Escape from freedom

We will put our feet against the head of the enemy and crush the python spirit by stepping on the enemy's neck.

-- Max Blumenthal on an instructive moment in the rise of 'true believers' in the contemporary Republican Party: an occasion on which Bishop Muthee and another pastor led the Wasilla congregation in casting out witches.

A river runs with it

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the United States...Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S.

-- NYT

Blended

Florida now has more exotic lizard species than there are natives in the entire Southeast [United States]. On a single tree you could conceivably find plant and animals from six continents, including parrots from South America, mynah birds and Old World climbing ferns from Asia, vervet monkeys from Africa, ladybird beetles from Australia, and feral cats from Europe, via Africa and Asia. In some cases, the recent immigrants would be more genetically diverse than their cousins back home. The state's ecology is a kind of urban legend come true -- the old alligator flushed down the toilet story repeated a thousand times with a thousand species.

Some find this all thrilling. Florida has become an open-air zoo, richer i species than ever before. To others, its the harbinger of a new and depressingly undifferentiated age, when the old biological borders begin to fade and every place starts to look like every other. Ecologists have even given it a name: the Homogecene.

-- from Swamp Things by Burkhard Bilger

Thin ice

It's reported that the Wilkins Ice Shelf is on the brink of collapse and a paper in Nature [1] offers clear evidence that Antactica is warming in step with the rest of the world (BBC, NYT) [2].

Wally Broecker's climate "monster" may be stirring [3].

Barry Lopez wrote Arctic Dreams before present rapid changes in the Polar climates were well understood. [4] But Lopez was haunted by unease at the role of industrial man, alluding to the Eskimo terms ilira, fear that accompanies awe, and kappia, fear in the face of unpredictable violence.

As late as the early industrial period (the early nineteenth century), creatures such as the Greenland right or Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) still resonated with something of the monstrous that had fascinated and appalled earlier Europeans.

A month before she entered Lancaster Sound in 1823, the [British whaler] Cumbrian killed a huge Greenland right [whale], a 57 foot female, in Davis Strait. They came upon her while she was asleep in light ice. Awakened by their approach, she swam slowly once around the ship and then put her head calmly to its bow and began to push. She pushed the ship backward for two minutes before the transfixed crew reacted with harpoons. The incident left the men unsettled. They flinched against such occasional eeriness in their work. [5]

But, Lopez shows, when you pay attention to the remarkable nature of this animal it is men's actions towards them that now seem monstrous:

The skin of [the Greenland right whale] is slightly furrowed to the touch, like coarse-laid paper, and is a velvet black color softened by gray. Under the chin and on the belly the skin turns white. Its dark brown eyes, the size of an ox's, are nearly lost in the huge head. Its blowhole rises prominently, with the shape of a volcano, allowing the whale to surface in narrow cracks in the sea ice to breathe. It is so sensitive to touch that at a bird's footfall a whale asleep at the surface will start wildly. The fiery pain of a harpoon strike can hardly be imagined. (In 1856, a harpooner on the Truelove reported a whale that dived so furiously it took out 1200 yards of line in three and a half minutes before crashing into the ocean floor, breaking is neck and burying its head eight feet deep in the blue black mud.) [6]

Today our "monsters" lurk elsewhere. Ilira kappia stabs us not from behind but from within our own shadows.

Footnotes

1. Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 by Eric Steig et al (doi:10.1038/nature07669). In State of Antarctica: red or blue? at Realclimate, two of the authors try to pre-empt misinterpretation.

2. (Added 27 Jan) Melting ice could push Emperor penguins to extinction

3. See also Attribution of polar warming to human influence by Nathan P. Gillett et al (doi:10.1038/ngeo338).

4. The discovery in 1985 of the "ozone hole" above Antarctica shocked many people into increased awareness of the potential of human activity to substantially affect whole earth systems on a short time scale. It helped pave the way for greater acceptance of the case for anthropogenic global warming. (See Breaking into politics 1980-88 in The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer Weart). Arctic Dreams was published in 1986. I have recently gone back to if for the first time in many years thanks, in part, to a prompt by JML.

5. From the prologue of Arctic Dreams. In Waiting for Salmon (2006), Lopez writes of the fury of many of his compatriots at the idea that nature is anything but a warehouse to be emptied prior to a rapturous departure:

To speak of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity is anathema to people still furious at Darwin for suggesting that 'nature' included man...[In] America, mainstream politics is uninformed by, event hostile to, biology.

6. Lopez quotes the Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross as 'cautiously' suggesting that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. 'A sound estimate of the size of the population today [1986] is 200.' 90% of the indigenous human population may also have died as a result of European incursion and infectious diseases.

Mis-framing

Ashdenizen recalls Anton Chekhov's observation: "it is not the artist's job to solve society's problems, but to state them correctly."

And one could think of a more constructive way to frame some interesting science than with this:

Could sea turtles help us design better helmets and body armor for soldiers?

Islands of the mind

One of the...places now receiving protection, Johnston Atoll, was formerly used to stockpile chemical weapons.

-- US vows 'huge' marine protection.

After almost a thousand miles, we at last saw land -- a tiny, exquisite atoll on the horizon. Johnston Island! I had seen it as a dot on the map and thought, 'What an idyllic place, thousands of miles from anywhere.' As we descended it looked less exquisite: a huge runway bisected the island, and to either side were storage bins, chimneys, and towers: eyeless buildings all enveloped in an orange-red haze...my idyll, my little paradise looked like a realm of hell.

...Migratory fowl stop here by the hundreds of thousands, and in 1926 the island was designated a federal bird reserve. After the Second World War it was acquired by the US Air Force, and 'since then', I read, 'the US military has converted [it] into one of the most toxic places in the Pacific. It was used during the 1950s and '60s for nuclear testing, and is still maintained as a standby test site; one end of the atoll remains radioactive. It was briefly considered as a test site for biological weapons...[and in] 1971 became a depot for thousands of tons of mustard and nerve gas, which are periodically incinerated, releasing dioxin and furan into the air...All personnel on the island are required to have their gas masks ready.

-- from The Island of the Colour-blind by Oliver Sacks (1996)

Exterminate the brutes

The inspector general of the [U.S.] Interior Department has found that agency officials often interfered with scientific work in order to limit protections for species at risk of becoming extinct.

-- NYT.

[See also Olivia Judson, 2 Dec.]

Here comes the chopper

Now, [George W.] Bush has entered into his own midnight period, and it promises to be a dark time indeed. Among the many new regulations—or, rather, deregulations—the Administration has proposed are rules that would: make it harder for the government to limit workers’ exposure to toxins, eliminate environmental review from decisions affecting fisheries, and ease restrictions on companies that blow up mountains to get at the coal underneath them. Other midnight regulations in the works include rules to allow “factory farms” to ignore the Clean Water Act, rules making it tougher for employees to take family or medical leave, and rules that would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act.

-- Elizabeth Kolbert