Links: The wider world

[sonia]

Students ride the rails in this course to learn about sustainability and tourism by Mark Alan Rhodes II, Assistant Professor of Geography, Michigan Technological University.

What does the course explore?
Over the course of three weeks, students visit six locations, with overnight train rides between each ranging from 16-24 hours. The days are broken up into lessons on observing landscape and land use, sustainable tourism and urban deindustrialization, with at least an hour of class time on each train ride.

Dendrochronology by Robert Moor.

I had read enough forest ecology to know that this chaotic arrangement of forms—a density and diversity of shapes, sizes, and shades that no painter would ever even attempt to capture—belied a deeper order. I was looking not at a site of decay, but of growth—the luxuriant, slow accumulation of something at once resilient and frighteningly fragile.

The Wonder Waller by Kristie De Garis.

‘Fully immersed in my conversation with the land, I began to notice the drystone, and running my hands over the rough, Perthshire fieldstone walls, I felt that same quietude I’d known as a child.’

Millan Millan and the Mystery of the Missing Mediterranean Storms by Rob Lewis.

Suddenly, parts of the climate you couldn’t see before appear. In addition to the atmosphere, you now see the landscapes around you and the soil beneath your feet, not as helpless victims, but as active drivers of this thing we call climate. Not only that, but you see that at one point, not too long ago, science looked at the climate in just such a manner.

The weeds are winning by Douglas Main.

Herbicide resistance is a predictable ­outcome of evolution, explains Patrick Tranel, a leader in the field of molecular weed science at the University of Illinois, whose lab is a few miles from the South Farm. “When you try to kill something, what does it do? It tries to not be killed,” Tranel says.

The joy of clutter by Matt Alt. "The world sees Japan as a paragon of minimalism. But its hidden clutter culture shows that ‘more’ can be as magical as ‘less’." With joyfully cluttered photographs.

The First Virtual Meeting Was in 1916 by Allison Marsh. "The amazing feat linked up 5,100 engineers from Atlanta to San Francisco"

Comments

Virtual Meetings

[jesse_the_k]

...of course it was via telegraph. Great links.

Re: Virtual Meetings

[sonia]

The virtual meeting was via phone, with telegraph as the backchannel "chat." I love the idea of these besuited geeks putting this together for the challenge and fun of it. Glad you liked the links!

[silveradept]

Looking at the world through lenses that don't put humans as the only things that matter, or that humans are the things that matter for the destruction being caused, often opens up pathways for making progress on big issues.

Herbicide-resistant weeds is certainly an issue that's worth figuring out, and I doubt that Monsato can engineer their way out of the situation.

I did like the trans-country meeting call and the description of the program of the meeting, with the song choices and everything else.

[sonia]

I was surprised by the size and swift growth of the weeds they're battling. But if we kill off everything else, that's what will show up.

Yeah, if we could come back to balance with the natural world, a lot of things would get a lot better.

The geeky meeting is so cool, and you're right, the song choices are fun to hear about.