This spring brings hopeful signs of an environmental awakening. I woke up this morning thinking about Rachel Carson. I wasn’t thinking about the author, exactly. It was more to do with the period of the early 1960s when Rachel Carson made a difference – a period of growing environmental consciousness as a prelude to taking [...]
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The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson In seventh grade in Ohio, in the heartland of America and without ever actually seeing the ocean, I read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. I had become very enamored in everything to do with water, but my experience was confined to freshwater in the streams, rivers and lakes [...]
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This post is part four of a four part series on scientific synthesis. In some cases, scientific synthesis is not the end product, rather it can be the start of a science application effort. In a case study to demonstrate the use of scientific synthesis which led to a science application effort, I will recount [...]
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This post is part three of a four part series on scientific synthesis. The Integration and Application Network (IAN) was created to facilitate scientific synthesis as part of science applications. In many respects, the linking of integration with application is crucial, and IAN projects tend to use synthesis in order to create effective applications. The [...]
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This post is part two of a four part series on scientific synthesis. At our annual UMCES Faculty Convocation organized by the Appalachian Laboratory faculty senators Drs. Katia Englehardt and Matt Fitzpatrick, we discussed scientific synthesis and asked ourselves the following 4 questions: 1) How do we approach synthesis?, 2) How does UMCES facilitate synthesis?, [...]
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This post is part one of a four part series on scientific synthesis. The word synthesis is derived from the Greek word, syntithenai meaning ‘to put together’, and was first used in the latter part of the 1500s. The word integration is derived from the Latin word, integratus meaning ‘to render whole’, and was first [...]
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Have you ever heard about Bill McKibbens and his three numbers? If not, you might want to read about it, if you are concerned about the future of the earth. In his Rolling Stone article, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, McKibben used three simple numbers to explain the serious climate change situation we face right [...]
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In 1610, Galileo Galilei published the Sidereus Nuncius, or the Starry Messenger, a paper which strongly suggested that Nicolaus Copernicus had been correct when he presented an alternative view of our solar system, over half a century earlier, in which the earth orbited around the sun and not vice versa. In doing so, Galileo changed [...]
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Professor Paul Greenfield was my mentor both at the University of Queensland and in the Healthy Waterways campaign. Paul recently retired from his role as Vice Chancellor of the University of Queensland and I would like to provide my perspective on his role as a human catalyst. Sometimes the most difficult thing to measure is [...]
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People are part of a hybrid socio-environmental ecosystem. The debate over whether people should start geoengineering the atmosphere in order to prevent the worst effects of global warming ignores one essential fact – we already are geoengineering the atmosphere. Geoengineering is the deliberate effort to manipulate processes that control conditions in the atmosphere on a [...]
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