Alun Salt in Botany One:

There’s more recognition that ecological restoration can be an essential tool in fighting climate change, and there are many projects aimed at restoring degraded forests to capture carbon. Still, the focus on forests ignores much of the land in the tropics that would not naturally be forested. A team of scientists is arguing that people need to become aware of other habitats and their value.

There’s increased understanding that not only do we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions, we also need to pull it from the atmosphere. Recently trees have come into fashion as the answer. This need has led to the Trillion Tree Campaign and a company in the UK planting giant redwoods to offset a lifetime’s carbon on the basis that “planting native trees to combat climate change is a little like bringing a water pistol to a gun fight.” Ecologists working outside forests could feel a little neglected. Research recently published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Fernando A. O. Silveira and colleagues showed that they’d be right. And it’s not just the public that is fixating on trees. The study shows that scientists and policymakers are focussing disproportionately on trees too. This problem, which they label Biome Awareness Disparity or BAD, could have consequences for conservation in the future.

More here.

Upon hearing the glacier’s been declared officially dead

That hollering wind catches again
in my throat the way it once
caught at our tent all night it hasn’t
died down by morning blowing
open my mind’s shutters to that
interminable static snowfield ascent
with neither ropes nor poles
cold’s iron taste sunlight banging
like a gate in my sternum i grew old
expecting the crevasse-edge to crack
breakage i still carry in my pack
though years have fallen through us
and we’ve little occasion to speak
the glacier is dead news i zip
into a cool hidden pocket and keep
walking deforming and flowing
under the weight of zero gathering
a force that sucks the world we
knew through its infinite mouth

by Sara Burant
from the Ecotheo Review

Scott Samuelson in The Hedgehog Review:

The pandemic has unveiled the reality behind what’s been vexing the academic humanities for decades. Classes went online, as business demanded. Classes returned to in-person, as business demanded. Since humanities enrollments have been declining, naturally higher education has been hiring more administrators to hire consultants to figure out how to attract what we’ve grown used to calling its customer base—or, if that doesn’t pan out, to provide a rationale for cutting its programs. When students and administrators aren’t teaming up against professors for not delivering what the customer wants, all parties seem to have made a non-aggression pact for reasons that have almost nothing to do with liberal education.

Fear not, payers of exorbitant tuition and legislative defunders of the public good, our institutions have all been taking ample time away from class to generate epic assessment reports that quantify our continuous quality improvement in the latest management lingo. In their new book Permanent Crisis, Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter argue persuasively that crisis talk is constitutive of the modern academic humanities. But this is the first time I’ve looked around the room at a faculty meeting and realized that my colleagues were inwardly doing early-retirement math.

Miraculously, the pandemic has revealed to me where the humanities aren’t in crisis.

More here.

Interview by Charles Weiner at the website of the American Institute of Physics:

Weiner: Let me ask at this point whether there were any brothers or sisters in the family?

Feynman: There was a sister. There was a brother that came after approximately three years. Or maybe I was five, four, six, three, I don’t remember. But that brother died, after a relatively short time, like a month or so. I can still remember that, so I can’t have been too young, because I can remember especially that the brother had a finger bleeding all the time. That’s what happened — it was some kind of disease that didn’t heal. And also, asking the nurse how they knew whether it was a boy or a girl, and being taught: it’s by the shape of the ear — and thinking that that’s rather strange. There’s so much difference in the world between men and women that they should bother to make any difference, a boy from a girl, with just the shape of the ear! It didn’t sound like a sensible thing. Now, I remember that I had another, a sister, when I was nine years old, so it’s possible that I’m remembering my question at the age of nine or ten, and not at the age of the other child, because it sounds incredible to me now that I would have had such a deep thought about society at the earlier age. I don’t know. I can’t tell you what age I was, but I remember that, because it was an interesting answer. I couldn’t understand it really. They make such a fuss — everybody dresses differently; they go to so much trouble, their hair different — just because the ear shape is different? What sort of an answer is that?

More here.

Abhijit Banerjee in The Print:

Many people have told me that they cannot cook to save their lives. I don’t believe them. A lot of them can build a dresser out of an IKEA box – despite the fact that the instructions read like they were written by a wall-eyed robot whose first language was Esperanto, while writing code in C++ or programming a television set to switch between the news and a soccer match. How could it be possible that they are not able to follow a simple set of instructions? 

Most culinary disasters, of which there are many, come from either underconfidence or overconfidence, and usually both. What undermines confidence is in part the memory of past disasters, cakes that leaked dough, meat that tasted like old leather, fish that suddenly melted into the stew, combined with the mysterious language that most cookbooks adopt.

My favourite example is from a Bengali cookbook that I owned when I first moved to the United States, which tells you, blandly, to wait till the onions have a nice colour. What is a nice colour, I would wonder, watching the onions go from translucent white to a rich golden, a reddish brown, a darker brown and finally a charred black. When should I have stopped?

More here.

Alex Williams in The New York Times:

Before she married her husband, Kiersten Little considered him ideal father material. “We were always under the mentality of, ‘Oh yeah, when you get married, you have kids,” she said. “It was this expected thing.” Expected, that is, until the couple took an eight-month road trip after Ms. Little got her master’s degree in public health at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, N.C. “When we were out west — California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho — we were driving through areas where the whole forest was dead, trees knocked over,” Ms. Little said. “We went through southern Louisiana, which was hit by two hurricanes last year, and whole towns were leveled, with massive trees pulled up by their roots.” Now 30 and two years into her marriage, Ms. Little feels “the burden of knowledge,” she said. The couple sees mounting disaster when reading the latest climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. Anxiety about having children has set in.

“Over the last year I thought, ‘Oh my God, I have to make a decision, it’s not that far away,” she said. “But I don’t know how I could change my mind. Over the next 10 years, I feel like there are only going to be more reasons to not want to have a kid, not the other way around.” Such fears are not necessarily unfounded. Every new human comes with a carbon footprint. In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

More here.

Scott Sayare in Harper’s:

Like many of the great perfumers, Jean Carles was a son of Grasse, a country town in the hills north of Cannes, on the French Riviera. Grasse, once a state unto itself, sits in a natural amphitheater of south-facing limestone cliffs, at the head of a valley of meadows sloping gently to the sea. The combined effect of this geography and the dulcet Mediterranean climate is a harvest of roses, jasmine, and bitter-orange blossoms that is exceptionally fragrant, and for hundreds of years the town has been known as the capital of the perfume trade. When Carles began his training, early in the twentieth century, a priesthood of Grassois perfumers presided over the industry. These so-called nez, or noses, were regarded with an awe of the sort that attaches, perhaps especially in France, to artistic genius. They were vessels of divine talent, their creations as wondrously perfect as the flowers of Grasse.

Would-be nez were initiated through an apprenticeship of several years, during which the secrets of the perfumer’s method were carefully revealed. The language of perfume is borrowed largely from music. Perfumers are said to “compose” their fragrances, merging individual “notes” into sonorous “accords” and arranging those accords in “harmony.” As his training progressed, Carles came to realize with some dismay that, for all its pretensions to art, perfumery proceeded almost entirely by trial and error. The noses selected ingredients by little more than instinct, and dosed them nearly at random. Perfumers worked, Carles later wrote scathingly, “in haphazard fashion, in the expectation of a potential miracle.” Many of the best formulas had been discovered “almost by chance,” he reported, “to the unfeigned surprise of their authors.” He set out to systematize perfumery, to establish a comprehensive theory of fragrance creation.

Carles proposed to arrange the scent realm in an orderly grid.

More here.

Spiderweb

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.

by Kay Ryan
from The Best of It
Grove Press, 2010

Christian Parenti in Nonsite.org:

How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.

In the summer of 2021, a social justice training exercise called the Privilege Walk made headlines when outraged Republican lawmakers Tom Cotton and Dan Crenshaw denounced it on the U.S. Capitol floor as racist. The so-called Privilege Walk, or Power Shuffle, is a workshop activity much beloved by the diversity training industry, in which a group of participants stand together on a line, then each take one step forward or backwards in response to a facilitator reading a series of statements such as: “If you’re a white male, take one step forward. If you were ever made uncomfortable by a joke about your ethnicity, gender, appearance, or sexual orientation, take one step back.” At the end participants find themselves arrayed along a continuum of “privilege.” Thus sorted, discussion ensues.

The Privilege Walk is now a standard element in the diversity training used by nonprofits, churches, universities, corporations, and even some parts of the U.S. military. Proponents of the Walk say it helps us “unlearn oppression” and “build alliances across difference.” Mainstream critics say the exercise propagates divisive identity politics and mock it as foundational to the Oppression Olympics. A Marxist critique would say that the Walk transmogrifies material problems into cultural ones, economic exploitation becomes the more nebulous problem of oppression. Both are forms of domination, yet they are each very distinct. When rendered as oppression, the material problem of class power is replaced by the attitudinal problem of “classism.” Furthermore, the Privilege Walk relies on a methodological individualism that assumes macro-level social phenomena have micro-level causes and solutions.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

Publishers are getting ready to celebrate the centenary of 1922, the year the world emerged from war and pandemic to become recognisably modern. It was then that James Joyce’s Ulysses and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, the USSR and the BBC were established and Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered. If this last example seems slight by comparison, it is worth remembering that the craze for Egyptian hieroglyphics fed directly into art deco, the visual style that is synonymous with the “roaring 20s” to this day.

Nick Rennison has sensibly got in early, bringing out his Scenes from a Turbulent Year while other authors and publishers are still putting the finishing touches to their manuscripts. In this enjoyable slice of popular history, he assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture.

more here.

Charles Johnson at the NY Times:

“There was a period when he was turning out 7,000 words a day,” writes Tomalin. “He kept working at what seems an impossible rate, producing stories so varied one might easily think they came from a team of writers.” Few writers will equal his worldwide impact on letters. With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, he invented the genre of science fiction. A crater on the moon’s far side is named after him. Nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Wells, the futurist, foresaw the coming of aircraft, tanks, the sexual revolution, the atomic bomb, and created the classic templates for every story that has been written about alien invasion (his inspiration for “The War of the Worlds,” says Tomalin, was “Tasmania, and the disaster the arrival of the Europeans had been for its people, who were annihilated”) and time travel (he was the first to imagine such travel made possible by a machine).

more here.

Via Crooked Timber.

Willem deVries in Aeon:

To an unusual degree among the great philosophers, G W F Hegel’s influence has waxed and waned. At his death in 1831, he was the reigning voice in German philosophy. His followers, however, soon split into opposed camps: the Right Hegelians, a conservative and religious group, and the Left Hegelians, a socially radical group including Karl Marx. Amid their squabbles, Hegel’s star began to fade in Germany. But in the late 19th century, it once again rose to prominence in the rest of Europe and in the United States. Certain strains of 20th-century Continental philosophy were deeply marked by his influence, such as French existentialism and the Frankfurt school of critical theory. But 20th-century Anglophone philosophy reacted strongly against the neo-Hegelian thought that dominated the universities at the end of the 19th century. In English-speaking lands (including the US), Hegel has lived under a cloud for the past century: his writing too dense, his ideas too abstract, his politics as well as his theology too suspect. His works have been treated with derision in mainstream Anglophone philosophy, and excluded from the canon that trained philosophers need to master.

The logjam that blocked English-language Hegel studies, however, is finally crumbling, and a number of Americans are leading the way. Again, Hegel’s star rises. It isn’t outlandish to suggest that the new openness to Hegel marks an important inflection point in US philosophy.

More here.

Cedric Durand and Adam Tooze debate if and how the current shortfall in energy supply is directly connected to climate policy. First, Durand over at Sidecar:

[C]apitalism has already experienced the first major economic shock related to the transition beyond carbon. The surge in energy prices is due to several factors, including a disorderly rebound from the pandemic, poorly designed energy markets in the UK and EU which exacerbate price volatility, and Russia’s willingness to secure its long-term energy incomes. However, at a more structural level, the impact of first efforts made to restrict the use of fossil fuels cannot be overlooked. Due to government limits on coal burning, plus shareholders’ growing reluctance to commit to projects that could be largely obsolete in thirty years, investment in fossil fuel has been falling. Although this contraction of the supply is not enough to save the climate, it is still proving too much for capitalist growth.

Putting together several recent events gives a taste of things to come. In the Punjab region of India, severe shortages of coal have caused unscheduled power blackouts. In China, more than half the provincial jurisdictions have imposed strict power-rationing measures. Several companies, including key Apple suppliers, have recently been forced to halt or reduce operations at facilities in Jiangsu province, after local governments restricted the supply of electricity. Those restrictions were an attempt to comply with national emissions targets by restricting coal-fired power generation, which still accounts for about two thirds of China’s electricity.

Next, Tooze over at Chartbook:

The attraction of this kind of argument for a crisis-theorist of a Marxist bent is obvious. It has about it the ring of a contradiction from which one could then derive a general crisis model. It has also had a surprising amount of currency in the pages of the FT. It is, after all, a plausible-seeming scenario. But, as an account of the 2021 energy crisis it is fundamentally misleading. It attributes far too much influence to climate policy and mistakes the basic dynamics of investment in the sector. Read more »