The conservative movement to save the planet

OriginalKate Aronoff at Harper's Magazine:

At first glance, it might be easy to pass Debbie Dooley off as a political sideshow—a novel and energetic bundle of contradictory beliefs, topped with curly blond hair and a Bayou drawl. During the Republican primary, she wrote op-eds for Breitbart News supporting Donald Trump. She is frequently billed as one of the founders of the Tea Party, and she holds a spot on the board of the Tea Party Patriots, an organization founded to push the Republican Party closer toward its fringe on every issue from taxes to immigration.

She is also one of the country’s most effective grassroots campaigners for clean energy.

Dooley is the co-founder of Floridians for Solar Choice (F.S.C.), a coalition that has been instrumental in implementing pro-solar policies in the Sunshine State. Last August, they convinced 73 percent of voters to pass a statewide ballot initiative known as Amendment 4, which exempted solar panels from being factored into the property taxes paid by homeowners and businesses. Then, in November, F.S.C. helped defeat Amendment 1, a measure lobbied for by the state’s biggest power providers that would have restricted the use of rooftop solar panels. Energy companies and dark money donors had poured $25 million into attempts to defeat Amendment 4, and another $20 million into trying to pass Amendment 1. In both cases, Dooley took on the Koch Brothers and won.

more here.

The Tragedy of Men

Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic:

Lead_960The past seven days have been a cheering time for masculinity, which—though frequently declared to be in crisis—appears to be more performatively virile and swaggeringly cocksure than ever. In Brussels, the American president and the French president participated in a handshake that looked more like a ritual dismemberment, gripping each other’s hands so tightly that Donald Trump’s characteristic grin wilted into a dyspeptic rictus of pain and dismay. In Montana, a millionaire candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives slammed a reporter to the ground, breaking his glasses in the process, while commentators on the right crowed that the spectacle of a “puny” journalist being manhandled was a sign of order being restored to the universe. This resurgence of machismo could be interpreted as both symptom and cause of the young Trump presidency. While many voters were appalled by a candidate who alluded to his penis size during a national debate, bragged about his testosterone scores to Dr. Oz, and boasted about his license to commit acts of sexual assault, a sizable minority seemed to respond to Trump’s old-fashioned embodiment of the masculine id. In October, a poll conducted by PRRI and The Atlantic found that many conservative men felt threatened by their diminishing status in society, and saw Trump as the candidate who could restore their cachet. But, as the British artist Grayson Perry asks in his new book, at what cost?

The Descent of Man, a pithy and entertaining tract studded with illustrations and personal anecdotes, would be unremarkable if it were just another diatribe about toxic masculinity in all its forms. But what sets it apart is Perry’s compassion for modern men, who, he argues, are floundering thanks to a model of manhood that’s thousands of years out of date. On the very first page, he describes watching a father berate his son while wearing “the face of someone who hands down the rage and pain of what it is to be a man.” The result of this ongoing bequest, he observes, is that men are “conditioned to be something that is no longer needed,” primed for conflict and dominance and aggression in societies that are evolving to prize tolerance and emotional intelligence instead.

More here.

Biodiversity moves beyond counting species

Rachel Cernansky in Nature:

GettyImages-128123166Emmett Duffy was about 5 metres under water off the coast of Panama, when a giant, tan-and-white porcupinefish caught his eye. The slow-moving creature would have been a prime target for predators if not for the large, treelike branches of elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) it was sheltering under. The sighting was a light-bulb moment for Duffy, a marine biologist. He'd been to places in the Caribbean where corals were more abundant and more diverse, but smaller; the fish there were always small, too. Here, in the Bocas Del Toro archipelago, he was seeing a variety of big fish among the elkhorns. “The reason these large fish were able to thrive,” he says, “was that there were places for them to hide and places for them to live.” For Duffy, that encounter with the porcupinefish (Diodon hystrix) brought to life a concept that had long been simmering in the back of his head: that the health of an ecosystem may depend not only on the number of species present, but also on the diversity of their traits. This idea, which goes by the name of functional-trait ecology, had been part of his lab work for years but had always felt academic and abstract, says Duffy, now director of the Smithsonian Institution's Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network in Washington DC.

It's an idea that's increasingly in vogue for ecologists. Biodiversity, it states, doesn't have to be just about the number of a species in an ecosystem. Equally important to keeping an ecosystem healthy and resilient are the species' different characteristics and the things they can do — measured in terms of specific traits such as body size or branch length. That shift in thinking could have big implications for ecology. It may be necessary for understanding and forecasting how plants and animals cope with a changing climate. And functional diversity has started to influence how ecologists think about conservation; some governments have even started to incorporate traits into their management policies. Belize, for example, moved several years ago to protect parrotfish species from overfishing — not necessarily because their numbers are dwindling, but because the fish clean algae from coral and are crucial to reef survival.

More here.

Thursday Poem

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

by W.B. Yeats
from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats