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

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.

The Legacy of Lonesome Larry

By: Michelle Nijhuis | September 26, 2014

This story has a happy ending. I promise.

Every year before the turn of the last century, some 150,000 sockeye salmon made an epic journey: They traveled from the Pacific Ocean up the Columbia River, hung a right into the Snake, a left into the Salmon, and finally, after swimming upstream for 900 miles, arrived in the clear, icy waters of central Idaho’s Redfish Lake. In late summer and early fall, the lake was so thick with sockeye that white settlers named it after the fishes’ scales, which turn from silvery-blue to brilliant red in breeding season. But in 1913, a new dam on the Salmon blocked fish access to Redfish Lake. After the Sunbeam Dam was blown up in 1934, the sockeye began to return, but their numbers were still recovering in 1962, when the first large federal dam went up across their migratory route in the Snake River. Eventually, four large dams were built across their route in the Snake, and another four across the Columbia.

The tens of thousands of sockeye that had struggled upstream to Redfish Lake each year became a few thousand, and then to few hundred, and then a few dozen. In 1991, there were four. In 1992, there was one.

His name was Lonesome Larry, and while his life was unlucky, his death was quite another matter.

Continue reading →

The Writings on the Wall

By: Richard Panek | September 25, 2014

You’d think a wall panel in the Galileo gallery in the Galileo wing of the Galileo Museum would be a good place to get an accurate context for Galileo’s historical significance.

You’d be wrong:

“These astronomical discoveries heralded a revolution destined to demolish an image of the universe that had lasted for two thousand years. The profound shock of that revolution, undermining faith in man’s privileged position in the universe, aroused violent antagonism that was to claim Galileo himself as victim.”

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Continue reading →