The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Off Our Meds: Guest Post: The Ebola Numbers

By: Robin Mejia | October 6, 2014

Welcome to “Off Our Meds,” a weeklong series in which LWON examines some scary issues in medicine. We won’t resort to fear mongering, because we don’t have to. Medicine is scary enough as it is.

Last week, over at The Atlantic, Jacoba Urist wrote about a truism in journalism: deaths closer to home matter more.

This sounds ugly but makes sense intuitively. We feel the death of a loved one in a completely different way than a death across town, let alone a death across the country. It’s not surprising that news coverage reflects a similar ethos.

Proximity is both geographic and cultural. Think of the racist old adage from across the other Atlantic: “1000 wogs, 50 frogs, and a single Briton.” And, Urist writes, violence and novelty play into newsworthiness, too. “A tornado that kills schoolchildren is horribly sad; a young man who guns down kindergarteners holds a mirror to the society in which he lives.”

This means that pretty much all factors are working against good coverage of the Ebola epidemic right now. Until last week, Ebola had only hit countries that most Americans have never even contemplated visiting. And the bump in coverage caused by the diagnosis in Texas has been more about the disease hitting the U.S. than about the thousands dying in Africa. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Ann Finkbeiner | October 4, 2014

September 29 – October 3, 2014

You think a place like L.A. just happened to sprawl like that? that our various civil and environmental messes just happened? Nope, says guest Erika Schoenberger, a lot of times we planned ’em like that.

An evocative argument over whether Native Americans came over the land bridge, as the white guys think, or sprung right up out of the earth, as the Native Americans think. Craig says, don’t choose, have both.

Jessa is walking across the ice one day, sees enormous and beautiful dogs running fast straight at her, thinks to herself, “Those don’t look like dogs,” and sure enough, they’re not. A redux post that I’m delighted to see again.

Second guest of the week — LWON is lucky in its guests — Laura Paskus moved to the Southwest, watched the Rio Grande turn from a grand river to a ghost river, a dust river. But she’s not giving up on it.

Helen walks to work now. It takes longer. She’s happier for it. It’s more interesting, what with the plants, the bugs, and the busted-up piano. She stops and plays the piano.

Walking With Open Eyes

By: Helen Fields | October 3, 2014

My commute is the best part of my day.

I know this is not normal. I live in the Northeast megalopolis. Commuting means drivers who are great at texting but unfamiliar with turn signals. Commuting means listening to people paid to be “funny” on drive-time radio. Commuting means waiting on a crowded platform for a train that might come and might have air conditioning.

When I started a full-time job three months ago, I decided to try walking to work. My office is in the next suburb up, one metro stop away; it takes me 15 minutes on public transportation, or 35 on foot.

I start by crossing the entrance to the metro station—a little awkward, going perpendicular to the inward flow of business-dressed people. I pass pretty houses and unremarkable apartment buildings. The way continues along the rail lines, where weeds grow wild and you can tell if a kid with a can of blue spray paint came through last night. I walk past a community college and a community garden, past a row of body shops, then finish in a low-rise stretch of restaurants and car rental agencies. Continue reading →

Guest Post: My Unhard Heart

By: Laura Paskus | October 2, 2014

Having grown up in Connecticut, I spent most of my childhood exploring streams, creeks, shorelines and marshes. Some of those places weren’t just mucky, they were dirty (as in “this is why we have the Clean Water Act” dirty). But all around, there were lush, green, magical places.

When I moved to the arid Southwest, I couldn’t wait to plunge into the Rio Grande. As I kid, I’d envisioned a mighty river carrying Spanish galleons and tossing barges about.

So, um, yeah, it’s nothing like that. Continue reading →

Redux: A Dead World at Sunset

By: Jessa Gamble | October 1, 2014

This was first published in March of 2011. As winter descends upon the sub-Arctic once more, I revisit these moments of awe on a frozen lake.
“It may not strike you as a marvel; it would not, perhaps, unless you were standing in the middle of a dead world at sunset, but that was where I stood.”

I’ve been carrying that sentence around in my head, semi-colon and all, for years. Set down by the phenomenal nature writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, it referred to a flock of geese flying overhead during a solitary excursion into the fossil yards of the Badlands. It easily could describe any such moment of wonder in the wilderness – the starting point or rallying incident for many a career of scientific inquiry. Last week, I had a close encounter that brought me back to Loren Eiseley’s visceral approach to field observation.

It happens about a block away from my house, if that length can be applied to a short distance along a frozen lake, and it begins with a huge, gorgeous dog tearing across the snow in my precise direction from the Northwest corner of Yellowknife’s Frame Lake, where the highway jogs out to the airport.

I look around for the owner, perhaps unseen around the next bay. From the single-minded dash of the dog, they must be calling furiously. I hear nothing but a distant skidoo.

Continue reading →

Those Who Emerged from the Earth

By: Craig Childs | September 30, 2014

As we know by now, science is not the last word on anything. It is one story among many, and it alone doesn’t satisfy every inquiry.

Over the last few years I’ve been visiting landscapes associated with the Bering land bridge in western Alaska. Most archaeologists believe this is where the first people crossed from Asia to North America in the late Pleistocene, a theory which has been bolstered by recent genetic ties found between modern Native America and Asian haptolytpes. But there is more than one way of telling a story of human arrival.

Nikki Cooley, a Navajo river guide from Northern Arizona, told me she didn’t believe in the land bridge, at least not as the origin of Native American ancestry. To her, the migration from Asia to North America never happened. Her people, she said, came from the ground. This she learned from her elders, who learned it from theirs, a bloodline much closer to the first people than most scientists who are telling their very different, empirical story. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Planning to Sprawl

By: Erica Schoenberger | September 29, 2014

I’ve been teaching undergraduates for a while now, various takes on the general theme of the environment and society. Here are some things I’ve noticed. The students often believe that they have discovered the environment and all the bad things we are doing in it. Up to now, they suppose, we have been unaware, self-centered and lazy, so we drive everywhere, recklessly leave the lights on and never give a thought to our carbon footprint. They also seem to believe that if they just go out and tell everyone, we will stop misbehaving.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great that they are on a mission to save the earth. We should all be on such a mission. I want them to understand what they are really up against, though, so they can be more effective.

My students – and a lot of environmentalists – focus on our individual behaviors: if we would all just bike to work and eat local organic food, things would get better. This isn’t wrong. Our choices matter and Americans, plainly, could consume far less than they do without suffering. But there’s a hitch – or, rather, three hitches. One is that while Americans may be, on the whole, overstuffed, much of the rest of the world needs more, not less: more industry, more energy, more food, more clean water. A second is that a capitalist economic system needs to grow to survive. This isn’t a policy option. If you think capitalism is going to be around for a while, which I do, we have to figure out another way of being sane in nature. Lastly, we don’t have unlimited degrees of freedom in our choices whatever our intentions. We get to choose, sure, but our choices are structured by larger social realities. Try living without a car in Los Angeles.

Aha! Isn’t LA the perfect example of how we chose suburban sprawl, trapping ourselves in our cars? All of the familiar post-war phenomena – the GI Bill, Levittown, white flight, the interstate highway system – allowed us to maroon ourselves in ways that we may now regret but couldn’t have foreseen. Continue reading →

Last Word

By: Christie Aschwanden | September 27, 2014

September 22-26, 2014

Erik makes the case that Donald Trump is actually a performance artist — Andy Kaufman in disguise.

Ann explained how it happened that between 1993 and 2013 about 10 percent of American electricity came from the Russian nuclear program. “You don’t just propose an idea,” the man responsible for the program says, “you go do something about it.”

Richard catalogued some of the errors and myths found in a wall panel at the Galileo museum and posits that myths take hold when they seem to reinforce a useful universal lesson. “They endure if we really want to believe that lesson.”

In between trips to the loo, guest Jennifer Holland wondered what exactly is in that stuff used to clear out one’s bowels prior to a colonoscopy.

Michelle told us the story of Lonesome Larry, a dead sockeye salmon who recently toured the state of Idaho.