November 3rd, 2007 | Published in Biology, Ecology, Science, Quotes
At the Tambopata Reserve, Terry Erwin used a bug bomb to collect all the insects from a single leguminous tree in the rain forest. I identified the ants in his sample and found 43 species in 26 genera, approximately equal to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.
–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 198
October 11th, 2007 | Published in Links, Ecology, Consumerism
Catalog Choice is “a free service that allows you to decide what gets in your mailbox. Use it to reduce your mailbox clutter, while helping save natural resources.” Sounds like a good idea to me.
September 22nd, 2007 | Published in Ecology, Consumerism, Culture
Here is a great story about a family who got rid of their car and replaced it with bikes and public transportation. I’ve wanted to do this for a couple years now, but just haven’t had the courage.
September 19th, 2007 | Published in Evolution, Biology, Agriculture, Ecology, Quotes
Corn has succeeded in domesticating us.
–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 23
August 3rd, 2007 | Published in War, Ecology, History, Quotes
Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.
–Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006), p. 125
July 3rd, 2007 | Published in Agriculture, Ecology, Food, Consumerism, Books & Reading
I finally got around to reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan a few days ago. I’m about half way through and it’s excellent. Pollan says we have a “national eating disorder” and highlights the irony that our stereotyped unhealthy country is so obsessed with “health food” and diets. He walks through his personal journey with industrial agriculture, organic agriculture, and hunting/gathering. The first 1/3 of the book is devoted to corn, because we eat more corn than anything else, though we don’t know it. It’s in everything, quite literally.
This is a great book to read if you’re interested in the food you eat, which I suppose should be everyone. Actually, if you’re not interested in the food you eat, this might be exactly what you need to read. You’ll never look at industrial (or industrial organic) food quite the same way again.
There are many interesting quotes I’ve marked, which are sure to find their way onto the site in the next few months.
June 14th, 2007 | Published in Progress, Ecology, History, Quotes, Technology
If I look back over the last hundred years it seems to me that we have lost more than we have gained, that what we have lost was valuable, and that what we have gained is trifling, for what we have lost was old and what we have gained is merely new.
–Edwin Muir in The Story and the Fable, quoted in Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 74
June 13th, 2007 | Published in Ecology, History, Quotes
Tampering with the natural order was a hazardous business. Franklin told a story of how an excess of blackbirds in New England’s cornfields prompted the locals to pass laws encouraging the destruction of those pests. The blackbirds were duly diminished, but the New Englanders soon discovered their meadows engulfed in worms on which the blackbirds had fed. “Finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their black-birds.” Drawing the moral, Franklin cautioned, “Whenever we attempt to mend the scheme of Providence and to interfere with the government of the world, we had need be very circumspect lest we do more harm than good.”
–H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 220