounded up her friends and enrolled them in her own Girls Gone Wild in Nature Club. Together they organize backyard campouts and bug hunts.

In Mississippi, teenager Josh Morrison founded Geeks in the Woods for his friends and fellow geeks everywhere. He defines “geek” as a “gaming environmentally educated kid,” and says he and his friends are “tired of being labeled” tech addicts ” can have their PlayStations and their outdoor time too: “We could be the generation that makes a U-turn back to . . . a balance between virtual reality and what sustains all life . . . nature.”

FIVE ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE TODAY

1. Go for a family walk when the moon is full. There’s a whole new set of animals, sights and sounds out there. Listen to animals calling. Owls and bats are looking for prey. Watch for things glowing, like worms and fungus on trees. And look up at the stars.

2. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify them with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new.

3. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the bend of a creek, the meadow in the woods. Let it become their intimate connection with the natural world.

4. Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding — tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until a crawdad tugs.

5. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing “find ten critters” — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, and other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”

Adapted from LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS by Richard Louv, copyright 2008. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

In our families and our communities, it’s time to take action. That’s why the new, expanded 2008 edition of “Last Child in the Woods” contains a “Field Guide” with 100 Actions that families and communities can take, along with discussion questions, a report on the movement, and other resources for parents, educators, conservationists, business people and community leaders.

For more information, see the Second Edition of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder“. To help build the movement, please join the Children & Nature Network.

Richard Louv, recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal (and an honorary Natural Patriot!), is the author of seven books. The chairman of the Children & Nature Network, he is also honorary co-chair of the National Forum on Children and Nature.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

The NYT has a great article about Doug Tallamy, a fellow ecologist at the University of Delaware who studies insects.  He and his wife are on a mission to reclaim their farm from aggressive invasive plant species and make it hospitable again for . . . maggots.  Why maggots?  because chickadees love to eat them. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the frightful scene that develops in your fetid garbage can, but rather the larvae of native flies that burrow into goldentod stems and other plants in the yard. And not just maggots but the menagerie of inconspicuous creeping and crawling and flitting creatures that metamorphose into butterflies and that nourish the birds. 

Theirs is a personal project of ecological engineering to support biodiversity.  It resonated with me immediately since, in the warming weekends of spring, I like to go out and whack back the vines and pull out the invasive privet thickets that sprout up everywhere, and clear patches around native saplings that are struggling under honeysuckle, and so on. 

“Restoration ecology” is not quite the appropriate term since some of the plants they foster are not native to their specific region.  On the other hand, they do support native insects, and therefore higher levels in the food web.  And in any case, as climate change and other environmental impacts progress, we need to shift our focus to “emerging ecosystems”.  While remaining (or becoming) aware of the sometimes forgotten baselines of how nature used to look and work, we also need to incorporate the reality that geographc ranges of species are shifting, some invaders are here to stay, and some natives are disappearing inexorably.  How do we maintain biodiversity and functional, resilient ecosystem in this new world order? 

The answers are not yet clear.  But efforts like those of the Tallamys are  small experiments toward finding the answers. Doug has written a book about this, “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens“, which I very much look forward to reading.  His basic thesis is deceptively simple: bugs are the key link in the food chain.  And bugs tend to be extremely finicky eaters.  Many are strict specialists on one or a few types of plants.  This means that yards and gardens filled with ornamental plants introduced from elsewhere often support only invasive pest species and not the native insects adapted to local conditions and enjoyed by local birds and other animals.  Encouraging native plants — and insects — is a concrete way to restiore ecological balance to the patches of land over which we personally have stewardship. 

And that is an exciting and hopeful message.  We often feel helpless when confronted with all the bad news about environmental degradation.  Here is something we can do personally to sustain biodiversity.  Nurture native plants and the creatures that depend on them.  One yard at a time. Power to the people (and other organisms)!

As the evidence for ongoing climate change has grown incontrovertible, there is increasing urgency to the question of what these changes hold in store for us.  Some wondered why Al Gore and the IPCC should be awarded the Nobel peace prize for promoting climate science?  Is there really a connection?  One source of insight involves querying the past: what consequences have past climate changes had for human society? 

In a relatively new study (published in December 2007 — I’m a little behind the curve here), David Zhang and colleagues exploit new high-resolution paleo-temperature records to address this question. The paper assembles evidence from five to ten centuries of human history to show that climate variation drives changing food production, which among animals typically results in what we ecologists call “intraspecific competition”, that is, competition among members of the same species.  Among humans we call it war.

The Figure at left shows the northern hemisphere temperature variation (as anomalies from the long-term average, panel A), war frequency, and rate of change in human population from 1400 to approximately the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1900. The number of wars is shown for the northern hemisphere as a whole (bright green line, and right axis scale), Asia (pink), Europe (turquoise), and arid areas of the northern hemisphere (orange). Panel C shows number of wars worldwide as recorded by three different authors using different thresholds for defining war — as can be seen, the trends are roughly similar. Finally, panel D shows the 20-year population growth rate in Europe (turquoise), Asia (pink), and the northern hemisphere as a whole (blue), as well as the 50-year fatality index in the region (bright green). Cold phases of history are shaded in gray. The bright green curves correspond to the right axis. 

What to make of all this?  First, we can see that climate varied during this time between cool and warmer periods that lasted decades to a few centuries. More importantly, these cool and warm periods coincided with times of unrest and relative tranquility, respectively.  Considering the whole global data base, there is a strongly significant negative correlation between war and temperature, with temperature anomaly explaining 28% of the variation in war frequency.  Even more telling, this “rhythm of history” was roughly synchronous across the northern hemisphere. Since, during these centuries, China and Europe were still largely isolated from one another, the synchrony of these trends over such an area, comprising much of the northern half of the planet, is difficult to explain by any factor other than the clear signal of large-scale global climate. 

The relationships are even more pronounced in the finer-resolution record for China during the longer period from AD 1000 - 1900 (see figure below): here each of the cool periods (gray shading) saw a major spike in the number of wars.

 

What is the mechanism behind these patterns? The answer appears to be pretty simple, and readily predictable from basic principles of population ecology.  Climate cooling reduces agricultural production, mainly by shortening the growing season and reducing available land for cultivation. Because the political boundaries of states in these agrarian societies were less porous than they are today, there was little opportunity for mass migration during the resultant shortages of food (and, since the problems were regional, nowhere to go in any case).  So the four horsemen – death, famine, war, and pestilence — mounted up and rode in.             

The figure at right summarizes in diagrammatic form the pathways by which long-term climate variation influenced frequency of war and human population dynamics in China and Europe during preindustrial times (i.e. up to 1900). Solid lines indicate direct effects, and dotted lines indirect feedbacks. Thicker arrows indicates stronger correlations.  There are several inrerrelated impacts of climate change mediated by the interactions of humans with our food supply and with each other, but food supply is central. 

So, OK, this data comes from back when people rode horses and peasants grubbed for potatos all winter long and so forth.  Why should we care in the 21st century?  We have refigerators and grocery stores!  Besides, the climate now is warming, rather than cooling, so it should all be good, right?  The most general message for us today is that climate variation has profound impacts on the global ecosystem’s ability to provide vital services, which in turn have profound implications for human society and well-being.  Although a warming climate has been good for us in the past, and will surely be good for some people in some places in coming decades too, we are facing a much bigger and faster warming than the earth has seen in a very long time.  And one of the consequences is change in rainfall, which is an even more powerful regulator of agricultural productivity than temperature.  And when food runs low, conflict is inevitable, as we are seeing in Darfur.  Too little (crop)land to go around was evidently a key match to the flame in Rwanda during the 1990s also.

Scholars have long sought, with only partial success, to explain the conflicts that repeatedly plague civilization. The results of this paper indicate that human ecology is –- or was — forced to a surprising degree by the same basic environmental drivers and by similar, if more destructive, mechanisms of competition that regulate populations of other animals.

There is hopeful news too. We have learned a thing or two in the last millennium.  As the authors note:

“In the long run and at a global scale, technological and social development raised the population growth rate . . . reduced climate dependence of growth rate of population (after A.D. 1400), postponed the time of population decrease, and accelerated subsequent population recovery . . . The gradual increase in time delays for [northern hemisphere] population declines as we moved into the modern era may reflect that at least some social mechanismsmay becoming more effective over time at the macroscale.”

At the same time:

“these adaptive choices that are positive to humanity have not let the human race escape from social calamities such as population collapse caused by severe cooling at both the global and continental scales as shown in the history of the past millennium. For armed conflict, the positive social mechanisms could neither reduce the number of wars nor indefinitely postpone the times of war outbreak in any cooling periods . . . Although we have more robust social institutions at both international and national levels, and much more advanced social and technological developments at present, a much larger population size, higher standard of living, and more strictly controlled political boundaries will limit some adaptive choices to climate change. We hope that positive social mechanisms that are conducive to human adaptability will play an ever more effective role in meeting the challenges of the future.”

[Original source (open access): Zhang, D.D., P. Brecke, H.F. Lee, Y.-Q. He, and J. Zhang. 2007. Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104:19214-19219.]

[The painting shows the English victory over the French at the battle of Agincourt in 1415.] 

Top ten list - Excellent!

I am honored to have received the Excellent blog award, bestowed after a rigorous screening and review process, and accompanied by a handsome prize consisting of the right to display proudly a small jpeg image on my website (see below left, and in the sidebar).

The honor was bestowed by the venerable Coturnix (aka Bora Zivkovic) at “A blog around the clock“.  For those less familiar with the minutiae of blog history, Bora is a pioneer of science blogging.  His multifarious accomplishments include (1) serving as the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), the rapidly growing open-access biology journal that encourages online commentary; (2) conceiving the idea for, and editing, the inaugural two issues of “The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs“, which have been made available to Luddites in old-fashioned paper format, available here; (3) co-organizing the (first?) North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, which drew a large number of premier science bloggers , journalists, scientists, and educators from around North America, and which I will definitely want to attend next time around.    

An honor such as this comes with responsibility of course.  And in the characteristic pyramid-scheme modus operandi of the blogosphere, mine is to finger ten more blogs that I deem “excellent!”  I am of course delighted to do so.  Thus, in no particular order:

Growth is madness. It’s the economy, stupid.  And the people (yes, us) that keep cranking it upward.

Trinifar. More than food for thought - a feast for thought.

The other 95%.  Wide-ranging essays, musings, and news related to the bizarre and multifarious creatures that populate our earth.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Amen brothers and sisters!

The Beagle Project.  A clever premise, which provides scaffolding for some interesting discussion.

Earth Forum.  More than just a blog — it’s an encyclopedia too!

Framing science.  And politics, etc.  The power of words, for good and ill.

Environmental economics.  WWA (Wonks with attitude). Actually makes economics interesting.

Children and Nature Network.  OK, I cheated — it’s not a blog.  But I love what these guys are about and what they’re doing.

Blogfish.  One of my early inspirations in blogging. A pioneer at the interface of marine science, conservation, and outreach.

There you have it.  Tag — you’re it!

 

A question that may soon be answered for us, at least in the southeastern USA.

Now this may seem like a frivolous question (certainly not, you might argue, worthy of perverting Shakespeare), and in the grand scheme of things, yes, it is.  But bear with me.  And I know, also, that harping on climate change is like picking a scab. People get tired of hearing about it.  But there is a lesson here about real people and real jobs, in the very real near future.  Not just in Bangladesh and small island nations with the water creeping up on their homes.  Here in Virginia.

Take an example. As a recovering workaholic, I have in the last few years warmed up to regular vacations.  So this past long weekend, with the boy out of school Monday and Tuesday, we packed off to West Virginia for a couple of days of skiing. It was great fun and, given that I took up skiing a mere year ago in my mid-forties, I am thankful and relieved that no lives (or limbs) were lost.

But, I must say, the ambience was a bit of a disappointment.  Everywhere you look — apart from the banked up lanes of fake snow on the slopes — the Appalachian vistas were brown and muddy. This is the middle of February in what passes for high altitudes in eastern North America, on the Presidents’ Day weekend that is traditionally the biggest ski time of the year (so I’m told).  The first day out the temperatures were in the fifities.  On one ride up the chair lift, I sat with a young guy from western North Carolina. He had been coming to this site (Winterplace, West Virginia) for seven years and told me that this was the worst he’d seen it. Now that is not a scientific survey, admittedly.  But you gotta wonder: How much longer can this be kept up?  How much longer can this industry survive?

You won’t be surprised to hear that my guess is: not very long.

Climate projections for this neck o’ the woods generally predict both warmer temperatures and less precipitation.  I have to confess that, among the other reasons for taking my son skiiing last year, one was to leave him with this war story for his incredulous grandchildren: “When I was a lad, we went skiing in Virginia!” I strongly suspect that this will sound like a fantasy to them.

So enough already. We know the climate is changing.  What’s to be done?  This is a microcosm of the challenges we face in responding constructively to climate change. I ruminated about this in between hot chocolates and visions of my leg being twisted 180 degrees on a particularly terrifying downslope plunge. How will these already poverty-stricken communities adapt to a world where there is no longer enough snow to support the ski industry, and the only other major industry — coal — has packed its carpetbags and buggered off?  Where the latter has not blasted the tops off the mountains and left them for dead, there might be hope of developing whitewater rafting, or trout fishing, or desperately needed nature camps for kids, or conceivably some sort of eco-tourism.  But will that be enough?  I’d be interested to hear ideas about this.  

 

And now, as the Pythons say, for something completely different.  I realize that this is a bit peripheral to the mainsteam content of this blog but (as another famous person said), “I’m the decider”.

In our profession of science, probably like all others, there is perennial argument about what determines personal productivity, how you should measure it fairly, and so on. Various metrics have been devised, books have been written, probably blogs have been started about this.  People have examined the role of gender, birth order, institution, culture, astrological sign (OK, I made that up), etc. But so far, to my knowledge, nobody has examined scientifically one potentially key factor: beer.

I am happy to say that this frontier has now been demolished, and the juggernaut of science has barrelled through, with the efforts of a Czech evolutionary ecologist by the name of . . . Grim. The study was conducted in – you guessed it — Bohemia.  Dr. Grim surveyed all researchers studying the evolutionary and behavioral ecology of birds (this is his own discipline so presumably he had drained a few glasses himself with many of the subjects and felt comfortable probing into the minutiae of their drinking habits) in the Czech Republic who had published at least one paper in a peer-reviewed journal outside the Czech Republic in the last 20 years.  He then inquired (delicately, one presumes) how many glasses or bottles of beer they drank per week. Finally, he obtained data on year of birth to control for effects of age on drinking frequency.  The whole study was conducted twice, first in May 2002 and then again in 2006, with the same subjects where available.  

The Grim finding (I’m sorry — that was inexcusable) was that the number of papers published, the total number of citations received, and the average number of citations per paper all declined significantly with quantity of beer consumed (see the graph at left).  These results were consistent across both 2002 and 2006 data sets.  And get this, you Bohemians:

“Generally, inhabitants of Bohemia (western region of the Czech Republic) are known to drink more beer than people from Moravia (eastern region of the country). This difference was confirmed for my sample of researchers: researchers from Bohemia drank significantly more beer per capita per year (median 200.0 litres) than those from Moravia (median 37.5 litres). Therefore I predicted lower measures of publication output for the former in comparison to latter group of researchers . . . Indeed, researchers from Bohemia published fewer papers per year, were less cited per year, and showed lower citation rate per paper per year.” (I have omitted the arcane statistical details) 

To my mind, the message here is clear: ditch the beer and drink more wine!

[Original source: Tomáš Grim. 2008. A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists.  Oikos. doi:10.1111/j.2008.0030-1299.16551.x]