Bracing Myself
09/04/08 17:59
I'm reasonably tall — 6'2" (1.83 m), with mostly a normal-sized torso but freakishly long legs. Normally I don't think about this very much, but preparing for a series of long flights always brings the long legs into prominence. The trips next week include one flight across North America, then across the Atlantic (all in one day), and then two days later another flight across Eurasia to Delhi. That one will be the killer. The way back will be even worse, reversing the steps without any long layovers to stretch out. No doubt I will be shorter and crippled by my return. Read More...
Comments
The Round Tables
09/04/08 15:56
Perhaps my favorite anecdote about China is the prevalence of round tables in restaurants. I almost never saw square tables, and I quickly learned upon entering a room -- even for a relatively casual meal — to turn to a ranking Chinese colleague and ask, Where do you want me to sit?
Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
Read More...
Almost invariably we were seated in private rooms with our own set of dedicated serving staff. A rotating lazy susan sat in the middle of each table. All of these features are quite different than in the West, of course. But the seating rank was perhaps the surprising element. Asking where to sit was important because these seating positions are carefully ranked. Some restaurants even had numbers at the seats, and two very nice private dining rooms actually had a small LED screen in front of each chair that could be recalibrated for groups that were smaller than the total number of seats available.
Read More...
Odd Jobs
07/04/08 14:23
The hard rains of the past few days have kept me locked inside except for an almost aborted trail run along a muddy, hilly trail. I came back soaked from the rain and sweat, my tights brown on black from the mud, and hands numb from the cold. But I could hear and see lots of birds moving through, even a few varied thrush that aren't normally at lower altitudes. I also heard my first hermit thrush this morning -- another lovely song. To keep from going stir crazy form being stuck inside, I've turned to work and this blog. And a conference call this afternoon -- including North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe -- brought what has become a familiar issue back to the front.
I've visited probably over a dozen cities and several national WWF offices in my role as a "freshwater climate adaptation specialist." You're probably thinking, What does any of that mean? Truly, a most excellent question. A definition of "climate adaptation" and "freshwater climate adaptation" will have to wait for another entry. Instead, I'd rather talk about the confusion itself as a phenomenon.
Read More...
I've visited probably over a dozen cities and several national WWF offices in my role as a "freshwater climate adaptation specialist." You're probably thinking, What does any of that mean? Truly, a most excellent question. A definition of "climate adaptation" and "freshwater climate adaptation" will have to wait for another entry. Instead, I'd rather talk about the confusion itself as a phenomenon.
Read More...
Aquatic Synergasms
06/04/08 16:31
A few years ago, the term “synergistic” was all the rage for National Science Foundation grant proposals and probably elsewhere in scientific funding venues. The term still seems to rage across the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; the U.N. body that focuses on “global warming” ). Synergistic basically means that the interaction between two of more forces is different than simply adding the forces together. In the western portions of North America, for instance, annual precipitation is becoming more variable (particularly with more droughts and higher rates of evaporation, resulting in drier and more frequently dry periods). Although fire is a natural part of the landscape in the region, the interaction of more fire and a drier climate is likely to transform the region as fires become more frequent and more intense. That’s a synergistic interaction. Read More...
The Evil of Nature
06/04/08 15:40
I wrote this piece as a letter to some unknown journal almost a year ago after reading Susan Nieman's great book of ethical philosophy on the nature of evil and its influence on modern consciousness. I haven't decided if I'll send it into a journal yet -- with additional revisions, as I think it's a bit pompous at the moment -- but I offer it here for what it's worth. Read More...
Leaving, on a Jet Plane
06/04/08 10:57
I leave for the UK and India a week from today, flying about two-thirds of the distance around the planet to work on two rivers: the Thames in Britain and Ganga (the Ganges in most of the rest of the world) on the Indian subcontinent. Much of what I’ll be doing in both places is just listening – hearing what experts in each of these basins are afraid of, what they hope for, what seems likely to happen, what is happening. Listening is good work, and comforting too. And it is very good to know and see people who really “know” things. Read More...
The Romance of Conservation
06/04/08 10:42
A lot of people have a romantic vision of the life of a conservation biologist, certainly for those who do fieldwork in exotic places. Perhaps I still share this vision, at least occasionally. But one reader of the first three entries here called and said, Your site is very depressing. I assume he meant it wasn’t romantic and charming.
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse. Read More...
He’s right, of course. Even by the root of the term, “conservation” is about a stopping loss, an attempt to keep from losing too much and about holding on to some notion of what’s “left” in a place -- an attempt to keep a place from passing from threatened to a state of crisis, or from a crisis to something even worse. Read More...
