Green Heron Gone Fishin’

You must check out this ingenious green heron using bread as bait to catch fish.

Watching the video, I was pretty sure the fish were just going to steal his bait, but hang on.

Green heron breed in my side yard, so a little oddly, I admit, this makes me feel parentally proud.

IT’$ NA$A AND IT KNOW$ IT

 

Hey, nice production values, as expected from NASA.  And it’s great that they can somehow make computer-bound robotics geeks look like the bomb.

 
Wish we could show a little of that love for explorers and naturalists who actually risk their lives in the cause of discovery here on Earth.

Hey, all you species seekers out there, think of it as a throwdown.  If you want to see just a shadow of those sweet NASA budgets, maybe it’s time to strut what you got, if you got it.

Or, you know, get your post-docs to do it for you.

Who Cares About Life on Other Planets?

Alien life form fantasy: Dude, it looks kinda like us

Another misguided piece of NASA propaganda appears on the New York Times op-ed page today, arguing that we really need to pour billions more into outer space.  I like exploration, which is why I wrote a book about it. 

But here’s my argument for discovering and protecting what we have here on Earth first:

You may have noticed the welter of headlines lately about planets outside our solar system dubbed “earth-like” or “potentially habitable,” orbiting in what astronomers call “the Goldilocks zone.”  That’s the elusive sweet spot close enough to a star to be not too hot and not too cold for life to begin.  Most of the recent announcements about these “exo-planets” are a product of the Kepler Telescope, launched by NASA in 2009 and credited, at last count, with having identified 139 wannabe Earths.

The excitement among scientists is understandable.  People have been wondering for centuries if there are planets like ours beyond this solar system.  Or, as it’s often phrased:  Are we alone in the universe?

Honestly, though, these stories mostly make me yearn for what the Book of Common Prayer calls “this fragile earth, our island home.”  As with the mothers who raise us, we tend to take her for granted.  Space exploration advocates have somehow persuaded us that it’s more exciting to look outward, and that finding any hint of life in outer space would be momentous, even down to the microbial level (also known as “exo-crud”). But even as NASA spends $50 million a year on astrobiology, plus $600 million so far on Kepler, we spend pennies to find the alien life forms we know live all around us here at home.

Alien life form reality: Doesn’t look at all like us, but actually lives here

By conservative estimates, about 80 percent of species here on Earth remain undescribed. Even biologists discovering new primates do so on a NASA publicist’s lunch budget, though these are creatures more astonishing than anything we will ever see in outer space.  We spend almost nothing even on identifying species that might keep us alive. And we  act as if natural life forms are worthless unless proven otherwise.  The Pacific yew tree, for instance, was widely considered a “trash” species—until it turned out to be the source of Taxol, a $1.7 billion-a-year drug that now routinely saves the lives of cancer victims.

The idea that finding intelligent life in outer space would somehow relieve our deep sense of being alone in the vastness of the universe also blithely overlooks the braininess all around us here on Earth—the way honeybees waggle-dance to map out the location of a flower patch for their hive mates, or the idea that a border collie named Chaser can recognize words for more than 1000 objects.  This is how narrow-minded the exo-planet set can be about life here on Earth: According to a recent article in one scholarly journal, the real value of studying how species on Earth communicate  is to “de-provincialize” our thinking about how to communicate with extraterrestrials.  This makes my head explode.

Hyping exo-planets while dumping on the real Earth is like ignoring your attractive and intelligent wife, because somewhere in the universe Scarlett Johannson lives.

Though it’s not the fault of the Kepler scientists, the search for “habitable” planets is also tainted by the lunatic idea that

“Ecosystem Services” is a Dangerous Idea

I recently posted a piece under the headline “Why Species Matter-Or Putting a Value on a Vulture.”  It cited an example in India, where the inadvertent destruction of vultures has produced an epidemic of stray dogs and rabies.  So I am obviously tempted by the idea of using “ecosystem services” as a way to get people to value the natural world.   But it also makes me uneasy.

This article by George Monbiot in The Guardian suggests why we should think more carefully about where this approach is taking us.   Monbiot is the founder of The Land is Ours campaign and author of Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, among other books.  He starts with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, attacking the farmer who first enclosed the common land for private use:  “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.

The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England’s ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was “theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour”. Some of the services provided by England’s ecosystems, it pointed out, “may in fact be infinite in value”.

This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don’t call it nature any more: now the proper term is “natural capital”. Natural processes have become “ecosystem services”, as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now “green infrastructure”, while biodiversity and habitats are “asset classes” within an “ecosystem market”. All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become

Do Dead People Have a Right to Bear Arms?

This is a bit outside my usual territory, but it is undeniably strange behavior.  Call it posthumous territoriality.  The web site Guns.com (also not on my usual reading list) reports on the nineteenth-century practice of deterring grave robbers by booby-trapping  coffins and cemeteries with heavy artillery.

The golden age of body thefts in the United States was just after the Civil War. From 1865 and 1890, the number of medical schools in the country increased by over 100%. These students needed cadavers to train their budding surgeons in anatomy and physiology. At this time, practically the only bodies available were those of condemned convicts. This led to a cottage industry in grave robbery for recent, fresh corpses. It was during this period that John Scott Harrison, the son of former President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, was stolen and later found at a medical college in Cincinnati.

In 1878, a number of “Coffin Torpedoes” hit the market. One design by Phil Clover of Columbus, Ohio was for an abbreviated shotgun that rested just inside the coffin lid. Once the lid was raised, the gun would fire directly into the face of the violator, discharging a number of 36-caliber lead balls.

Another inventor, Thomas N Howell, perfected two different “Grave Torpedoes.” Each was more like a landmine than any firearm. Borrowing Civil War technology, Howell’s device weighed 8-pounds and carried a charge of more than .75-pound of black powder ignited by a percussion cap. Buried atop the coffin with a protective plate above the torpedo, if disturbed the metal plate would help serve as a shape charge directed right at the would-be grave robber. An advertisement for the weapon declared that it would allow one to, ““sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.”

In 1881 at least three men were killed when one such device ignited during a late night traipse through the cemeteries near Gann in Knox County, Ohio.

O.k., these were clearly businesses that took the Second Amendment right to bear arms seriously.  No doubt it was all about maintaining a well-regulated militia of the undead.

Why Species Matter–Or Putting a Value on a Vulture

Today’s New York Times reports on the epidemic of stray dogs and rabies in India, but neglects a key contributing factor:  The near extinction of vultures over the past 15 years.  I wrote about this unexpected connection in this piece which originally appeared on Yale Environment 360:

We live in what is paradoxically a great age of discovery and also of mass extinction. Astonishing new species turn up daily, as new roads and new technologies penetrate formerly remote habitats. And species also vanish forever, at what scientists estimate to be 100 to 1,000 times the normal rate of extinction.

Over the past few years, as I was working on a book about the history of species discovery, I often found myself coming back to a fundamental question: Why do species matter? That is, why should ordinary people care if scientists discover one species or pronounce the demise of another?

It may seem too obvious to need asking. In certain limited contexts, people clearly do care. We will go to great lengths to protect a boutique species like the giant panda, for instance. We also thrill to the possibility of finding the slightest microbial hint of life in outer space, hardly blinking when the U.S. government spends $7 billion a year largely for that purpose. Meanwhile, we spend pennies exploring the alien life forms that are all around us here on Earth.

Maybe it’s just human nature not to value — or even see — the thing that’s right in front of our faces. And maybe it’s also a failure of communication.

That is, scientists may need to explain their work on a far more basic level — not “Why do species matter?” but “Is food important to you?” or “Do you want your children to have effective medicines when they get sick?” or even “Do you like to breathe?”  None of these questions overstates the importance of species.

For instance, Prochlorococcus is an ocean-dwelling genus of cyanobacteria and among the most abundant life forms on Earth. Why should we care? Because it produces about 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe — and yet until an MIT microbiologist named Sally Chisholm discovered it in 1986, Prochlorococcus was unknown. We need to understand in short that our lives depend on species most of us have never heard of — species we otherwise tend to shrug off as obscure, trivial, even undesirable.

Vultures, for instance.