What are we humans doing to biodiversity in the Anthropocene? Causing Earth’s sixth mass extinction? (e.g. Barnosky et al. 2011 and others). How about something completely new to biodiversity on this planet? How about a massive globalization of species leading to the widespread emergence of novel ecosystems enriched with exotic and domesticated species (Hobbs et al. 2009). That’s the main […]
What happens when a talented science writer brings together a diverse group of ecologists and conservationists chasing a new vision of nature? If that writer is Emma Marris, the answer is: Rambunctious Garden– a new book to be released this September 1. Using her great gift for storytelling, Marris tours the reader through the contemporary ecological labyrinth that constitutes “saving […]
“We cannot expect nature to remain in a constant condition and thus provide us with a simple solution to the questions of what is “natural” and what is desirable.” (Botkin 1990, p 181) . Just one of many great thoughts in Daniel Botkin‘s 1990 classic: Discordant Harmonies: a New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. I’d seen Botkin’s Environmental Science textbook, […]
Do you feel uneasy? Maybe your local ecosystem has taken a turn for the worse. According to ecopsycology, we humans suffer profound discomfort when our habitat feels like it is being degraded. As discussed in an article in this week’s NY times magazine. Ecopsychology proposes that “an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind”, and an imperiled planet can have the same […]
By Jonathan Dandois Will the census of the future ask homeowners how many trees they have on their property? With humanity now faced with a changing climate under even the most stringent efforts to reduce carbon emissions, carbon accounting has become a hot topic for scientists, politicians and economists. While carbon accounting at the scale of individual households and their […]
Should we conserve nature even if it is not wild? Humans have transformed 40% of earth’s ice-free land into crop fields, pastures and settlements, and have embedded another 37% within used and populated landscapes (anthromes). While 23% is still free of people and their use of land, these remaining wildlands are mostly found in the driest and coldest parts of […]
Not only do humans burn away forests to enhance their food supply, they also do it when they battle each other! Or so says a study published by Zhen Li and his colleagues this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Li et al. 2009). By linking a careful investigation of paleoclimate indicators from sediments with burning […]
by Jonathan Dandois Here is an open question to the group and readers: Is there a typical human habitat, and if so, what does it look like? More than likely, there is a distribution of different habitat types that humans occupy at a global, regional, and even local levels, but perhaps there are some common patterns. I realize that the […]
by Diann Prosser The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has recently released the first comprehensive digital map of wetlands across China, based on remote sensing imagery. The effort was led by PengGong, of CAS Institute of Remote Sensing Applications in Beijing and University of California, Berkeley. Wetland map classification was based on Landsat (ETM+) imagery (1999 to 2002) obtained from […]
While you are driving to work, plume of carbon drifting lazily into the sky, do you ever wonder where all of your carbon will end up? Now, work by Simon Lewis and a large team of collaborators (Lewis et al 2009) have shown that about 1/6th of the carbon emitted annually to the atmosphere by combustion of fossil fuels (total […]
Are pristine rainforests the only ones that matter? We know that forests do change as they age, developing some unique characteristics when mature, and that some species cannot live outside of large swaths of ancient tropical forests. But what about the rest of tropical forests- the younger ones, the forests that people live in or have cut in recent decades […]
The Biosphere is home to all life on Earth. Now that we humans are living in and/or using almost all of it, the future of the biosphere is in our hands. Keeping human influence out of the biosphere is no longer a relevant conservation strategy. At this point in history, the only way that the biosphere will be a desirable […]