research, events, web, writing – environmental & climate change
Looking for a headline that says it all? Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants: Study. That study being The biomass distribution on Earth. Confronting these annihilation estimates summons Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous: “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Continue reading “msb ~037 Mass annihilation”
What instruments does imagination offer? Microscopes and telescopes selectively bring the small and distant into human focus. But selecting some things means excluding others, helping to simplify the complex. What if an instrument could bring complexity itself within our scope? Continue reading “msb ~036 Macroscopes of the mind”
I wasn’t able to attend GroundWork Gallery’s Restore? Conserve? Rewild? but enjoyed ClimateCultures’ review. This exploration of different responses to environmental predicaments included contentious Ecosystem Services approaches. Although it’s common ground that ‘nature’ provides benefits to ‘society’, which government, business and populations undervalue and undermine, controversy arises when we’re asked to translate these into a common value: cash. Continue reading “msb ~035 Ecosystems and Boundary Objects”
When I was an environmental student in the early 90s, I chose the Mediterranean for a study on transboundary pollution. From memory, oil pollution into that sea worked out at over 17 Exxon Valdez disasters every year. That Alaskan tanker spill was still big news back then, driving a lot of environmental awareness. In contrast, 17 equivalent marine disasters in the Mediterranean, year on year: barely commented on. Of course, oil pollution’s just one facet of what we’re now learning to call the ‘plastisphere’ – the planetary zone that encompasses the discarded petroleum-based products and packaging that’s smothering rivers and swirling in ocean eddies, but also the leaked, spilt and spewed fossil fuels with which we make the plastics and push them around the world. Continue reading “msb ~034 Our Plastisphere future?”
Googling ‘comedy in climate change’ produced just one result: this 2015 piece from Australian comedian Andrew Denton. ‘Comedy about climate change’ produced over 21,000 – still low, but we already knew there’s not a whole lot of laughs in the reality. But if you get one hit for a search you’d really better read it, and I enjoyed Denton’s article. Continue reading “msb ~033 Room for comedy?”
Wonderful to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell rewarded now; her ground-breaking discovery should have brought her 1974’s Nobel Prize. Her male collaborators received that, though she did the hard work on pulsars: supercondensed end-of-life stars that emit intense radio beams. Radically expanding our understanding of the cosmos, such breakthroughs also helped fuel my own interest; ten years later, I embarked on my astrophysics degree). Now she’s been awarded the Breakthrough Prize for her landmark work. Continue reading “msb ~027 Breakthroughs from left field”