Yet Despite Decades Of Relegation To Roles As Tourist Attractions Or Advertising Gimmicks, Airships May

"To survive, I had to grow a skin as thick as a cast-iron pot and this is now almost impenetrable. I am not convinced this was a positive modification to my character, but it is definitely an important survival adaptation for a woman conservationist in East Gippsland.

So why continue to be in this front line situation in constant conflict, having to justify your beliefs to a hostile public on radio interviews and in the papers?

It’s not my idea of pleasant country living. I’d like nothing better than to get on with my plans to breed Clydesdales, grow walnuts, work on the eco-tourism business, weave baskets from willow and honeysuckle and weed the carrot bed.

It is my sense of injustice, my own convictions and determination that keep me in there. Sometimes I wish I was as apathetic and ill-informed as the general population seems to be. But once you become aware of the injustices being done, the lies being told, the legalised vandalism being paid for by our taxes, you can never allow yourself the luxury of putting the blinkers on.

Though sometimes I wish I could.”

- Jill Redwood, forest campaigner and conservationist in East Gippsland for over 30 years, writing in Women and Migrants associated with the Timber Industry in East Gippsland (2000)

How To Avoid The Next Atlantis

They say nothing in life is guaranteed except death and taxes. Maybe we should add rising sea levels to that list?

The lapping waves of Earth’s oceans are going to move as much as 1 full meter higher within our lifetimes, and perhaps several meters more in the coming centuries depending on what we do or don’t do about slowing down climate change. Part of this comes from melting glaciers and ice shelves flowing out to sea, and part comes from the natural expansion of water as it warms, but we have to face facts: Sea level is rising.

This new video from MinuteEarth looks at some of the interesting ways that coastal cities around the globe are trying to get ready for a wetter world. I wish this wasn’t something we had to prepare for, but I’m glad we’ve got smart people on the job.

Bonus: Curious what 1 meter of sea level rise looks like? Head over to Climate Central and play with their Surging Seas map simulator. Look, you can even make half of Florida and Louisiana disappear!

TED Grant Goes to Archaeologist Who Combats Looting With Satellite Technology

Her laptop brims with satellite images pitted with thousands of black dots, evidence of excavations across Egypt where looters have tunneled in search of mummies, jewelry and other valuables prized by collectors, advertised in auction catalogs and trafficked on eBay, a criminal global black market estimated in the billions of dollars.

“For the first time technology has gotten to the point where we can map looting,” said Sarah H. Parcak, a pioneering “space archaeologist,” founding director of the University of Alabama’s Laboratory for Global Observation in Birmingham and an associate professor there.

Satellite eyes in the sky, which have transformed the worldwide search for buried archaeological treasures, are now being used to spy on the archenemies of cultural preservation: armies of looters who are increasingly pockmarking ancient sites with illicit digs and making off with priceless patrimony. Read more.

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: outstanding lecture

UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown came to the London School of Economics last week to discuss her book Undoing the Demos, and her lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations.

Brown looks at the human rights enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, and how they have been interpreted in successive Supreme Court rulings like Hobby Lobby (corporations are people whose religious freedom entitles them to deny contraception to their workers) and Citizens United (corporations are people and have the free speech right to buy politicians). She suggests that these have been misread as merely conservative/business-oriented thinking gaining influence, and that rather, they are best understood as an ongoing project that grants personhood to companies at the expense of real people.

Brown speaks for more than an hour with almost no poli-sci/econ jargon, building elegant, beautiful arguments that should be accessible to anyone. If you listen to anything this weekend, make it this.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution [Wendy Brown/Zone Books]

When Firms Become Persons and Persons Become Firms: neoliberal jurisprudence in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores [LSE]

MP3

How To Build More Resilient Cities

Check in: The Tokyo hotel where guests can curl up with 1,700 good books

Book and Bed, a new Tokyo hotel, has created the sort of space that is impossible to leave. It is a cheap and cheerful dorm with a difference: guests’ bunk beds are hidden behind library shelves filled with hundreds of books in Japanese and English. | Read more

Could Europe Be Powered by African Solar Energy?

For a long time, people looking for big fixes to climate change have been talking about building huge solar installations in North Africa, which gets a lot more sun than most of the places where solar power is big — Germany, for example. But now, it looks as if someone finally is doing it.

Next month in Ouarzazate, Morocco, the first portion of what eventually will be the world’s biggest concentrated solar power plant – called Noor I – is set to go online, according to the Guardian, a British newspaper.

Eventually, when the entire $10 billion complex, which is being financed with assistance from the World Bank and European Union, is completed in 2020, it will generate 580 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide a big portion of Morocco’s energy needs while still leaving plenty of juice for export. The complex could prevent 700,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being spewed into the atmosphere each year.

The plant uses an ingenious technology for getting the most out of sunlight. A huge array of 500,000 crescent-shaped mirrors focus sunlight and transmit it to a single point on a tower. (The mirrors actually have tiny computers in them, which adjust the angle throughout the day to gather the most energy.)

The plant could turn Morocco, which depends upon fossil fuel imports to fill 94 percent of its energy needs, into a major producer of electricity for export. Find out how by clicking here.

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

The Fracking Science Compendium by Physicians for Social Responsibility shows overwhelming harms. Learn more below: 

http://concernedhealthny.org/compendium/ http://www.psr.org/resources/fracking-compendium.html

In an experiment, two ravens had to simultaneously pull the two ends of one rope to slide a platform with two pieces of cheese into reach. If only one of them pulled, the rope would slip through the loops, leaving them with no cheese. Without any training they solved the task and cooperated successfully.

However, when one of the two birds cheated and stole the reward of its companion, the victims of such cheats immediately noticed and started defecting in further trials with the same individual.

“Such a sophisticated way of keeping your partner in check has previously only been shown in humans and chimpanzees, and is a complete novelty among birds.”

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