Harvard University Press Blog

What Have We Learned from Plants?

For Beronda L. Montgomery, the author of Lessons from Plants, the undisturbed growth of plants has been a reminder that life moves along, even in the most difficult times. In her new book, Montgomery shows how plant behavior and adaptation can offer valuable insights for human thriving. Her recent article in Elle on how plants have been a beacon of hope for her and many others during the pandemic inspired us at Harvard University Press to think about how plants have also helped us during this past year of working from home.

Paige (Digital Sales Associate) moved shortly before the pandemic and purchased a cheap grocery store orchid to bring some joy to a relatively empty house. “In the past, I’ve simply discarded orchids once their blooms fell and the stems turned brown. However, like many, the beginning of the COVID lockdown had me turning my attention to the plant companions in my home—a place where I now spend 95% of my time. I continued to care for this dormant orchid over the course of the year, not knowing if it would actually bloom again. Then, in the depths of winter, during the sad and lonely post-holiday COVID surge, the orchid re-bloomed beautifully, like a thank you note for not giving up.”

“Although I was delighted to have my children return home for the duration of the pandemic, the five of us definitely needed to sidle around each other at times, especially during Zoom singing lessons,” said Kate (Senior Editor). “I finally managed to find an appreciative audience for my daily vocal exercises: the long-neglected potted citrus tree next to the garage, far from the rest of the family. As the seasons changed, it quietly tolerated my scales and I gradually noticed its needs: a bit of fertilizer, consistent watering, leaf polishing, pruning, hand pollination. Its transformation has taken close to a year, but it has finally, after a decade, borne fruit. It’s a visual reminder for me to keep up with my vocal practice, even a few minutes a day.”

Jenn (Assistant Promotion Manager) doubled her houseplant collection over the past year. “When the pandemic began, I made a vastly revised assessment of an apartment unit I’ve happily lived in for 15+ years: 1. no yard; 2. large construction site right across the street; 3. working from home while this huge new building was assembled. Thankfully, Ricky’s Flower Market—an independently-owned, European-style, urban garden center—was a short walk away. Within five months, I more than doubled my collection of “easy care plants”—a grove of ZZs, a couple of rubber trees, a snake, a pothos, a prayer—from 12 to 30+. While the noise crushed ears and stretched patience, there was a lush break—a plethora of greens—from the vision of dump trucks, cranes, a line of porta-potties. Now that we’re in the last phase of construction, my new home project is to find room for more vegetation to act as a buffer as the sound bounces in different ways between this old building and the shiny one. I’m forever grateful for this enhanced collaborative admiration—a house of plants, two humans, and one skittish cat, worked together, in a sense, to dim the cacophony of the outside world.”

Across the pond in the UK, Richard (Director of International Sales and Marketing) found solace in his garden. “I am with Cicero, who said that if one was in possession of a garden and a library, then everything will be complete. During this year of COVID and lockdown my garden has become even more a source of pleasure, therapy, and solace. My garden is where I find an outlet for creativity, a place to think when physical effort unclouds my mind, and everyday stresses and concerns seem to melt away. An old Chinese proverb says: ‘Life begins the day you start a garden,’ and I have been able to start several, but not until I came to start this garden did I truly fall in love. I have learned more patience, more willingness to try new things, and understand more fully what nurturing and hope mean because I garden.”

In London, Ellie (Deputy Manager of International Publicity) reflected on what she learned from working on Lessons from Plants: “Handling the international publicity for Professor Montgomery’s book has made me think about how plants have been so beneficial for me. The cherry tree outside our living room window has burst into the most beautiful blossom, brightening up our otherwise rather grubby city street. Having grown up in a house where my plant-loving father recycled yogurt pots to grow seedlings and turned our backyard into a country jungle, the enforced stay-at-home nature of lockdown seems to have finally unleashed this plant nurturing gene in me, and my bedroom is now hosting a lot of plants that are miraculously still alive. I’ve got a tray of sweet pea seedlings slowly growing on my bookshelf—waiting till the frost has gone and they can go outside. I started growing them when our household was having to self-isolate, and having something else to concentrate on was very beneficial. They will hopefully unleash some beautiful flowers soon, but in the meantime, I just love watching them grow while restraining the urge to prod them too much!”

Sometimes the right book appears just when you need it. After working from home for over a year, Lessons from Plants has brought positivity and inspiration to us at HUP. In her Elle piece, Professor Montgomery wrote, "As we emerge from this winter of pandemic life may we be like plants, carrying on with fierce determination and relentless purpose." Let's hope we can learn from plants and enter spring in that same spirit.

Fall Reading List

Fall is the perfect time to settle in with a good book for our Executive Editor for Science, Janice Audet. Here she suggests some recent and forthcoming books she finds informative and fascinating.

The fall season shepherds in the beginning of a new school season, a time to begin or resume routines and learn new things. The fall season can also be a time to take stock, become introspective, and prepare for the indoor time ahead. For me it often means I tuck into a corner of the couch with a blanket, a cup of tea, and a book. Whatever the fall season means for you, we have a group of compelling science titles to meet your interest. These books guide us through the natural world, human behavior and the mind, and, if you just need a mental escape, an exploration of space. Open up one of these books and find a new connection with the world.

As the days grow shorter and the sunlight wanes, deciduous plants begin preparations for winter. As I’ve learned from Beronda Montgomery’s forthcoming book, Lessons from Plants, dropping leaves in autumn is a seasonal, energy-saving behavior. To prepare for winter days with less sunlight, plants reduce chlorophyll production for a quieter metabolic state. When the temperature drops and the amount of sunlight declines, the plant’s green pigments recede and other pigment colors emerge. The leaves transform into a fiery display of red and gold before drifting to the ground. The changing colors of the leaves is but one example of plants’ incredible ability to sense their environment. There is so much we can learn from plants on how to engage with our environments and adjust our behaviors accordingly. Just as plants thrive after a period of dormancy, we can also be more resilient if we take time to rest.

Without leaves and stems, humans are left to use our five senses to make sense of the world. One of the most crucial tools is as plain as the nose on our face: our sense of smell. But what does the nose tell the mind? How do we recognize certain scents? In other words, how does your mind know that you smell apple, not pumpkin, pie? If you pause and sniff, you’ll notice that everything around you has a smell. The room has the lingering scent of the last meal you ate, your sneakers have an aroma, and your clothes may smell like laundry detergent or something less pleasant! And to that point, why is smell often thought of as a highly subjective sensation, especially in comparison with vision? The same scent can cause a completely opposite reaction and opinion in two different people. In Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind, A. S. Barwich explores what the nose knows and asks us to reconsider our individual and collective ideas about the sense of smell. Consider, Barwich explains, that we don’t perceive smells in cognitive isolation. Our nose and our minds respond to contextual cues, as well as physiological and affective states. Would the aroma of garlic be as pleasing at 7 a.m. when you are drinking your coffee, as it would be at 6 p.m. when your stomach is rumbling with hunger for dinner? There is great complexity that underlies how people experience smells, and A. S. Barwich is an excellent guide for us to better understand our perceptions and consider our assumptions.

Our senses also play an important role in our detection of fear. Our ability to smell, see, and hear signs of danger has been carefully honed over time. It all began about 550 million years ago with the evolution of specialized nervous systems in worms. A cocktail of neurochemicals that selectively modulate and coordinate activity led to the worms taking control of responses to life threatening experiences. Whether it’s slithering away or balling up to hide, animals and humans have developed complex behaviors to survive. Dan Blumstein’s The Nature of Fear: Survival Lessons from the Wild shows us how we can learn how to better respond to fearful situations. For example, animal alarm calls offer early warnings about a predator—a cat is coming close. But if those calls become screams, the high-fidelity distortion escalates the warning. Screams may not necessarily be louder in volume, but they sound ‘noisier,’ with rapid amplitude and frequency fluctuations. This is the sound of fear. Through experimental research, Blumstein has found that such nonlinearities, like noise, tap into the human emotion of fear as well. Upon hearing this kind of sound, humans’ eyes widen rapidly and often the heartbeat increases. Horror films and haunted houses have used nonlinear, noisy sounds for years to frighten audiences, and in recent decades, political advertisements have also found them effective when attempting to discredit an opponent. Our biology heeds this noise and then signals the need to make a decision: fight or take flight.

Should we need to flee, we are fortunate that navigation skills are also deeply embedded in our biology. In prehistoric times we learned how to find our way over large distances, to the farthest regions of the planet, and this occurred through recognition of landmarks or from a memory associated with an experience. As Michael Bond writes in From Here to There, “the experience of a place can never be explained in coordinates or in terms of the firing patterns of your spatial neurons; you only really know where you are if you can tell a story about that place or remember how you found your way there.” While lately my navigation has been mostly limited to my local neighborhoods and bike trails, I’ve noticed how freeing it has been to leave the GPS or map apps behind. The spatial representations I carry in mind of these new neighborhoods and trails—the mental maps—are filled with turns in the road, houses with yellow exteriors, and soccer fields. I’ve found some comfort in Bond’s discussion: by navigating without technology’s assistance, I am bolstering my skills and cognitive health. As Bond states, “There is still a world out there to explore, and we need to find a way through it.”

But, if you’re feeling like you want to leave the world behind, I recommend a witty and compelling look at space travel, Christopher Wanjek’s Spacefarers. Most plans for space settlements look good in your imagination, on paper, or in an animated video. But what would it really take to live beyond Earth? On the Moon we would need to solve the problems of no breathable air, no atmospheric pressure, and no protective atmosphere, but it is relatively close to Earth and, as we’ve found, suitable for encampment. The red planet, Mars, is the most earthlike planet in the solar system and has the only other surface suitable for human settlement with our current technologies. But Mars also has no breathable air, little atmospheric pressure, and it would take anywhere from six to nine months to get there. Venus is nearly identical to Earth in air pressure and gravity if one stays above the Venusian clouds, but we may not want to subsist in balloon-lofted cities for the rest of our lives. How about Mercury then? There is unlimited solar energy which could provide for “green” living, but life would need to be subterranean since there are wild temperature fluctuations and a lack of breathable air or atmospheric pressure. Wanjek explores the moons of planets, orbital habitats or islands in the sky, searching among our solar system’s frontier for livable space. While settlements may be currently out of our reach, Wanjek gives us something to marvel at, aspire to, and dream about in the meantime.

Regardless of what this season means for you or where you are this fall, physically and mentally, I wish you rest, resilience, and travels into the far reaches of your mind. The universe is at our fingertips…and between the covers of a book.

How to Plant a Forest

For this week’s University Press Week Blog Tour, Lucia Jacobs offers us a glimpse of environmental stewardship as seen through the activities of the ubiquitous squirrel, a species native to the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia from the Eocene Epoch onward.

Lucia Jacobs is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC-Berkeley and was a 2019 Radcliffe Fellow. Her work synthesizes concepts from ecology, animal behavior, cognitive science, and neuroscience in order to understand the evolution of universal cognitive traits such as spatial memory and navigation. Her new book on animal behavior and economics is under contract with Harvard University Press.

As a young child, I spent so much time with one favorite sapling that my mother fashioned me a stick chair so that I could sit more comfortably next to my beloved Oaky (who turned out to be a sweet gum). Perhaps I should not have been surprised a couple of decades later when I committed myself to a life of trees and squirrels, tromping the paths among the mighty oaks and beeches of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as a Ph.D. student.

At Princeton, I was trying to answer a deceptively simple question: why do two kinds of squirrels, living almost on top of each other, have two different banking systems? The eastern gray squirrel, the classic denizen of Central Park, is a stockbroker. This squirrel acquires diverse types of stocks all through August, September, and October, spreading out the risk by hiding each nut in a different location so that if one is found the rest will be safe. Having made this initial investment, the squirrel then spends November through March working furiously on her or his portfolio, checking its value with internal calculations: Is the nut present or has it been stolen by a competitor? Or, has the nut germinated and its caloric value come crashing down in an annual rhythm of hyperinflation, with all the precious nut calories escaping and becoming useless (to a squirrel) green leaf calories?

But that is only one system. The red squirrel, a small neat package with white eyeliner and a big mouth, practices a whole other economy. This squirrel uses its big mouth to scream out warnings to all animals (humans included) who would encroach on its precious space. Quite unlike the flannel-suited grays, the little red squirrel has solved the problem of winter survival by another time-tested method: build a castle of pine cones and scream obscenities at anyone who passes by.

Why two such different economies in two squirrel species that can often be found in the same forest? The gray’s acorns and hickory nuts are big and juicy. But are also tiny time bombs of hyperinflation in case of germination. The red squirrel, unlike its gray neighbors, can subsist on pine cones. That is why reds are found in the piney ends of a forest. Pine cones are poor provender in comparison to nuts and acorns but they come with a hidden advantage. When covered with the debris of torn and de-seeded cones that accumulate over time, pine cones can last, without maintenance, for many years. In this case, the pine tree has lost. The cone has not stayed on the tree long enough for the scales to open and the tiny seeds to be wind-dispersed. The baby pine trees die as embryos. And like Chanticleer on his dung heap, the murderous red squirrel sits on top of the midden proclaiming his wealth and property to all in earshot. Because cones refrigerated in the midden can last, the squirrel only has to defend its small property, a few pine trees, to survive.

Why does the gray not follow the red’s strategy? Even if her bounty germinates, why does a gray not defend a single tree and put all her acorns in one basket? Well, because trees are not stupid either. The tree exacts its price for prior years of large-seeded "free gifts” by occasionally falling silent and remaining fruitless. Not just one tree but whole forests of oaks and hickories vary their production unpredictably. Branches groan with seed one year but produce only a smattering for two years after that. This is known as the masting strategy of trees, and it brutally reestablishes the balance between the squirrel population and tree reproduction. When the stocks crash, squirrels starve or emigrate. Trees depend on squirrels to propagate their offspring which, over time, become our forests. If there are too few squirrels, then the nuts will fall to the ground and be eaten by weevils, under the shade of parental branches. If there are too many squirrels, then all the offspring are eaten. But throw out a couple of masting years and regain the balance—just enough squirrels to help bury just enough nuts that could lead to the germination of thousands of baby trees. This is how large-seeded tree species, producing the seeds that are worth caching, achieve a delicate balance with the squirrels.

So, there you have it—the two economies of two squirrels, the red and the gray. Choose the life of the red: a territorial bantam cock, all bristling fur and trilling pronouncements, protecting precious small territory of cone-bearing trees, never being able to let down your guard.  Or choose the life of a gray: a flannel-suited stockbroker, workaholic while the stocks are available in the fall, investing the bounteous crops into a diverse portfolio, which must be managed, never counting on any one stock for your long-term survival. Know that if you take the acorn eater’s path (and your path was taken many millions of years ago and is now firmly inscribed in your genetic code) you permanently forgo the larder and live instead the life of a wanderer, caching treasures, relying on your wits and memory to stay ahead of the competition. It is the gray squirrels and their two cousins, the fox and the little southern flying squirrel, that are the environmental stewards of our forests. They are an important key to how our forests are planted, how they grow, and how they persist.

Build a Better Flytrap

The tiny, innocuous fruit fly has been a subject of research for more than a century, and is discussed in upwards of 100,000 scientific publications. Its surprising parallels with humans—the fruit fly has a beating heart, a brain, and other organs comparable to our own; exhibits complex behaviors including sleep and aggression; and slows down with age—have made it an ideal subject for research that’s furthered our understanding of biology, health, and disease. In First in Fly: Drosophila Research and Biological Discovery, Stephanie Elizabeth Mohr celebrates the power and importance of curiosity-driven pure research conducted with fruit flies, providing historic and contemporary examples of the profound knowledge such work has afforded. After First in Fly, readers will have a new appreciation for the beauty of the fruit fly, and the common genetic threads that connect us to other creatures. And yet, for many of us, that recognition won’t likely dislodge the lived experience of the fruit fly as a miraculously multiplying kitchen nuisance. For that, Mohr offers up the flytrap described below.

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Although researchers take great care to contain fruit flies in a lab setting, some inevitably get free, and once free, the flies will follow enticing scents to places they are unwelcome, such as a lunchroom or a yeast research lab. Drosophila researchers are not likely to bring insecticides into the lab—we are for the most part trying very hard to keep fruit flies alive, after all, so that we can perform genetic crosses and do other types of studies. But even the most dedicated fly researchers recognize that rogue flies can be a nuisance. We have developed an effective strategy for capturing flies that have escaped from their culture vials: we place simple flytraps in strategic locations around the lab. The same approach can be used in a home to get rid of an unwanted infestation or to collect wild flies for study. In the 2014 BioSCAN project, volunteers in Los Angeles, California, placed flytraps in their backyards as part of a species survey. These backyard collections led to identification of several new species of phorid flies, as well as the observation that Drosophila flavohirta, a species not previously found in the Americas, has taken up residence in Los Angeles.

To make a trap, first gather the following: an empty bottle, a rubber band or tape, and a tablespoon of something attractive to the flies, such as fruit juice, cider, champagne, wine, red wine vinegar, mushy banana, tired grapes, or overripe mango. The materials should be assembled as shown, then placed in areas frequented by the flies. The paper cone or a similar cover with a single small opening is essential: an open jar constitutes a fly feeder rather than a flytrap. The opening in the paper cone or cover should be just large enough for the small flies to fit through. Flies will be attracted by the bait and enter the chamber. Once inside, they are unlikely to try to escape, and even if they try, it will be next to impossible for them to find the tiny hole through which they entered.

This is a live trap method. To get rid of the flies, seal and throw away the trap within a few days. If forgotten, the trap is likely to become the birthplace of a next generation of flies. Before tossing the trap out, the curious might examine the flies to determine what species of flies were caught and whether they have unusual or interesting attributes. Should you decide to culture the flies, sliced bananas with a sprinkle of baker’s yeast should suffice as a food source, and a piece of cloth secured with a rubber band or a plug of cotton can be used to stopper the top without depriving the flies of oxygen. Be careful not to let the food dry out or expose the flies to prolonged heat or cold. To anesthetize the flies for close examination, place the trap on ice for five to ten minutes. If the food is very mushy, put the trap on its side, so the anesthetized flies do not get stuck in the food, or use a funnel to transfer the flies to an empty bottle before placing them on ice. A small paintbrush, makeup brush, or crab pick can be used as a pusher, and a magnifying glass, macro lens attachment on a camera, or smartphone-compatible microscope can help you inspect your flies closely. Further information, including food recipes and video demonstrations, can be found online. Who knows? Isolation of a spontaneous mutation, observation of an interesting behavior, or some other chance finding might launch a groundbreaking study.

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You can read more about First in Fly at the Atlantic.

The Future of Russia as an Energy Superpower

Russia’s energy wealth has long been the main pillar of the country’s economy, but what’s the long-term future of that financial security in a world that is gradually moving toward decarbonization? Thane Gustafson, whose Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia we recently released in a paperback edition, addressed that question earlier this fall when he delivered the Chatham House’s Annual Russia Lecture. The text of his address is below.

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The last time I had the honor of giving a speech here at Chatham House was thirteen years ago, in 2004. The talk was entitled “The Russian Oil Miracle.” Five years before, after sinking to a low point equal to about half of the Soviet-era record of 1988, Russian oil production had abruptly turned around, and between 1999 and 2004, it had regained much of the lost ground. During those years, Russia accounted for all of the net addition of crude to world oil supply.

What we could not see at the time, however, was that 2004 was the last of the miracle years, which were essentially based on capturing the “Soviet dividend.” By 2004 much of the Soviet dividend had been extracted, and while Russian oil production has continued to grow steadily since then, progress has been very gradual, and every year the net increase in production is far outstripped by the volume of drilling required to produce it, as each year’s production must overcome the built-in decline rate of existing fields as well as the diminishing returns from new ones. The Russian oil industry is very much in the position of an athlete that is running uphill against a slope that is steadily growing steeper.

But it is not my purpose today to deliver an update of the Russian Oil Miracle, but rather, to ask a very different sort of question, reflecting the revolutionary changes that have taken place in the world of energy, and especially in our perceptions of it, in just a decade-and-a-half, and to reflect with you on the implications of these changes for Russia as an energy producer and as—I think we can fairly use the term—a “petro-state.” Namely—what happens to Russia as an energy superpower as global demand for oil approaches a peak?

Cycles within Cycles: How to Think about the Energy Future of Russia

Trying to predict the future of Russian energy, and indeed of Russia itself, is like predicting climate change. And here I’m not talking about Mark Twain’s famous wisecrack that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Rather, what I mean is the classic difficulty in any conversation about climate change—namely, that of distinguishing between long-term cycles and near-term ones, or, to put it another way, between signal and noise. Rising ocean levels are signal, whereas last year’s winter temperatures in Washington are noise.

Let me take as one example the cycles of global crude oil prices and their impact on the Russian economy. Russia has gone through four economic crashes since the mid-1980s, all four of them connected to the rise and fall of commodity prices and specifically oil. The precise causes and course of each of these cycles has been different from case to case. Yet the following would have seemed like a safe prediction just a few years ago:

• The cycle of peak and trough in global commodity prices will continue—that is what commodities do—and since oil markets are increasingly globalized and commoditized, the same cyclical pattern will govern oil prices as well—and gas too, by the way, as liquefied natural gas (LNG) increasingly turns gas into a globally traded commodity.
• And with each downturn—possibly at more frequent intervals in the future than in the past, but roughly once every decade—Russia will be thrown into recession, although with improved macroeconomic management (as in the last downturn) the extent of the decline may be cushioned. Conversely, as Alexei Kudrin has been warning for a decade, the stimulative effect of each upswing in oil prices will also be smaller each time, as the dependence of the Russian state budget on oil revenues increases.

Humans and Nature, Hopelessly Entangled

Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.

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Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”

Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.

“What Kind of World Shall We Make Together?”

In the immediate wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, Jed Purdy wrote at Dissent about the ironic possibility of Trump’s action forcing an overdue sense of emergency. Purdy sees in the agonized response to Trump’s announcement a sense that “Paris had come to stand, at least in liberals’ minds, for the thought that the world was bumping toward the right track, that someone out there was doing something about climate change.” For Purdy, though, the political constraints that shaped the Paris accord rendered it largely symbolic from the beginning, too weak by design to avert major climate disruptions. If the Paris Agreement already fell short of the global cooperation necessary to address climate change, what might such a movement look like? Below, in an excerpt from his 2015 book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Purdy sketches some of the parameters of how the world might democratically shape a way to make human and natural flourishing compatible—even as democracy itself intensifies the emergencies we face.

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Today democratic consent is the only widely accepted way to make political power legitimate, and for very good reasons. It expresses two critically important ideas: that power should not be exercised over people without their consent, and that all individuals should have equal voice in the question of consent—in saying yes or no to a law or a government. But democracy’s standing is less secure than this quick summary suggests. Widespread acceptance of democracy as the standard of political legitimacy can be thin and nominal: it is effectively universal, but not because of deep commitment. In fact, pieties about democracy are now under pressure from, and sometimes yielding to, technocratic government at the heart of the historically democratic world, such as Europe, and assertive authoritarianism in countries such as Russia and China. This newly evident fragility is a reminder that much of democracy’s seemingly universal triumph came from the failure and decline of alternatives, rather than from affirmative democratic success. Moreover, even democracy’s thin universality is novel, a mere wrinkle in history. Less than a century ago, it was common to say that democracies were weak, enervating, feckless, and that stronger, more demanding forms of government must rise to replace them. The romance of authoritarianism was a major theme of the twentieth century, with fascism being only the most indelible instance, and it would be complacent to suppose that the romance will not return. Not all of its variants are revolutionary; indeed, some of the most important today are technocratic and distinctly conservative in their relation to the existing order of power and authority.

Disgust with democracy grows where democracy palpably fails, and failure has recently seemed to be its specialty. Here we return to the ironic awkwardness of calling for more democracy when democracy seems a formula for failure. Today’s American voters, the country’s political parties, and the government they form are unlikely to strike anyone as the source of attractive answers to the question: What kind of world shall we make together? In fact, their answer is already visible in the world we are making, and its drawbacks are evident. Whatever else it means, a call for deepened democracy had better not amount to “More of this, please!”

It will not do to raise pious calls for democracy just because democracy is abstractly a good thing. The Anthropocene question—what kind of world to make together—should be taken as a challenge to democracy. The test is whether citizens can form the kind of democracy that can address the Anthropocene question, the question of what kind of world to make. A democracy that cannot do this will have marked itself as inadequate to its most basic problems.

A commitment to democracy must not be a pious test of faith in a failing system. It must be a commitment to producing democratic politics that can meet these challenges, that can achieve strength and decisiveness of the most delicate kind: in favor of self-restraint.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

The Fragile Framework

In preparation for the Paris climate talks, comics artist, educator, and Unflattening author Nick Sousanis contributed a comic to a special issue of the journal Nature. Titled The Fragile Framework and co-authored with longtime climate writer Richard Monastersky, the comic examines the 25-year quest for a global climate treaty.

As the work brings readers through the disappointments of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the shortcomings of the subsequently-enacted Kyoto Protocol, and the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations, the complicated politics give way to the devastating realities of a warming planet.

The comic, the first panels of which are below, is available for download, will be printed in Nature, and was slated for distribution to attendees of the Paris talks, which began earlier today.

(SPOILER ALERT) You Are Not An Ape!

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

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In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.