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...
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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...
