Extrahuman

The preface to Contours of climate justice (pdf) includes a note written in 1951 by Dag Hammarskjöld which, say the authors, show with particular clarity his deep bonds with the wilderness. What mattered for Hammarskjöld was the:

…extrahuman in the experience of the greatness of Nature. This does not allow itself to be reduced to an expression of our human reactions, nor can we share in it by expressing them. Unless we each find a way to chime in as one note in the organic whole, we shall only observe ourselves observing the interplay of its thousand components in a harmony outside our experience of it as harmony.

I find that last sentence confusing, but the main drift of the passage is probably on target.

Out-evolving extinction

...where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair.

If [as experiments with bacteria indicate] most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a new trait [that allows them to thrive in radically different circumstances] — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.

This is interesting, but how far can one make an analogy between micro and macro-organisms? It's one thing for bacteria to evolve to consume altogether different nutrients -- say methane rather than sugars. But multi-cellular organisms are, I guess, incapable evolving such a change. Hares and lions will never switch to eating, say, sulphur. Their best chance is if adverse anthropogenic pressures are reduced.

'The goddess must have blood'

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with traditional kukri knives began their task of decapitating more than 10,000 buffalo in a dusty enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police.

Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads.

A right-handed snail-snake

Snail asymmetry has driven the evolution of a unique asymmetry in snakes [and], as Darwin would have predicted, the snakes also appear to be driving snail evolution.

-- Sean B. Carroll reports on findings by Takahiro Asami, Masaki Hoso and Michio Hori.

Enypniastes, a sea cucumber

from WHO via BBC. Hat tip: MP.

Koala barely

According to the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, [Sam the Koala] was the subject of widespread comment at the G20 summit in London in April this year, and he issued a personal tribute to this "symbol of hope" when Sam died six months later. "It's tragic that Sam the koala is no longer with us," Rudd said, just restraining himself from decreeing a state funeral.

-- from Koala Wars by Gideon Haigh

From the Cretaceous bestiary

Kaprosuchus saharicus is one of five 100 million year old fossilized "monstrous and surprisingly diverse" relatives of the crocodile recently found in Niger and Morocco. [1] The 6-meter-long animal had an armoured snout for ramming its prey and three sets of tusks for ripping flesh.

Science magazine comments that "each of the five ancient animals could have answered a casting call for Star Trek". But Kaprosuchus would have resonated with the medieval and ancient imagination too, combining as it does attributes we associate with a dog, a boar, a crocodile and a dragon.

P.S. 23 Nov: the crocs have been given nicknames. The biggest is SuperCroc. PancakeCroc had an impressively flat head. BoarCroc (Kaprosuchus saharicus) had fierce-looking fangs and an armored snout for ramming. DogCroc had a fleshy nose like a dog and was limber enough to gallop. DuckCroc had broad, overhanging snout resembling a duckbill. And RatCroc had a pair of buckteeth in the lower jaw that were used to dig for food.

'The beast itself'

Daniel White's Mandlebulb

Bird poems

Tim Dee and Simon Armitage choose ten.

I like this by Basho:

My eyes following
until the bird was lost at sea
found a small island

Ancient baby

We don't yet have sight of "the coelacanth's mating ritual" that Andrew McNeillie hopes to see but we do have sight of a baby.

'The music of knapping'

For hundreds of thousands of years we have made stone tools: people sitting together under the trees, chipping and tapping and knapping their flint, their obsidian, their jasper. And their multiple rhythms, together with the sound of cicadas, and birdsong, would have been musical.

-- from Time in Stone by Emily Young.

'More like rainbows and mirages than raindrops or boulders'

You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception -- the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world...

We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are drive to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality. The "I" we create for each of us is a quintessential example of such a perceived or invented reality, and it does such a good job of explaining our behavior that it becomes the hub around which the rest of the world seems to rotate. But this "I" notion is just a shorthand for a vast mass of seething and churning of which we are necessarily unaware...

But our own unfathomability is a lucky thing for us! Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how miniscule we are in comparison to the vast universe in which we live, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in a state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our our creation -- categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.

-- Douglas Hofstadter (2007)

'Intolerable beauty'

Chris Jordan's photographs of the plastic in the stomachs of baby albatrosses on Midway atoll are, he says, an attempt to communicate what is "an incredible tragedy symbolic on many levels":

Before going out there we met with a group of Hawaiian elders and received their teachings from Hawaiian spiritual tradition..one of the women said to me ‘don’t think of the birds as being victims. She said in the Hawaiian tradition they are sentient beings intentionally bringing to themselves the garbage of the world as a way of passing on a message. And whether or not you accept that as being true, I thought it was fascinating this idea that there’s a message that is being transmitted through the death of these birds...

...It was a very bizarre experience to feel the aesthetic beauty of something so horrible and yet [it] can be a portal...If I took ugly photographs of a scary subject no one would want to look at them. So I think by presenting these things in a beautiful way it not only honors the complexity of the issue, it also draws the viewer into...a difficult conversation with himself that he might not otherwise be willing to have.

In a statement on his web site, Jordan says:

...The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

All of this is convincing and useful. But we also need the phrase 'intolerable ugliness'.

On beauty (2)

There seem to be certain constants which all cultures have found 'beautiful': among them -- certain flowers, trees, forms of rock, birds, animals, the moon, running water.

One is obliged to acknowledge a coincidence or perhaps a congruence. The evolution of natural forms and the evolution of human perception have coincided to produce the phenomenon of a potential recognition: what is and what we can see( and by seeing also feel) sometimes meet at a point of affirmation. This point, this coincidence, is two-faced: what has been seen is recognized and affirmed and, at the same time, the seer is affirmed by what he sees. For a brief moment one finds oneself -- without the pretensions of a creator -- in the position of God in the first chapter of Genesis...And he saw that it was good. The aesthetic emotion before nature derive, I believe, from this double affirmation.

Yet we de do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live...in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope...


...Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Are sets out to transform the potential recognition into an unceasing one.

-- from The White Bird by John Berger (1985)

Related: Nicholas Humphrey On beauty.

A hundred to one

If we were to expand marine protection from less than 1% to 30%, say, what would that cost? Establishing reserves, policing them and so on, would cost about $40-50bn per year - and the annual benefit would be about $4-5 trillion.

-- says Pavan Sukdev, study leader of TEEB. The study also finds the ongoing loss of forest comes with an annual pricetag of US $2-5 trillion.

Bye bye bluefin

Catches [of bluefin tuna] in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable. "It's like the year before the collapse of the northern cod," says Dan Pauly.

More widely, a 2009 assessment of the state of commercial fisheries around the world found that 80 percent of fish stocks are either fully exploited, overexploited, or have collapsed (via Center for Biological Diversity).

Through a glass

Perhaps it is objectively true that only poetry can talk of birth and origin. Because true poetry invokes the whole of language (it breathes with everything it has not said), just as the origin invokes the whole of life, the whole of Being.

The mother orangutan has come back, this time with her baby. She is sitting right up against the glass. The children in the audience have come to watch her. Suddenly, I think of a Madonna and Child by Cosimo Tura. I'm not indulging in sentimental confusion. I haven't forgotten I'm talking about apes any more than I've forgotten I'm watching a theatre. The more one emphasizes the millions of years, the more extraordinary the expressive gestures become. Arms, fingers, eyes, always eyes...A certain way of being protective, a certain gentleness -- if one could feel the fingers on one's neck one would say a certain tenderness -- which has endured for five million years.[1]

-- from Ape Theatre by John Berger (1990).

Footnote

[1] More likely, the last common ancestor of orangutans and humans lived about 13 million years ago.

Vatican suggests limits to corporate expansion strategy

If other intelligent beings exist, it's not certain that they need redemption.

-- Father Jose Gabriel Funes, the chief papal astronomer.

(see also Just wondering and Whereof can one not speak)

Birostris

image from Save our Seas accompanying an interview with Andrea Marshall, who has set up Giantfish, a ray adoption scheme.

See also first film of 'giant' sting ray.

Widening gyre

One Rainbow runner...had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

-- from Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash by Lindsey Hoshaw.

At the time of writing the background to the header of this blog is a detail of trash found in the stomach of an albatross. See also photos by Chris Jordan.