The cosmopolitan ecologist

This city is, above all else, clean and orderly and beautiful in its well-designed simplicity. I’ve had almost a week in Stockholm, and I’ve fallen in love with the brightly colored medieval homes lined up against the dark Baltic Sea. But what strikes an American about Stockholm is how well-run it seems to be, even down to the way passengers get on and off the metro trains. It’s almost a ritual: at each stop those remaining seated swing their knees towards the aisle to allow those who are departing to get out, and then everyone seated switches seats towards the window seats, to allow new riders who are coming on the train easy access to a seat. Sounds simple, but it is so far from the rudeness of the Boston subway.

As I write that sentence, I know it sounds clichéd, but it’s what really struck me first about Sweden. Some other observations: Sweden has the best bathrooms in the world. The custom is that instead of having little cubicles, each toilet is in a little room covered floor to ceiling with white tile. What’s even better, there’s a real door to the room that really locks, and each little room has its own small sink. Given that the rooms are so private, there’s a tendency for some places to just mark all the rooms as unisex, which makes perfect sense but it stills takes some getting used to for us Americans!

Another thing that is clear it the Swedish people’s love of the environment. Several conservations I had in cafes suggested that the average person here knows a great deal about global warming, for example, and believes the world should do a great deal to fight it. They also clearly love to get out and hike in their woods and gardens, albeit after often driving there in rather large and posh SUVs. I wonder why SUVs have grown so popular in Stockholm, while they are still exceedingly rare in Paris.

Posted by ecologist at 07:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Landing here in winter is like entering an odd no-man’s land, a netherworld of lost souls. White fog obscures the horizon in all directions. Every inch of the ground, save the runway, is covered in wet snow. One can’t glimpse any other buildings, not even a road leaving the compound. It is, in a pleasing, lonely way, like a terminal in purgatory. Inside the terminal is a modern, clean well-lighted place, with the floors occasionally made of wood, a nice touch that adds some warmth to the place. It’s funny that here they have a large, walk-in theatre, showing some truly beautiful pictures of Iceland in the summer. It’s almost as if they want to reassure us travelers that there really is a world out there, beyond the fog.

Posted by ecologist at 01:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The daylight is slowly seeping through the clouds, and the waters of Puget Sound are going from jet black to a dark, threatening blue. The café I am in is empty, while the baristas slowly bitch about their paychecks, the state of the world, their boredom. Outside the traffic on Stewart Street is slowly picking up, cars whizzing by the odd neon sign advertising luggage, nude girls, or a Chinese restaurant. To a Bostonian, the attire of businesspeople seems curiously disjointed, in a pleasant way: a woman wearing a yellow rainslicker over a suit, her feet shod in sandals. It seems like a beautiful city, Seattle, with the same weather-induced gumption as Boston but without Boston’s comical sense of self-importance. I think I will go for a walk along the water’s edge, before returning to my wonderful babacool pension for breakfast. I love traveling west; my biological clock is ahead of all of Seattle’s, and so to me the city is moving in slow motion.

Posted by ecologist at 01:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Europe’s cafes usually serve great espresso, although they call it different names. The French just call an espresso a “café”, and then when they add milk either call it “café au lait” or “crème” (slightly different in flavor). The Spanish seem to call an espresso a “café solo”, and add milk by asking for a “café con leche” (which tastes nothing like a French café au lait). Regardless, the coffee is of high quality. The average corner café of Paris for exceeds the quality of Starbucks, and sees no need to dilute its product with flavored liquors or spices.

How odd then that the coffee at the airports we’ve visited during this trip has generally sucked. In Charles de Gaulle, Beauvais, and Amsterdam Schiphol all the shops have this horrible machine that gives (crappy tasting) lattes at the push of a button. The exception was Girona airport, where there was a real live person who pulled a very good espresso.

As a carnival, you can’t beat Schiphol. A casino lies next to the meditation room. A wonderful children’s playground lies next to a store selling adult DVDs, their pornographic cover photos not even hidden. Down the hall somebody is selling tulip bulbs, and upstairs there is a museum that shows paintings from the 16th and 17th century. One could also rent a hotel room, or just take a shower. The only downside of Schiphol is their odd policy of interrogating each passenger individually, which makes boarding  a plane incredibly slow.

Posted by ecologist at 07:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s a humble little suggestion for journalists: why not restrict use of the word “president” and “prime minister” to those who were elected in free and fair elections. The current standard policy for most newspapers is to use whatever title a leader wants to use, leading to absurdities like “President Kim Jong-il.” If you stop to think about it, North Korean’s leader is clearly not “the elected head of a republican state,” as Oxford’s New American Dictionary defines it. “Prime minister” also contains an implication of democratic principles: the head of an elected government; the principal minister of a sovereign or state.”

Such a restriction on titles would have to be done consistently, to avoid the appearance of propaganda (and would of course not apply to direct quotations from sources). Why not have a policy that every country with a Freedom House
score of “Not Free”. For example, here’s how you might write the names of leaders whose countries do not meet this criterion:

Algeria’s Leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika
Angola’s Leader José Eduardo dos Santos
Azerbaijan’s Leader Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev
Belarus’s Leader Alexander Lukashenko
Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck
Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah
Burma’s General Than Shwe
Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni
Cameroon’s Leader Paul Biya
Chad’s General Idriss Déby
China’s Leader Hu Jintao
Congo (Brazzaville)’s General Denis Sassou Nguesso
Congo (Kinshasa)’s Leader Joseph Kabila Kabange
Cote de Ivoire’s Leader Laurent Koudou Gbagbo
Cuba’s General Fidel Castro
Egypt’s Leader Muhammad Hosni Said Mubarak
Equatorial Guinea’s General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Eritrea’s General Isaias Afewerki
Guinea’s General Lansana Conté
Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Iraq’s Leader Jalal Talabani
Kazakhstan’s Leader Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev
Laos’s General Choummaly Sayasone
Libya’s Leader Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi
Maldives’s Leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom
North Korea’s General Kim Jong-il
Oman’s Sultan Sayyed Qaboos bin Sa’id Al ‘Bu Sa’id
Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani
Russia’s Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
Rwanda’s General Paul Kagame
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud
Somalia’s Leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
Sudan’s General Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir
Swaziland’s King Mswati III
Syria’s Leader Bashar al-Assad
Tajikistan’s Leader Emomalii Rahmon
Togo’s Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé
Tunisia’s General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Turkmenistan’s Leader Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhammedow
United Arab Emirates’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
Uzbekistan’s Leader Islom Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov
Vietnam’s Leader Nguy?n T?n D?ng
Zimbabwe’s General Robert Gabriel Mugabe

Posted by ecologist at 10:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It finally feels like summer in Boston. The air actually feels thick and moist, which drives New Englanders crazy but pleasantly reminds me of the dog days of July in North Carolina. At some point the humidity begins to enshroud you, an enveloping claustrophobic hug. The proper response to such weather is to slow down, feel the heat settling over you as you blissfully do nothing. I have been doing a lot of nothing recently, at least outside of work hours.

Which means that my posts to this blog have been few and far between. And frankly it’s hard to get excited to write knowing that only a couple dozen people a week will read my work. I love to write for its own sake, but if that’s all I hope to do I could just write in my journal. No, I had some naïve hope that some of the thoughts here would stat a little conversation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Internet, and the glorious explosion of content on the Web. I am a techno-optimist at heart, and I have to believe that this great increase in the number of authors in the world must be good for humanity, and will be as monumental for our history as the printing press. As I discussed in an earlier post, bloggers are as a community good at widely-disseminating publicly-available information, excellent at expressing our opinions about that information, and only so-so at investigative reporting to uncover new information.

Fro the reader’s perspective, however, the explosion of information on blogs seems a bit problematic. The vast majority of blogs are rarely read, for the simple reason that there is almost more content than there is people to read it. These are written mostly because their authors get joy out of writing. A very small minority of blogs become super famous, some by virtue of their name (think of the Huffington Post) and some by virtue of a particular piece that catches everyone’s excitement, the proverbial 15 minutes of fame. I wish I believed that this selection process brings the most brilliant opinions or writing up (certainly not mine) to the top, but I don’t. What wins on the web is a snazzy picture or a snappy tagline, dripping with invective.

I’ve now had the odd experience of having several friends tell me my essays are rather “serious”, and I think they meant that pejoratively. I’ve always tried to write essays like those I like to read- Mario Vargas Llosa, Gore Vidal, V.S. Naipaul, Michel de Montaigne. But the problem (apart from my lack of sufficient rhetorical chops) is that anything that ponderous and slow seems moribund on the web, anachronistic. I suspect if I were reading my own writings on the web, I would click away to another website before I reached the end of my own piece.

Posted by ecologist at 02:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve had a ball during my time in South Africa, and have learned a great deal, both within my discipline at my conference and personally as I have travelled. One thing has persistently bugged me, however: the tendency of tourists (and some white South Africans) to object that much of this country is not the “real” Africa. By this, they mean that much of the country’s culture has been profoundly shaped by the Dutch and English colonization, diminishing the visibility of anything indigenous.

This is, of course, quite true, and I would join anyone in lamenting the ruinous effects of the colonial period, and supporting the efforts of the current South African government to respect the diversity of cultures and languages. However, it bugs me when tourists talk about the “real” Africa, for at least two reasons. First, Africa is a huge entity, with a bewildering number of cultural groups. It thus seems much more problematic to talk about knowing the “real” Africa than it would be to talk about knowing the “real” Japan. Even the countries within Africa are made up of a diverse set of cultures, and do not at all approach the ideal of a nation-state, if indeed any state ever does.

Second, I feel like tourists should strive to not just see the traditional elements of a culture but to experience a bit of the everyday life of the region one is visiting, however hybridized or Westernized a culture it is. One learns a lot more about what it’s like to live in Paris in the 21st century by taking a ride in the Metro and seeing a free movie at the Parc de Villette than one does walking around Notre Dame. Similarly, some of the fascinating things I’ve seen in my brief visit here were not postcard-perfect moments of tribal Xhosa life, but were vistas in to the current mix in which that life continues: the young Xhosa men doing initiation rituals literally on the side of a major highway, in a narrow strip of brush, the remnant of the buffer strips between neighbourhoods the apartheid government created; the brightly-painted cargo containers used in the townships as local telephone/internet hubs, of for the (amazing numerous) hair salons. I suppose I am making a plea for viewing the current way of life in a country as just as “real” as the historical reality.

Posted by ecologist at 07:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, my love of Knysna has been substantially reduced (notwithstanding the excellent Carmen’s Corner, which served the best food we’ve had in South Africa, an amazing mix of French, Thai, and Cape Malay Cuisine). Around three in the morning we were awoken to the sound of two men fighting and screaming at each other. My immediate response was to lock the room door and hear what happened. From what we overheard, it seems the owner of the backpackers came back late, and didn’t shut the security gate tight. An unidentified man followed him in, only to be quickly confronted by the owner. After the man refused to leave, saying he was trying to visit his brother, the owner pre-emptively (and rather ruthlessly) sprayed him with mace and pressed the panic button, summoning armed security guards, who arrested the intruder. Having myself been mugged at gunpoint during my graduate school years at Duke University, I can honestly say that that was far less scary than having to listen, impotently, to another person’s struggle with an intruder.

 

We packed up our car earlier the next morning and drove to the Roburg Nature Reserve. The hike there was gorgeous, with blooming fynbos and views of a Right Whale and calf off the coast. However, it seemed as if our luck had ran out for this trip, as we managed to lock our keys in the car. The problem was quickly solved with the help of a locksmith, and our vacation officially ended as we returned our car to the Port Elizabeth airport, and I prepared for the beginning of the Society of Conservation Biology meeting.

Posted by ecologist at 08:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m on the busy main street of the city, watching the endless parade of people come by me. It is probably the first main drag that I’ve been on that has white tourists as well as (many more) black locals, in town to cash their monthly paycheck (the line at the back stretches around the block) and have some fun. It feels refreshingly safe and normal, although I’m sure when the sun sets I will return to my (somewhat irrational) fear for my safety.

After my last postcard, we spent one last morning in Cape Town. We had our usual breakfast at St. Paul’s B+B, a normal English breakfast, reinforcing the whole Anglican vibe of the place. We then sped across to the Waterfront, barely managing to make it to the clock tower, the entry point for our ferry to Robben Island. The tour of Nelson Mandela’s former place of imprisonment was moving, not least because the guides had both been imprisoned there themselves. The younger of our two guides spoke in the exact cadences of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, which I thought linguistically interesting because his bas language was entirely different, Sotho. The guards spoke openly about how amazing it was the South Africa did not descend into chaos as the apartheid government fell in 1994. They traced the South African miracle to, paradoxically, the solid grounding of the major players in English education, particularly Locke’s checks-and-balances idea and the concept of tolerance within a liberal democracy. All of the above somehow was in alliance with more radical, Black Power elements that wanted to redistribute wealth (although apparently there has been some bloodshed between the two groups). Much is also traced to what might be called the sainthood of Nelson Mandela, and the way Robben Island made him and others more humble rather than angrier.

We slept that night in Montagu, at a little farm. It was a rather forgettable night. We made ourselves a curried pasta (not nearly as good as the one we had had in Port Elizabeth), went for a short little walk the next morning, and then had a great fresh scone at a café. Scones here are big affairs, covered with jam and whipped cream, although we would usually turn the later down.

We then drove the short drive over to Oudtshorn, checking into the very genial Backpacker’s Paradise. Before the sun set, we attempted to walk at De Hoek Nature Reserve, only to have the guard tell us that we needed a permit which he couldn’t sell us and which could only be bought back in Oudtshorn. So instead we drove up to the top of the Swartsburg Pass, our little maroon Citi Gulf barely making it. Once back in town, we shopped at the Pick and Pay, and then made ourselves a stellar dinner at the hostel of ostrich steak, salad, potatoes, carrots, and a delightful white whine we’d picked up from L’Avenir. We lingered by the warm fireplace, and marveled at how this particular hostel was a well-oiled machine, full of guests and yet with everything always functioning as it should.

This morning we headed over to the caves, thoroughly enjoying our adventure tour, which took us through meters-long passages where we had to crawl on our belly. We then drove the N12 down towards George, stopping on the mountain pass for a lunch at a picnic site with a phenomenal view. Then we landed in Knysna, checked into a Backpackers, and attempted to go for a walk and failed to find a trailhead. Instead, my wife went shopping in the city center, while I waited for her at the chain “Vida e café”, like Starbucks but with a red color scheme.

Which brings me up to the present, at least for this postcard. Now freed from the tyranny of chronology, I don’t really know what to write about. Perhaps I’ll end with a comment about the main news radio station, which we can pick up anywhere in the country. The commentators seem very long-winded, composing overly complex sentences that tend to resolve any disagreement by agreeing that of course more discussion of the issue is needed. It’s quite a highbrow style, even compared to America’s NPR, perhaps its closest equivalent. Maybe that’s how one tries to deal with disagreements in a democratic, fractious country.

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We’re in a cozy B+B called St. James, on Bree Street in the City Bowl. It is a gorgeous, antique place, whose furniture and pace of life seem pleasantly stuck in the 1880s. We arrived here yesterday, in a driving rain, and stashed our car in their parking lot, which is of course protected by a chain link fence with razor wire on the top, just as our hotel has a locked gate, a locked door, and a big panic button the receptionist can use to summon the armed security guards. After a while, this intense security against nameless and faceless violent thieves begins to seem normal, although it does shape how you live your life. We tend to get back to the hotel before 9pm, just to be safe.

Anyway, after our arrival we took a little stroll around the City Bowl, being particularly impressed with the Company’s Gardens and their stately fig trees, trunks as massive as an elephant’s leg. Seeing the location of the former slave market in Cape Town, as well as the balcony where Nelson Mandela gave his famous speech, brought the tragic history of the place home.

Our visit this morning to the District 6 museum deepened our understanding. The story of the integrated neighborhood torn down on the insistence of the white government literally brought tears to my eyes, particularly the old street signs. I was intellectually interested in the fact that the architects who planned the demolition justified the intervention using Le Corbusier’s writings, further strengthening my conviction that nothing good came out of that man’s ideas. After the museum, we walked through the Garden District and then up to the Bo-Kap for a Cape Malay Brunch (we heard the Noon Gun fire), then wandered around the Waterkant and then the Waterfront. Much fun, and way too much eating.

Posted by ecologist at 01:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, we’ve successfully survived several days of our vacation in South Africa. It has been a blast.

We landed in Jo’burg late on the 19th, and were greeted by a friendly chap from the Emerald Guesthouse, where we spent the night. He gave us our first introduction to the thick accent Afrikaners have when they are speaking English.

The next day we got a complimentary shuttle ride back to O.R. Tambo, and flew down to Port Elizabeth. The security at the airport was ridiculously lax, so different from the United States. We picked up our rental car, a maroon CitiGulf with a manual transmission. I managed to get to our hotel in boring Summerstrand, despite having to drive on the left-hand side of the road and shift gears with my left hand. We spent the rest of the day bumming around the beach, and are some fantastic curry with mutton and later with pasta.

The next day we were picked up at our (relatively) posh hotel for a tour of all of PE. It started in the colonial center, through the tragically destroyed South End, out to the poverty of the townships. It was the oddest landscape I’d ever seen from an urban planning perspective: the buffer zones that the apartheid-era government had left between neighborhoods of different racial groups create a network of greenspaces that bear little relationship with topography. These buffer zones are in the process of being turned into sidewalks and schools and new neighborhoods, anything to erase the memory of apartheid. Despite the crushing poverty, there was a sense of hope, as substandard housing was being slowly but surely replaced by buildings with electricity and water. After the tour, we had a beer at a shabeen, and then we were dropped back at our hotel. We hopped in the car and drove to Addo Elephant Park, sleeping in a “safari tent” with a view out over the bush.

All the next day was taken up with the park. Some scattered memories, in non-chronological order: everywhere kudu, with males and their spiral horns escorting the females; a troop of elephants walking in formation next to us, so close you could touch them, the baby elephants nursing from their mother’s pendulous breasts; a jackal eating a meercat; vervet monkeys trying their best to get into our tent and steal our food; a herd of 50 buffalo walking slowly across the grassland and around our car; sightings of Cape grysbok, ostrich, blue crane, burchell’s zebra, and eland, but sadly no lions or black rhinos; the everpresent warthogs, the juveniles constantly fighting for fun, and the adult males alternately attacking each other and trying to quickly mate with the scarce females.

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Whoever said that Bostonians are a cold, unfeeling lot had never been here on a day like today, when the sun shone high in the sky and the pavement shimmered from the heat. Everywhere couples just stroll, holding hands: young punks with piercings, yuppies pushing a stroller, old academics walking proudly. It is a different city, tender, affectionate.. Everyone walks, and distances that in the chill of winter seem absurd suddenly seem quite logical. Boston University to Central Square? Why not, it’s only an hour.

Cambridge’s residential streets become a procession of flowers as our brief spring belatedly unfolds: daffodils, ornamental magnolias, the red leaves of Japanese maple, the periwinkle, the locust trees, and now roses, the old fashioned variety that actually smell good. Even in our gardens we seem to pack a lot of living into 3 months of the year.

Today I did something I’ve been meaning to do, and kayaked from Watertown along the Charles River. I passed under the Eliot Bridge, staying close to the south bank under the shade of the birches. After JFK Street, I had a street festival on the Cambridge side to keep me entertained. I stopped for lunch around the supports of the BU bridge, admiring the view of downtown, and letting my kayak float on the water while I munched. It was a perfect afternoon.

I’ve been marveling recently at how complex this city is, so many parts and pieces interacting, and yet somehow it mostly all works out. It is not so different from the amazement I feel about the complex web of interrelationships that keep, say, a forest growing. In all the litany of worries about humanity’s urban future, I forget the simple fact that many (most) things about cities do work. The Dutch sometimes say that God created Nature, but the Dutch created Holland. In the same way, Bostonians created the Charles River that exists today, and even the grimmest environmentalist has to admit they didn’t do half bad.

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I was a teenage indie rock fan. I grew up in Chapel Hill, back when it was the next big thing, sneaking into clubs and hearing some amazingly good, and some amazingly atrocious, music. I make this admission confessionally, for I’m now to all extent and purpose a young urban professional, a yuppie. Somehow I went from an indie rock kind to a professional ecologist, and I’ve been searching recently for what exactly the connection between the two is.

There was a surprising intensity to life in Chapel Hill, a self-conscious intensity, an idea that a good show and good friends could “crucify the insincere tonight.” My group of friends was rather kindly called by an outside the Philosophy Boys, although while we read that stuff we didn’t know shit about what it meant. We loved Hal Hartley films and their brutal honesty, and Kundera’s novels for their scatological cynicism. There was a pervasive do-it-yourself aesthetic, albeit with a limited scope. It was a radical idea pre-WWW that great music could be made apart from the mainstream world, in this little cultural bubble. We had a studied disdain for appearances, and nominally believed that the clothing meant nothing, the looks meant nothing, the music everything. Anti-consumerism was dominant, and anything popular and mainstream was immediately suspect. However, there was also frankly a lot of nihilism, a sense that most of the adult world was corrupt. I suppose all teenagers feel that, but we took it ideologically a bit farther. One of our favorite songs sang “We are the rats in the garbage of the Western World, so let’s dance.”

I realize now, looking back on my life, that ecology has a lot in common with the indie rock world. We often talk earnestly, if perhaps sometime naively, about a small group of people changing the world. The scientific endeavor is in many ways also do-it-yourself, staffed by people who are by necessity self-driven; as we say in the field, publish or perish. We believe that everyone can add a brick to the great edifice of science, and we all individually hope to do something more, to write something truly great. We too disdain appearances, trusting a man with muddy boots more than a man in a nice suit. I was recently teased by a group of ecologists for looking too dressed up for tucking in my shirt. If anything, ecologists are more anti-consumerist than indie rockers, for consumption is often seen at the root of many ecological problems.

However, there’s something much slower about the scientific mindset. Graduate school, and writing for peer-reviewed publication, is like boot camp for the mind, training it. “Life’s not a horserace, it’s a marathon.” Rather than searching for pinpricks of intensity, we look forward to a lifetime of work. This has made me seem, I fear, rather boring to the outside world, when intellectual and spiritually I am more alive than I have ever been.

Ecologists, at least some of us, have a certain quiet optimism. As a political struggle, we have several, notably for clean water and air. Others we have of course lost. But there is an optimism that with work moderate progress is possible. There’s nothing radical or sexy about us as ecological engineers. I still think of another song though: “We could be heroes, just for one day…”

Posted by ecologist at 08:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The first daffodils are blooming in Cambridge, and the snow banks have finally melted. The students have headed off to warmer climes, to drink off any extra brain cells they might have acquired during the year, and the town is blessedly quiet. And me, I’ve been spending far too long in the wood-paneled depths of the neighborhood pub, watching college basketball.

This is a fairly natural thing for a native North Carolinian to do, of course. Basketball is something close to a religion down there, almost eclipsing the insanity of Red Sox nation. To give you an idea, before my wedding, several older men approached me with a quandary: there was a chance that if UNC advanced in the NCAA tournament that they would play a game during my wedding reception. Of course, they loudly protested, they would be at the reception, but might it be possible to have the game playing in a back room so they could check score periodically? In the end, crisis was averted, for Carolina lost earlier in the tourney.

What’s interesting about my current basketball fever is that I’m usually quite immune. Indeed, I only watch the NCAA tournament fully when I’m away from Chapel Hill. I like the feeling that everyone down there is watching the game just as I am, and felt bummed out at the Tarheel’s loss at exactly the same moment I did. And I love talking with my family after the game, and hearing about the progress of the dogwoods and the azaleas and magnolias.

There are, among my friends, some intellectuals who find the love of sports too clannish for comfort. I think there is some truth to this criticism, but I think it is also in human nature to have some petty rivalries. I dream of a world without war, and I’m idealistic to believe with wise governance that might be possible. And if in that world men still get drunk and have fist-fights in bars over their sports teams, that’s okay with me. La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.

Posted by ecologist at 01:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, I've often had debates with friends in the U.S. about the relative costs of flying to Europe from different airports in the U.S. Out of curiosity, I spent some time this morning pulling off kayak.com the best listed price in May 2007 from different major airports in the U.S. to different major airports in Europe. Keep in mind these are the best prices- most people probably end up paying more.

The two cheapest airports are both in the New York City area. This is followed, surprisingly, by Boston (I never thought of Logan as cheap!), and then Chicago and Washington (essentially tied). Cities on the west coast of course cost more than the east coas, 'cause it's farther geographically. Cities in the middle of the country actually are the most expensive, perhaps because there aren't as many people traveling internationally so the market is less competitive.

Most interesting are the patterns of where you get good deals- Miami consistently has amazing deals to Barcelona and Madrid, presumably because of the large spanish-speaking community there. There are great deals to Dublin from Boston, New York, and Chicago, which may reflect the historically high number of Irish in those cities.

All prices in US$: 

Posted by ecologist at 08:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I spent last Friday, to my total surprise, sitting on an aircraft carrier in Boston Harbor. I arrived at 8am at a nondescript parking deck in the waterfront. All I knew was that I was the guest of my wife, who was to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen. We were forced to wait in an endless, but well ordered, line that snaked through multiple “staging areas,” finally passing through what may have been the most efficient security checkpoint I have ever seen. We then walked up a steep metal mesh gangplank, dangling over the waters and being buffeted by the winds. The women’s high heels all got stuck in the mesh. Once inside the relatively warm hanger bay of the USS John Kennedy, our long wait for the ceremony began.

 

More than 2 hours later, Edward Kennedy arrived and gave an admittedly excellent and moving speech. The symbolism, of the Senator who has worked so much for immigration reform speaking on a soon-to-be decommissioned ship named after his dead brother, was powerful. The rest of the ceremony was good, if a bit too cheesy for my tastes- the video montage accompanying the song “Proud to be an American” was over the top. Nevertheless, it was a happy and joyous day for all involved. I was certainly happy my wife could finally participate as a citizen in U.S. politics.

 

What stands out most about Friday was how well ordered the whole event was, in a way that civilian life never is. There was, however, one apparent oversight: bathrooms. Given that there were 600 civilians on the carrier, forgetting to think about how they will find the bathroom in the bowels of the ship seems a rather big oversight. To their credit, the Navy admirably and quickly came up with a solution: given each person a military escort to the bathroom.

 

Somehow this small oversight reminded me of an excellent book I am reading now, Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation. What is fascinating about the work is the feeling of actually being inside history, of seeing the messy process by which decisions are made. Stupid oversight and mistakes got made during Acheson’s tenure in the government, of far more import that some missing bathrooms on a boat. More importantly, the book makes you realize that history is not some process drive by impersonal forces like fate or destiny. Nor is it the story of single men leading movements. Rather, it is the complex outcome of a set of men and their personalities. To read Acheson is to realize that things could very well have turned out differently, if a different set of men had been there. And when history’s inevitable surprises happen, competence and a sharp comprehension of reality, trumps ideology everytime.

Posted by ecologist at 03:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently reconstructing my family tree. In part, it’s simply a hobby, something to pass the spare time in the long, slow Boston winter. The hunt for information, one fact leading to another, is pleasing to a scientist, logical, progressive. Moreover, the Internet has made it easy, as each Google search brings up bizarre new sources of information- who knew there were so many people into transcribing tombstones!

But the hobby’s about something more, about having a sense of history. My wife jokes with me that I’m just interested in proving I was related to a king, but it’s not that at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. There’s a certain humility in knowing that my Italian ancestor, Gaetano Lombardi, got off the docks in New York with $12 in his pocket. There’s a pleasant geographical confusion in realizing my “German” ancestors, the Roeske's, embarked for the US from a city, Stettin, that is now actually in Poland. There’s a certain pride in knowing a relative of mine, Albert Brown, was an engineer in the Panama Canal Zone. And a certain sadness at seeing the rows upon rows of Weimorts' graves in Ponce de Leon, all probably related to me in some fashion lost to the mists of time.

In a sense, my hobby is also a rebellion what Gore Vidal called The United States of Amnesia, our persistent desire to create our own narrative. It is a very democratic belief, this idea that history or paternity does not matter. On my recent trip to San Francisco you felt it most strongly wandering around Palo Alto, this idea that the future is so completely underdetermined that the predictive power of history is very small. While I love this belief, and actually think there’s a lot of truth to it, I somehow enjoy genealogy as the opposite- everyone came from somewhere, has two parents, a fixed birth date and death date. Considered in its entirety, my family tree is a bewildering set of different stories, some of success, some of failure. It is the exact opposite of some pat tale of a descent from a privileged ancestor. As Joseph Brodsky said, “What should I say about life? That it’s long and abhors transparence.”

Posted by ecologist at 05:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I will be in Washington on January 27, for United for Peace and Justice’s legal, permitted demonstration against the escalation of the war in Iraq. The time seems ripe now, and an effective protest may make a huge difference. The new Democratic Congress has to listen to the anti-war movement, at least to some extent, for we are part of their constituency. Moreover, the growing consensus opinion that the troop escalation is wrong (70% in a recent AP poll) adds political clout to the protest. I am also happy, frankly, that UFPJ has decided not to work with ANSWER, a more militant coalition. This will make the message of the march more focused and clear.

 

Who knows if the march will really be effective, or change any Congressman’s mind about how to vote? My opinion is that every person should have a set of bedrock moral beliefs that are not cast aside when they are inefficient. One should, or course, try to make one’s actions in support of these beliefs as politically effective as possible. A decent argument could be made that protest events are less effective as a political tool in the US than they once were. But history is mysterious, and sometimes one has to act without knowing the full consequences of one’s action. Vaclav Havel writes eloquently about this with regards to the Charter 77. At the time it was a mostly symbolic manifesto calling for more civil freedoms within the Czech communist system. In the end, the Charter ended up starting a chain of events that profoundly changed the Czech system, but no one knew in advance it would turn out that way. At some point a man has to commit to concrete actions that are consistent with his beliefs and improve the world a bit, and leave the writing of future history to the historians.

 

There is a poisonous, hip irony out there on the web that is deeply cynical about the UFPJ march. Wonkette gives probably the most egregious example, when she says “It won’t make a bit of difference, but you might get lucky with a hippie!” While I’m sure there will be a few members of the hippie species at the march, the vast majority of folks will be quite normal middle-class liberals. Wonkette’s comments reveal a deep smugness. The entire blogosphere seems to me a bit like the salons of aristocrats in Paris in the 19^th century, supportive of the Enlightenment but fearful of the rabble.

 

There’s also a darker insinuation in Wonkette’s remarks, that this march is just protest for protest’s sake. Milan Kundera summarized this as kitsch:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Bloggers hate this second tear, and well they should- the most important function of the blogosphere is as a BS detector. However, our hip, poisonous irony has also banished the first tear. I reject that. In a democracy, I want people to react emotionally (but legally) when their government invades a foreign country, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing an almost equal number. I want people to shed that first tear. And if that makes me un-ironic and subject to Wonkette’s well-crafted satire, then so be it.

Posted by ecologist at 01:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m back in the Open Eye Café, in my hometown of Chapel Hill. The teeny coffeshop I once knew has expanded and swallowed the neighboring furniture shop, creating a large, clean, well-lighted space. There are certain spaces like this, of rapid change, that momentarily shock me. Part of me wants to believe that all of the places here that have played a special role in my life will be frozen in time. And yet of course the town keeps changing. New subdivisions sprout up and so alter an intersection that I drive, aimless, until I see one of the few landmarks I still recognize.

And of course the version of town that I know is just an arbitrary slice of a continuum of change. I’ve been reading John Ehle’s excellent history of the Chapel Hill civil rights movement, The Free Men. It’s like hearing a genteel southern gentlemen tell a story over a tall bourbon. Some aspects of the town he describes make perfect sense to me, somewhere deep in my bones. There is a prevailing sense among the conservative citizens of North Carolina that “college is a dangerous time of life and Chapel Hill a dangerous place, a seedbed of new ideas.” We Chapel Hillians like it that way, are perhaps a bit arrogant because of our belief that something good can come from this place. However, the small village mentality of Chapel Hill that Ehle describes is gone, replaced by an economic dynamism and a fascination with the fictional metropolis that is the Triangle.

And I too am different. The streets of Chapel Hill seem monstrously large after the cramped roads of Boston, the neighborhood scarily empty at night. I have become, despite my best intentions, an urbanite. Things that once seemed special in Chapel Hill now seem mundanely suburban. The only thing that is constant over time is my bond with my family. On that front, I’m luckier than many Americans, whose families are scattered all over the place: at least I belong here, and know I will always have shelter here.

Posted by ecologist at 04:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve often complained on this blog, perhaps to the point of appearing crochety, that the ever increasing pace of modern life makes it difficult to find time to reflect or think deeply about any issue. For scholars like myself, this is a serious problem: we are employed to think critically about an issue, come up with an hypothesis, and test it. While modern communications technology can greatly facilitate the testing of hypotheses, it sometimes inhibits the first two processes, by creating an atmosphere of near constant distractions. Recently, I’ve been thinking about my ingestion of electronic information from the perspective of its signal-to-noise ratio (due in part to my reading of an excellent book by Nassim Taleb). Generally, the more frequently updates sources of information contain no more total signal than the more sparsely updates sources. For example, the entire day’s broadcast on CNN contains no more information than a quality print newspaper; the news has been stretched to fit the available time, vastly decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

The strategy that most of my academically-inclined friends have adopted is therefore quite rational. In contrast to the “drop out” mentality of the 1960s in the US, my friends and I are all highly connected- part of the day. In essence, we all connect to the Internet and digest high signal-to-noise ratio information from sources we trust, and then physically unplug our Ethernet cables to get some deep thinking done. It’s fortifying, a sort of high fiber, low fat media diet. In an odd way though, it is still occasionally equivalent to “dropping out” of mainstream culture. I realized this recently when a good friend on a similar media diet asked, in all seriousness, who Jonbenet Ramsey was. In a sense, I was totally envious of her- at least she’s not wasting her synapses thinking about it- but it also made me realize how she (and I) have consciously chosen to be willfully ignorant of certain parts of American culture.

Posted by ecologist at 05:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been much flack recently from the press about John McCain’s chilly reception at the New School in Manhattan. Howard Kurtz compiles this assault, and generally supports it. It’s a common critique, one that was trotted out in the press here in Boston when Dr. Rice gave an address at Boston College: incivilities by students and faculty toward the speaker are an attack on free speech. While I can see a grain of truth in this argument, I’ve come to believe it’s fundamentally wrong.

Everyone’s stated ideal is for open, vigorous two-way dialogue on the campuses of academia. I happen to believe that this can happen even for politicians. I once saw Representative David Price bravely defend his stance on the Iraq War in front of an audience at UNC, who got to ask questions of him for an hour and a half. All too often, however, an open debate is the last thing on a politician’s mind. The goal is a clean, crisp photo-op, with an impressive backdrop that allows the politician to borrow from the prestige of the university. Questions are rarely allowed, and if they are they are prescreened to be safe and polite to the speaker. There should certainly be no boos or catcalls or signs that might distract from the preordained message of the event. It’s important to recognize that this photo-op bears no resemblance to an open, two-way dialogue. Its purpose is in fact the exact opposite.

There’s something a bit thin-skinned about the American dislike of heckling. It’s in sharp contrast with the British system that allows for more open hostility during public discussion. Tony Blair faces more heckling in one of his weekly sessions in front of Parliament than Bush has faced in his entire presidency. I sometimes fanaticize about watching Bush wither in front of weekly pointed questions from Congress…

Something deeper is going on that causes these incivilities than mere impoliteness. They are a calculated way to puncture the media bubble that increasingly surrounds every single event of every politician. If a student body deeply resents being used as a backdrop for a photo-op, then why in the world shouldn’t they make that know by moderate incivilities? After all, McCain will still have plenty of chances to exercise his free speech rights- what’s wrong with the students squeezing in a bit of their message while they fleetingly have a chance. As a media strategy, this detournement works: we can be quite sure that Mr. Kurtz wouldn’t have discussed how the students felt about McCain’s speech if they hadn’t acted out. In a way, by being so deferential to authority the media has created the need for incivility, to puncture the media bubble.

There’s also a historical irony here, for many of those who critiqued the actions of the New School were, I suspect, supporters of moderate incivilities toward those who perpetuated the Vietnam War. I would bet, although I’m not certain, that Mr. Kurtz is in this category. I’m sure incivility to the establishment is more threatening when you’re part of it. Interestingly, Mr. Kurtz didn’t raise free speech issues when people heckled the leaders of China, or those who opposed Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The clear message to the universities is: be a useful backdrop, and stop asserting  your opinions so much.

Posted by ecologist at 10:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The release of the Internet movie EPIC 2014 has gotten a lot of buzz recently in the blogosphere, including a discussion in On The Media on NPR last week. For the most part, notwithstanding some comments during the beginning and end, the movie marvels at the beautiful dream of the Internet: it will somehow allow the media to whither away, and allow us all to become the media. It is a beautiful aesthetic, in its own way. Still, it strikes me as just as improbable as the idea that information technology will allow all national borders to whither away. Or, more to the point, it strikes me as just as improbable as the communist ideal that the state will slow whither away- a convenient fiction based more in desire than in any real facts.

Maybe all of us in the blogosphere should ask ourselves, what good are the mainstream media (in the broad sense of the phrase) so often ridiculed in our webpages? Could we live without them? I think the answer to this is a firm no. We might recognize three main information-generating functions of media (not that these exist a priori, but they are a useful categorization). First, they repeat and retransmit basic facts (“The President today said that…”). Second, they offer up opinions and analyses of these basic facts (“Why do you think President Bush said that, Mr. Novak?”). Third, they ferret out more fundamental facts, facts that often powerful people and agencies would like to remain hidden (e.g., Woodward and Bernstein and the Deep Throat affair).

The first two functions are being made easier and easier by the Internet, and EPIC 2014 is right insofar as it pictures this process becoming more automatic and personalized. Any one interested enough to read about the President’s speech can read the transcript or see the video minutes after it occurs, making a summary article about it the next day in the newspaper nonessential for transmitting the basic facts. The over-abundance of blogs means that there are a plethora of opinions and analyses of all the basic facts of the day floating around the Internet, making newspaper columnists not necessarily unimportant (they are often quite good at what they do- that’s how they got the job!) but only one of many voices discussing the news. The New York Times decision, for example, to put only their columnists behind their pay wall shows that the management there might not get it- the columnists are arguably the most dispensable part of what the Times provides. The third function, however, has become if anything more important in the Internet era. The hard work of digging up fundamental facts requires people who can focus full-time on it, with support staff helping them and an institution dedicated to helping them. Very few bloggers have that set-up, with the exception of some of the extremely dedicated or the extremely wealthy.

The world as envisioned by EPIC 2014 visualizes news being managed by big corporations and free-wheeling bloggers. In that world, news will be “superficial”, as EPIC 2014 itself acknowledges. It’s time for bloggers to get over their distrust of the MSM, and work to find financially-stable ways for fundamental facts to make their way into cyberspace. Otherwise, it will all just be a media landscape "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
       

Posted by ecologist at 09:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been hustling recently to get a manuscript done, dealing with all the minutiae a lead author on a large study has to deal with: calls to coauthors, endless rounds of ‘final’ edits, the political calculations of which journal to submit to, etc. Now that it’s all done, my spirit feels broken, and I’m having trouble throwing myself into the other dozen things I should be doing. Was it always thus for scientists? Was life always a set of wind sprints, from one paper to the next?

I’ve written about this elsewhere, so I shan’t revisit all that that, lest the reader think I’m just whining. But I want to comment on one particular facet of this conspiracy to keep the whole world facet. A teeny facet really, but one that seems so basic it still puzzles me. My cell phone rings repeatedly, and its shrill default tone pierces the air. An email arrives in my inbox, and the computer hums a tone that sounds so self-important, you’d think God himself had emailed me. I’m no technophobe, and I love the functionality that all these new gadgets bring to our life. Still, I have to say, the design of these products is just bad, inhuman, in that their default notification sounds demand immediate attention. People have a real need for a less grating interface, one more at peace with human instincts.

It’s good that one can at least customize all these features. Cell phone ring tones are perhaps the best example I can think of: their popularity comes not so much from the music, which is such a crappy quality as to be worthless, but from the control people can exert over the process. Given the huge financial success of the ring tone industry, why in the world aren’t technology designers employing more psychologists and musicians and artists from the get-go, so that the default settings on these machines, which are the ones mostly used by most consumers, are more harmonious?

Posted by ecologist at 08:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Since the meteoric rise of the Internet, much has been written about the transformative power of networks. Some of this writing limits itself to echoing McLuhan`s simple observation that "the medium is the mesage," that in effect every method of communication has its own style that inevitably shapes science and culture. I am inclined to think this is true, that the revolution caused by the Internet will be as big as that caused by the printing press or the radio. Still, I am worried about the tone of some sloppy writing out there that gives the Internet and other networks messianic qualities.

Exhibit 1 in this category is Hart and Negri`s enjoyable treatise Multitude, which essentially makes the case for global democracy, albeit one of a Communist bent. However, they argue that just as the nation-state required a different form of government than the city-state, a global democracy will require a different form of government than the nation-state. This new form must be a flexible, multi-level network, with the Internet the prime analogy. Similarly, many books on political theory like Future Multilateralism argue that a complex network of governance including NGOs, the UN, and international corporations will bring about stability as a neccesary consequence of its complexity.

I believe all such works ignore some very real dangers of complex networks. Ecology`s 30-year long obsession with food web dyna,ics can shed light on this. At first, ecologists assumed that more complex webs were more stable, almost as a tenent of faith. However, theoretical and (to a lessor extent) empirical studies have shown that having more nodes (species, individuals, etc.) in a network does not make it more stable, and can often make it less stable. Similarly, randomly adding connections to a food web tends to decrease its stability. What does add stability is the creation of redundant pathways, multiple routes that energy can travel through the system. I suspect the same is true for political and media systems: complexity in a network only increases stability (in the sense of responsiveness to the needs of its actors) only when it increases the nu,ber of pathways by which political demands or information needs may be met.

Posted by ecologist at 07:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There are innumerable blogs on the Internet, and you might be asking yourself, “Why am I reading yet another one”? I feel just about the same writing these lines- why in the world am I wasting my precious little free time doing this?! Maybe I should start with what you won’t find on this site. You won’t find instant, obsessive analysis of political news. I believe most columns worth writing take at least a couple weeks to gestate in the author’s mind before they are ready to be revealed.  You won’t find far-reaching proclamations that are fun to read for their breathless enthusiasm. My training as a scientist has made me naturally averse to speculating way beyond the data at hand, although my colleagues should realize that what I write on these pages is far less certain than the scientific manuscripts I write for work. 

What you will find, I hope, is thoughtful essays, a couple times a month, on everything from the arts to politics to pop culture to (especially) ecology and environmental science. My model for these mini-columns is the excellent essays by Mario Vargas Llosa and Octavio Paz, to whom I owe a great debt. They both taught me that short essays still have a place in modern literature, as something more than mere opinion pieces, as literature in the finest sense. I am sure my humble skills as a writer won’t approach their work, but I hope to offer something that gets some peoples minds working…

Now, the bigger question (for me): why am I writing? There’s certainly some risk for me professionally- People in the sciences learn to keep their heads out of political fights, do some dry boring technical work, and make a living. And as an ecologist who hopes in the future to collaborate with policymakers, at the national and international levels, even the appearance of being involved in the kooky world of blogs may make me an untouchable. But I’ve frankly decided I don’t care- life is too short for me to limit my mind to the little domain in which I do my scientific work, and I’m determined to find a couple hours a week to devote to this forum. That said, everything on this site is a personal opinion, and in no way reflects my measured expert scientific opinion, nor the opinion of my employers. Hell, in a week it might not even represent my opinion anymore! And, of course, all works on this site are my property, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without citation or a link back.

Posted by ecologist at 02:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)