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Category: Humanity

Anatomy of a pandemic

Anatomy of a pandemic

Kevin Patterson writes: Wuhan, in the province of Hubei, China, is a transportation hub of 11 million built where the Yangtze and Huan Rivers meet. In December, patients began presenting, in steadily increasing numbers, with symptoms and clinical findings suggestive of viral pneumonia. (Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs; it may be caused by viruses, bacteria, or fungi.) Tests for known pathogens capable of causing such an illness came back negative. This raised the question of whether a novel…

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Deforestation plays a key role in triggering epidemics

Deforestation plays a key role in triggering epidemics

On Feb. 18, 2020, in Seoul, South Korea, people wearing face masks pass an electric screen warning about COVID-19. AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon By Suresh V Kuchipudi, Pennsylvania State University The coronavirus disease, known as COVID-19, is a frightening reminder of the imminent global threat posed by emerging infectious diseases. Although epidemics have arisen during all of human history, they now seem to be on the rise. In just the past 20 years, coronaviruses alone have caused three major outbreaks worldwide….

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Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities

Bruce Bower writes: Nebelivka, a Ukrainian village of about 700 people, sits amid rolling hills and grassy fields. Here at the edge of Eastern Europe, empty space stretches to the horizon. It wasn’t always so. Beneath the surface of Nebelivka’s surrounding landscape and at nearby archaeological sites, roughly 6,000-year-old remnants of what were possibly some of the world’s first cities are emerging from obscurity. These low-density, spread-out archaeological sites are known as megasites, a term that underscores both their immense…

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More evidence of ‘insect apocalypse’

More evidence of ‘insect apocalypse’

The Guardian reports: Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades. The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse”, which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. A third study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams. The survey of insects hitting car windscreens in rural Denmark…

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How Margaret Mead became a hate figure for conservatives

How Margaret Mead became a hate figure for conservatives

Sam Dresser writes: The explosively curious and acerbic Margaret Mead was born in 1901 and brought up by a tough academic family in Pennsylvania. After a childhood dotted with melancholy, her purpose in life – anthropology – emerged in her undergraduate years at Barnard College in New York City. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the 1920s, she fell under the sway of Franz Boas. The moustachioed polymath was born in Germany and defined American anthropology. It was…

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In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

In untold numbers, animals are suffering and dying, and we are either partly or wholly responsible

Jeff Sebo writes: At the time of writing, Australia is on fire. The fires have killed at least 25 humans and more than a billion animals. Animals such as koalas are especially at risk, since their normal response to threats – climbing to the tops of trees – leaves them vulnerable in the case of fire. As a result, an estimated 25,000 koalas have died and many more will die in the coming weeks. In 2018, Hurricane Florence swept through…

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Our fate turns on retiring our dualist view of nature

Our fate turns on retiring our dualist view of nature

Philip Goff writes: Since 1980, the temperature of the planet has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, resulting in unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the acidification of oceans. In 2015, 175 million more people were exposed to heat waves compared with the average for 1986 to 2008, and the number of weather-related disasters from 2007 to 2016 was up by 46 percent compared with the average from 1990 to 1999. This is nothing in comparison to the horrors…

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The elephant-human relationship dates back into prehistory

The elephant-human relationship dates back into prehistory

Tim Flannery writes: In January 1962, on my sixth birthday, I was taken to Melbourne Zoo, where I rode an elephant. We children climbed a scaffold and perched on rough wooden benches atop the elephant’s back, where my fingers furtively reached for a feel of its wrinkled skin. A few months later, elephant rides were discontinued, for safety reasons, at most zoos in Australia, Europe, and the US. I was dimly aware of the danger involved in mounting such an…

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What we could learn from our cave-dwelling ancestors

What we could learn from our cave-dwelling ancestors

Barbara Ehrenreich writes: In 1940, four teenage boys stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search revealed that their animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so—in the spirit of Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar—the boys made the…

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How conspiracy theories evolved from our drive for survival

How conspiracy theories evolved from our drive for survival

Jan-Willem van Prooijen writes: The great fire of Notre Dame on 15 April 2019 broke the hearts of culture lovers around the world. Parisians wept in public while the flames reduced large parts of this monumental cathedral to smouldering ashes. The French president Emmanuel Macron Tweeted a sentiment that not only French people felt: ‘Je suis triste ce soir de voir brûler cette part de nous’ (‘I feel sad tonight to see this part of us burn’). According to official…

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How science has shifted our sense of identity

How science has shifted our sense of identity

Nathaniel Comfort writes: In the iconic frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), primate skeletons march across the page and, presumably, into the future: “Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.” Fresh evidence from anatomy and palaeontology had made humans’ place on the scala naturae scientifically irrefutable. We were unequivocally with the animals — albeit at the head of the line. Nicolaus Copernicus had displaced us from the centre of the Universe; now Charles Darwin had…

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What an embodied history of trees can teach us about life

What an embodied history of trees can teach us about life

Dalia Nassar and Margaret M Barbour write: Place yourself on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, near the Franz Josef Glacier. Officially, this forest is a temperate podocarp-hardwood rainforest, but these dry words belie the rich diversity of plant life around, encompassing every imaginable shade of green, brown and grey. They also do an injustice to the experience of standing dwarfed by the soaring trunks of the 400-year-old rimu trees draped in moss, with their beautifully…

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The end of life on Earth?

The end of life on Earth?

Apocalyptic statements always sound crazy and talking about the end of life on Earth at this juncture in its history will, for many people, seem like an overly pessimistic assessment of the perils we face. Temperatures rise, extreme weather events become more frequent, species dwindle or disappear, forests burn, glaciers melt — no doubt the situation is dire, but surely not so bad that we are witnessing the destruction of life itself. For that to happen, wouldn’t Earth have to…

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How cultural anthropologists redefined humanity

How cultural anthropologists redefined humanity

Louis Menand writes: Not that long ago, Margaret Mead was one of the most widely known intellectuals in America. Her first book, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” published in 1928, when she was twenty-six, was a best-seller, and for the next fifty years she was a progressive voice in national debates about everything from sex and gender to nuclear policy, the environment, and the legalization of marijuana. (She was in favor—and this was in 1969.) She had a monthly column…

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The Amazon is burning because the world eats so much meat

The Amazon is burning because the world eats so much meat

CNN reports: While the wildfires raging in the Amazon rainforest may constitute an “international crisis,” they are hardly an accident. The vast majority of the fires have been set by loggers and ranchers to clear land for cattle. The practice is on the rise, encouraged by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s populist pro-business president, who is backed by the country’s so-called “beef caucus.” While this may be business as usual for Brazil’s beef farmers, the rest of the world is looking on…

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Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Fires in the Amazon, the planet at risk

Tierra Curry writes: In Brazil, the Amazon rainforest is now burning at a record rate. The greedy, short-sighted policies of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro are jeopardizing indigenous peoples and countless plants and animals. Indeed, in the midst of a climate emergency, Bolsonaro’s policies to slash environmental protections and develop the Amazon for mining, ranching and farming jeopardize the future of life on Earth as we know it. North America has already lost nearly 300 species to extinction. The toll…

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