In 1995, 14 wolves were released in Yellowstone National Park.
No one expected the miracle that the wolves would bring.
It started with the wolves hunting the deer, this led to a rapid decrease in the deer population. The wolves' presence also made the deer avoid parts in the park where they were and easy prey.
Thanks to the deer's absence, those parts started to regenerate. Forests of aspen and willow trees started to flourish.
That's when things really started to happen. With trees and bushes came more berries and bugs. As soon as that happened, various bird species started moving in.
With the increasing tree population, also another species was attracted. The beaver, previously extinct in the region, moved back. And the dams they built provided habitats for otters, muskrats and reptiles.
The wolves also killed coyotes, which meant more hawks, red foxes, badgers and weasels in the park. Even the population of bald eagles and ravens rose.
But here's where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. With more balance between predator and prey came the possibility for other species to thrive. There was less erosion because of increased vegetation. And the river banks were stabilized, the channels narrowed, more pools formed, and the rivers stayed more fixed in their courses.
So the wolves did not only transform the great ecosystem of Yellowstone, they also changed the park's physical geography.
where I will be posting musings on my recently initiated research career transition from astrophysics to ecology. I would like this place to be a lively forum, especially for scientists involved in similar matters. First post is online 🎉 , boosts welcome ! 💚 🍂 🔭 #Astrodon#Ecology
You can register by following @lookingup.francois-rincon.org or using the rss feed link on the site.
Are you a scientist who's active on Mastodon and does research in #ornithology, #ecology, #naturalhistory, or a related field? I want to follow you - please reply and introduce yourself! (And please share so this reaches more people!)
I've just read a very interesting — but disturbing — essay about the direct connection of historical colonialism to deforestation, desertification, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Ugh.
My first reaction is to be appalled and disgusted (once again) with the incredibly poor "stewardship" shown by European conquerors of indigenous peoples. Time and time again, these "civilized" invaders proved far less capable of effectively managing precious natural environments and resources than had the original inhabitants. Damn them!
And my second reaction is to be fascinated by the suggestion that "Anthropocene" may not in fact be a suitable name for the geological epoch we entered at some point in the past few hundred years. This is because the prefix "anthro" suggests that ALL humans are responsible for the changes wrought by global industrialization, when in truth it was, and is, only a mere sliver of the population, that good old 1%, who are behind the drive to dominate nature and exploit the environment at whatever cost, so long as they can profit from it and solidify their positions at the top.
Here's a short excerpt which amplifies this point...
While the scientific community has been debating over which year the Anthropocene Epoch began, several Indigenous and Black scholars have shot back against the term.
The problem, some scholars say, is that the term assumes the climate crisis is caused by universal human nature, rather than the actions of a minority of colonialists, capitalists, and patriarchs. And the implication that the Earth was stable until around 1950, when the ‘Anthropocene’ supposedly began, denies the history of people who have been exploited by those systems for centuries.
Indigenous scholars have further addressed how the term stands for colonialist ideologies that sever the deep ties and interconnections between humans, plants, animals, and the soil.
“Instead of treating the Earth like a precious entity that gives us life, Western colonial legacies operate within a paradigm that assumes they can extract its natural resources as much as they want, and the Earth will regenerate itself,” said Hadeel Assali, a lecturer and postdoctoral scholar.
I hope you'll read the full essay, and then let me know what you think about its message.
"Grains were not grown as fields of a single variety, but as diverse mixes of cereals & legumes called ‘maslins’ (or ‘mashlum’ in Scots). Ancient grains like emmer, einkorn, & barley were grown together with peas & lentils. Hemp, flax, & poppies were common supplemental crops as well. These diverse mixed fields were far more resilient than monocultures - in some parts of Europe, they’ve existed unchanged for 4,000 years."
Watercolour. A thin intrusion of mafic basalt running through felsic Lewisian gneiss. The two rock types, with their different mineral content, have strikingly different lichen communities. From Raasay, NW Scotland. A second, and probably final, sketch of this - I have some other interesting rocks to try...
A marketplace is not an ecosystem. It is merely a single organism, a megafauna, whose sole purpose is to consume and grow as much as possible.
An ecosystem on the other hand has no inherent growth-imperative. The primary objective of an ecosystem is equilibrium; circular exchange of energy. A secondary objective is emergent diversity for the sake of adaptability & robustness.
Economists calculate that the world's corporations produce so much climate change pollution, it could eat up about 44% of their profits if they had to pay damages for what they put out
👍 HarperCollins made a tiny tweak to its book design—and has saved thousands of trees as a result
In an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of each book, they’re tweaking fonts, layout, and even the ink used. The goal is to pack more into each page, while ensuring that the pages are as readable as ever. And so far, these subtle, imperceptible tweaks have saved 245.6 million pages, equivalent to 5,618 trees.
A group of scientists flew a sensitive tool attached to the nose of a special research plane, sniffing out aerosols in the atmosphere. They found significant amounts of aluminum and exotic metals in Earth’s stratosphere, which could alter the second layer of the atmosphere, according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Loved seeing this last night - bats on the radar as they head out for their evening meals. How many circles of bats emerging can you count? (Attachment is a video of weather radar of the #CentralTexas area, showing many expanding circles around areas where bats roost during the day.) #Texas#Austin#bats#radar#nature#ecology
(Astro)Physics has been a core part of my personal identity since my childhood and illuminates my views of the natural and human worlds. In particular, doing research on dynamical complexity on astronomical scales has contributed to the development of my increasingly alarmed scientist perspective on a variety of very earthly issues, chief among which our climate & ecological crises.
However, paradoxically (or perhaps as a logical conclusion ? ), what I have learned in part thanks to my astrophysicist viewpoint has also increasingly led me in recent years to wonder if I should not use my scientific skills and training to help mitigate these crises instead of doing astrophysics. After much weighing of what was the best move from my comfy position in the astrophysics ivory tower, I have finally “looked up” from my speculative theoretical calculations, and have recently decided to gradually shift my research priorities to ecological sciences with a focus on biodiversity conservation, in an attempt to make the most of my research training, experience and vocation to modestly help, to the best of my scientific abilities, understand and mitigate the ecological crisis we are facing here, on Earth.
Why ? Well, first of all, with increasing professional experience, my personal views of astrophysics & astronomy have evolved to become quite a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is a field full of very smart people and intellectually challenging and exciting. But it is also now sufficiently mature that we essentially know all we need to know to grasp our position, both insignificant and precarious, on Earth and in the larger Universe. In some sense, mission accomplished: the field has done its job (well) to scientifically enlighten human bipedes. On the other hand, there remains a myriad of unanswered questions, of lesser importance I think, and more or less interesting to solve, that in my opinion me and most of my colleagues could spend their lives working on without making any significant difference to human progress, knowledge, and well-being in relation to our environment. Most of the research questions we work on have become in my opinion misguided intellectual raisons-d’être in an era of bloated, overhyped academic research and industrial-scale scientific publication. Working on such questions make us feel busy and smart, but in reality my own impression, informed by accumulated experience, is that we are nowhere near to have the adequate tools, theoretical, numerical, observational, or experimental, to make any significant progress on most of these. Why then waste our energy and time on these questions, most of them quite insignificant – when exceptional times invite us to focus our intellect on more pressing issues ? Fact is, astrophysics is and will remain a very speculative field, with very limited falsifiability, in the foreseeable future. I may expand on this in future posts. What matters here is that having spent most of my professional efforts myself on not even being wrong, all of this while the world burns, has become a major existential issue for me.
Then, there is the problem of the pollution footprint of astrophysics. Let’s write this plainly: we are the most polluting scientific field on the planet: mega-observatories, steel and concrete cathedrals of science built in remote desertic locations, mega-space observatories packed with electronics dumped into space by huge rockets (some of them built by corporations that are actively contributing to the destruction of our environment), billions of CPU hours spent in high-performance computing numerical models of doubtful informational value sucking lots of not-so-low-carbon electricity (3t/MCPUh in the lowest-emitting countries), lots of electronic purchases to develop high-tech astronomical instruments, and buzzing international travel all over the world to conferences and international collaborations all contribute to our huge footprint. In my current research institute, each individual, researcher or other, emits on average 28t CO2 eq/ year in his/her professional activities ! My own individual professional footprint, including HPC (but excluding my occasional use of observational data from space observatories) was of the order of 10t CO2 eq/year until recently. None of this is sustainable and justifiable for a field that is nowhere near essential to document and help solve our environmental crises. However, despite a rising awareness among the base, our community has barely started taking significant steps to change that at the science policy power levels that really matter. This would require questioning the actual need for our most polluting, core research activities, and to downscale significantly instrumentally and in term of human resources, especially on the engineering side. I am having a very hard time being part of the problem in the environmental catastrophe movie unfolding in front of our eyes. Here too, I will probably talk more in future posts about the detailed arguments underlying the case I’m making, as I do not want to give the impression that I am saying this lightly.
Mix all these considerations together, and shake with a pinch of mid-career scientist professional existential crisis and boredom, having the feeling of having done everything I could and not being able to give more to the field, and you have the recipe for a major introspection and reconsideration of future career directions. I have honestly grown tired of astrophysical sciences, its research practices, and of my own perceived personal inadequacy to do anything significant there. I feel both useless and wasted. So I have concluded it is high time to use my energy and experience to serve more important research causes before I get too old and intellectually rotten, modestly and with whatever limited intellectual capacities I have left at my advanced age of 44. What better cause to serve than ecology and biodiversity conservation research for someone with a deep sensitivity for nature, mountains, and complex patterns of the natural world ?
This place will be here to describe my experience, thoughts and struggles as a scientist in the process of such a (scientifically difficult, and certainly not obvious) transition. I thought it would be a good idea to share my experience as it unfolds, both for egoistic reasons, to encourage myself and to conserve momentum when things get difficult (as they inevitably will do), but also to make other younger or older people with similar questionings, and maybe eager to take similar steps, relate and share. And also maybe as a bit of an activivist too, to contribute to instill through some logical arguments some sense of emergency and questioning among some of my colleagues less sensitive to these issues.
How, when, where all of this is going to happen, what is going to be posted in this place, that will be a story for upcoming posts. I hope you enjoy the ride. Please feel free to weigh in in the comments now and then to tell me/us about your own experience and thoughts on the matters I will post about, especially if you are a scientist yourself. I would also like this place to be a forum for debate or experience-sharing. What is important for me though is that this is always done constructively, in a civil and informed way, and in good faith. My view of these exchanges is that they should in the end lift us up all to help us better understand our place and role as humans and sometimes scientists, both as part of, and powerful actors (for the best or the worst) of our earthly natural world. This kind of conversation, in my view, is more than ever needed (actually, well-beyond scientific circles) in times of massive media dis- or mis-information and through-the-roof political irresponsibility on the biggest issues of our times, preserving the physical wonder that is nature and life on the pale blue dot.
Climate change protests: Major coal port remains blocked by climate protesters
Protesters have spent the night blockading the world’s largest coal port over what they say is the failure of the Australian Government to act on climate change
Several hundred protesters blocked Newcastle Port’s shipping lane, remaining overnight and into Sunday with the action due to end at 4pm, local time
Apparently it is now illegal to sing satirical carols in the street
by Mike Sivier
6–8 minutes
Members of Just Stop Oil have been threatened with arrest for singing Christmas carols – with altered lyrics to make them satirical, relevant to climate change
We really need a different term than ‘AI’ to describe private, on-device machine learning that benefits individuals but (a) doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy, (b) doesn’t destroy the environment and, (c) doesn’t enrich smug Silicon Valley tech douchebros like Sam Altman.