"Kate Jackson is one of those special God-struck individuals with a consuming passion for snakes. She is not alone in this passion, but it is a rare phenomenon to have the passion combined with a dedication to rigorous scientific inquiry."
That from George Zug of the Smithsonian Institution, introducing Jackson on Sunday at the National Museum of Natural History. Jackson's book Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo is out now from HUP.
Robert Paarlberg, in a recent Reason interview:
My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.
This and other dicey issues are tackled with grace by the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, out now from HUP. Paarlberg, an advocate of GMO seed varieties for African fams, takes this unpopular position because he believes that improvements in seed varieties and farming techniques are African farmers' ticket out of a low-yield agriculture that keeps most of them mired in hunger and poverty. He wrote Starved for Science in order to explain, in Reason editor Kerry Howley's words, just why "cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed." Also available online is a talk Paarlberg gave recently at the International Food Policy Research Institute, which works to find "sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty."
Like many coral specialists fifteen years ago, Charlie Veron thought Australia's Great Barrier Reef was impervious to climate change. "Owned by a prosperous country and accorded the protection it deserves, it would surely not go the way of the Amazon rain forest or the parklands of Africa, but would endure forever. That is what I thought once, but I think it no longer." A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End is Veron's Silent Spring for the world's coral reefs.
Veron, a former Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, recently appeared on ABC Radio National's "Breakfast" program to discuss the possibility that the reefs could disappear once and for all within the next 40 years. You can listen to the podcast here.
Eladio Fernández, author of Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey through Island Biodiversity, is one of the most accomplished nature photographers around. Check out his new website featuring page upon page of gorgeous photos of Hispaniola, an island whose considerable age (40 million years), along with a diversity of habitats—from mountains and cloud forests to savannahs and tropical lowlands—makes it one of the most spectacular, if poorly understood, troves of biota on the planet. No one is better equipped to document this extraordinary set of phenomena than Eladio, so head over to www.eladiofernandez.com to witness it in all its glory.
Jim Endersby's A Guinea Pig's History of Biology has made Barnes & Noble's "The Long List--50 books, CDS, and DVDs to know about now." And you know what?--the best way to "know about it now" might just be to purchase a copy from our oh-so-user-friendly website! Never too late for a late Christmas present for the science-lovers among your friends and loved ones. With a cover like that, who could resist?
Last March we published Timothy Morton's Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, in which the author argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the idea of nature itself. It's an intriguing thesis, and Morton's book marshals an eclectic range of sources to put together an argument for what he calls "dark ecology."
Well, it turns out that none other than world-renowned theorist Slavoj Zizek has gotten his hands on a copy of Ecology without Nature. Presumably he read it and liked it, because he decided to give a lecture on it in Athens that, fortunately for us internet users, has been posted on YouTube for our viewing enjoyment. We've embedded part one below and will provide links to the other five parts, but here's a quick précis transcribed from the talk:
The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is a deeply conservative one: any change can only be a change for the worse. So what is wrong here? What is wrong I think is the … principal position … that there is something like “nature,” which we humans, with our hubris, with our will to dominate, disturbed … [W]e know Jacques Lacan's motto, “The big Other doesn't exist.” I think we should extend this to nature. The first premise of a truly radical ecology should be, “Nature doesn't exist.” … So again what we need is ecology without nature, ecology that accepts this open, imbalanced, denaturalized, if you want, character of nature itself. [I]t is … all too easy to attribute our disbelief in the catastrophe to the impregnation of our minds by scientific ideology. [The] standard thesis of the predominant ecology … says something like this: “The ultimate cause of our ecological problems is modern technology, Cartesian subjectivity, within which we are abstract beings somehow outside nature, who can manipulate nature, dominate nature … what we should rediscover is that nature is not out there, an object of our manipulation. Nature is our very background, we are wired to nature, embedded in nature. You should go out, feel, breathe nature. You should accept that your abstract scientific reification … is just an alienating effect of being embedded in the life world.” I think that far from offering a solution, this kind of reference to our immediate living experience is the cause of the problem.
Links to the lecture: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. First part is embedded below.
||| Learn more about Ecology without Nature.
Alex, the African Grey Parrot whose incredible facility with language made him the subject of intense interest from scientists and the public alike, has died at age 31, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Alex's caretaker and the chief source of reports on Alex's remarkable progress in communicating with humans. Dr. Pepperberg, pictured at left with Alex, chronicled the bird genius' exploits in 1999's The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, in which she recounts her attempts to discover whether large-brained, highly social parrots such as Alex were capable of mastering complex cognitive concepts and the rudiments of referential speech. The book won plaudits in the mainstream press, with the Los Angeles Times Book Review calling it "pioneering" and the New York Times Book Review opining that Pepperberg "succeeds where many others have failed."
Sort of, according to this New York Times blog post on a "mental olympics" in which human babies faced off against chimps and orangutans in sixteen events to determine who's the real king of cognition. While our primate cousins took the crown in tests dealing with causality and spatial skills, the human babies triumphed in the "social learning" portion of the proceedings:
A researcher showed the children and apes how to pop open a plastic tube to get food or a toy contained inside. The children observed and imitated the solution. Chimpanzees and orangutans, however, tried to smash open the tube or yank out the contents with their teeth.
HUP, of course, is the purveyor of many fine books on chimps and their behavioral (dis-)abilities, including a slew of material from the world's leading primatologist, Frans de Waal, complimented by offerings from Harriet J. Smith (Parenting for Primates), Carel van Schaik (Among Orangutans), Barbara J. King (The Dynamic Dance), and others.
Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology, Sarah McFarland Taylor's look into the burgeoning world of environmentally active Catholic nuns, is making waves in the blogosphere as the movement gains steam. And if yesterday's New York Times article on Christians, Jews and Muslims "who see food through a moral lens" is any indication, we could be seeing the beginning of a much larger trend in "spiritual ecology."
A great new article on bonobos in the New Yorker quotes, among others, our resident bonobo expert Frans de Waal, author of several HUP books.
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