2. The oceans vs plastic; act
3. Two men at the top of my pantheon: Darwin and Lincoln, born the very same day: 12 February 1809
4. Penguins and Albatross--the world through the eyes of a seabird, Feb 19
5. Lead shot in the food chain; now on DVD
6. This weekend's Great Backyard Bird Count made it on Marketplace!; so did Alan Greenspan, to his regret
7. Free action toolkit for Do Not Mail Registry
8. Interacting with San Francisco's Park Patrol
9. Feedback: words, words, words
10. The strain in Spain falls mainly on the train: AVE Madrid
11. Another birthday celebration: Galileo 15 February
12. A new golden age for stargazing
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1.
"Golden Lands, Golden Opportunity" Aggressive Report Would Preserve Remaining Bay Area Open Space
"Thousands of acres in the Bay Area - from redwood forests in Sonoma County to orchards in Contra Costa and a large section of open space on San Francisco's waterfront - should be protected from development, according to a report released Tuesday.
The areas are included in the first comprehensive list of woodlands, trails, orchards, watersheds and parks that more than 100 land-use experts decided should be part of a regionwide green corridor with space for wildlife, human recreation and agriculture."
Read the full article on SFGate.com (copy and paste url)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/04/BA4Q15ME6N.DTL.
Nature in the City Needs a Grantwriter!
If you have a background in grantwriting, and have some spare time on your hands, we really need you! We are looking for a volunteer grantwriter to help us get the funding we need to continue all the wonderful things we do for San Francisco and its people & wildlife.
Please forward this on to anyone you think may be interested! If you are succesful you will be compensated for your work.
Give us a call at 415-564-4107 or send an e-mail to steward@natureinthecity.org if you would like to lend us your expertise.
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2.
OceanHealth.Org and San Francisco's Surfrider Chapter (www.sfsurfrider.org) are encouraging shoppers to "Love the Ocean & Use Less Plastic" on Valentine's Day by remembering their reusable shopping bags and avoiding plastic products on Valentine's Day. Please join the online campaign at http://tinyurl.com/8hhzyj to show your support and to learn ways that you can help.
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"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority." E.B. White
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3.
Modern biology owes unpayable debt to Darwin
For any endeavor, identifying the greatest practitioner of all time is almost always contentious...Physicists would argue over Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, with perhaps a few votes for Niels Bohr. Mathematicians would divide their votes among Newton, Archimedes and Carl Gauss.
But then there's biology. The greatest biologist of all time? There's only one answer. Any other vote invalidates the voter as unqualified. It's Darwin.
On the occasion of his 200th birthday the world is celebrating the life and work of the man who made modern biology possible. As geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once so aptly proclaimed, "Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution." No scientist's birthday warrants more hullabaloo and hoopla.
Excerpt from Science News editorial 31.01.09
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Abraham Lincoln
Darwin was born on 12 February 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln, who also struggled to reconcile our binary natures in his first inaugural address on the eve of the Civil War: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." From Skeptic column in Scientific American, February 2009
Here are some helter-skelter, disjointed notes about Lincoln, in no particular order, unattributed, including direct quotes. I gathered the material from a variety of sources: reading books, articles, internet, radio (hastily-scribbled notes), a CD course from The Teaching Company. Why do I do this? Primarily because Lincoln has taught me a great deal about life and about government--AND how we got where we are. It could have been otherwise. Late in life I am learning how complex human beings are, and how tricky it is to govern us. He is unquestionably one of the very great political leaders--one of the three or four in human history, in the view of one scholar.
Lincoln and race
Lincoln was a racist, as were almost all whites at the time. He used the N-word in his racist jokes, thought blacks inherently inferior, and proposed the solution of shipping them back to Africa. Although shocking to modern sensibilities, none of this should be surprising. In my youth (1930s, '40s), racism and sexism was rife, and few thought much about it. True, in school we were being taught that treating blacks as inferior was unfair and unjust, so the groundwork for attitude change on race was being laid. (Not so for sexism, which was so deeply ingrained and accepted that it was almost invisible, and certainly never mentioned in school.) Nevertheless, slavery was deeply repugnant to Lincoln and--in spite of his denials to accusations that he would free the slaves--the South deeply distrusted him, so much so that as soon as he was elected the South began seceding.
Lincoln grew regarding views of race; he once declined to invite Frederick Douglass to the White House.
Lincoln and Douglass were pre-eminently self-made men; they both were continually evolving--which was a contradiction of the very idea of slavery. Lincoln and Douglass came to know each other.
Lincoln met more blacks in the White House than all previous presidents combined.
Although racist, Lincoln was strongly opposed to slavery, but he had to ready the nation first. However, even in 1863 he wasn't sure the two races could co-exist.
We have mythologized Lincoln; we see him not as a human. We have greater respect for him when we see him as a recovering racist.
Lincoln and politics
Lincoln was one of most hated men in America. He received only 40% of the vote for president in 1860. He was ridiculed, caricatured, and frequently referred to as "ugly". (Some people even today regard him as ugly or unattractive. I have never understood this, as his deep character lines are anything but ugly to me.)
Some of his own cabinet hated him and tried to undermine him.
Many in America and Europe believed that the decay of democracy was embodied in the choice of a backwoods solicitor such as Lincoln to guide the destiny of his nation.
The war was going badly. Initially, Lincoln thought the rebellion would be put down and life would go on. (He called it rebellion; he refused to even consider the idea of secession)
He understood how fragile democracy is. He always tried working things out.
Politics is usually about paying back; Lincoln overcame this temptation and appointed many rivals and enemies. (Arabian proverb: Hold your friends close; hold your enemies even closer.) For example:
He appointed William H. Seward, one of his opponents in the 1860 Republican presidential primary, as Secretary of State. Seward developed into a loyal supporter.
He appointed Salmon P. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury. Chase was a humorless, relentlessly ambitious man who never liked Lincoln. (The feeling was mutual.) He never gave up the desire to be president, not even in 1864, when Lincoln ran for re-election.
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's "Mars," (Secretary of War) also at first held Lincoln in very low esteem, publicly blaming the North's initial reverses in the war on the president's ineptness. Eventually, however, Stanton warmed to the difficult task of reforming the War Department and a mutual respect between him and his president grew as the difficult war proceeded.
Many of Lincoln's cabinet appointments were from his opposition--some of them contemptuous of Lincoln--and they reflected opinion of the Democrats from the North. They thought they could control Lincoln, but they learned otherwise.
So Lincoln's turbulent group of touchy, ambitious men actually became a team and guided the Union during those dangerous times. In the end, though, it was Lincoln's forbearance, humor and understanding of human nature that was the linchpin of this fragile team that saved the Union.
In her outstanding work on this subject, Team of Rivals, the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the consummate skill Lincoln showed in managing this unruly group of ambitious establishment politicians during a time of our nation's greatest peril.
(Postscript: When it was decided to name a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, I was a little disappointed that they had not named it instead for Frederick Douglass, a deeply impressive man and a towering figure in my mind.)
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4.
“Penguins and Albatross ~ The World Through the Eyes of a Seabird”
Presented by Ted Cheeseman
Thursday, February 19, 7.30 pm - free
SF County Fair Building, located at 9th and Lincoln Ave.
Join naturalist and expedition leader Ted Cheeseman for a lecture exploring what it is to be a seabird in the vast unforgiving desert of the open ocean. How is it that albatross can fly 1400 miles on a single feeding trip to bring home just one meal for a chick? How can penguins survive, thrive raise chicks in the world's harshest environments, but yet do not populate the mild tropics? Illustrated with images from Ted's travels with Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris around the world, Ted will tell stories of the new views we are able to have into the lives of seabirds through GPS-telemetry. We are only now learning how truly magnificent penguins and albatross are just as many species face sharp declines at the hands of industrial fishing and climate change. Through his expeditions with Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris, Ted frequently travels across the Southern Ocean and to its sub-Antarctic islands, the heart of prime penguin and albatross habitat. Ted will take you undersea with penguins and on the wing of an albatross, an entertaining and educational journey among the world's greatest mariners with beautiful photographs and the most recent bird science.
Ted's abiding love of penguins and albatross stems from a lifetime of guiding travelers to remote seabird breeding colonies. He grew up traveling extensively with Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris, and began studying and photographing wildlife very early. After completing a master's degree in tropical conservation biology at Duke University, Ted returned to California to lead and organize expeditions full time with Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris. These voyages take Ted around the globe several times each year, sharing his love for the natural world with travelers. Through voyages to Antarctica Ted has witnessed the decline of his favorite of all birds, the Wandering Albatross, inspiring him to become involved with conservation efforts to protect these magnificent birds. Ted currently leads expeditions to South America, Antarctica and the Arctic for Cheesemans' Ecology Safaris.
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5.
TO: MEMBERS OF THE CALIFORNIA FISH & GAME COMMISSION, et al.
At the Commission's 2/05/09 Public Forum I mentioned the availability of a new Canadian documentary entitled, "Mystery of the Toxic Swans," dealing
with the lead shot issue and its devastating effects on wildlife (and not just swans). The film has already aired on Canadian TV to very favorable reviews, and the producers are currently seeking venues in the U.S.
As noted, former Commissioner Judd Hanna has a featured spot in the film. As you'll recall, Mr. Judd was politically lynched for speaking the truth about lead shot. Here's hoping all of you fare better.
The DVD is available from:
OMNI FILM PRODUCTIONS
111 Water Street
Vancouver V6B 1A7 CANADA tel. 604/681-6543
I was told that the cost of the DVD is $25 (U.S.), plus $6 (postage and handling). Could be cheaper in bulk, or for educational purposes. I would urge you all to get a copy. Again, I remain convinced that lead should be banned nationwide for all hunting and fishing. The science is in.
Eric Mills, coordinator
ACTION FOR ANIMALS
Oakland
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6.
I am a regular listener to NPR's Marketplace (4 pm weekdays KQED-FM), and was surprised and delighted to see a plug for the Great Backyard Bird Count going on now and through the weekend:
Marketplace datebook for Friday, February 13, 2009
And to benefit our feathered friends, the annual Great Backyard Bird Count begins, creating a record of where the birds are.
The program occasionally has items about the health of the economy being connected to the health of the environment, but I it seems more of a stretch to figure the connection here, unless there is a chance to sell more binoculars. (Just kidding.)
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A commentary from Marketplace:
Really, Mr. Greenspan?
Tonight*, CNBC airs a two-hour documentary on the economy’s collapse called “The House of Cards.” It includes comments from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Greenspan says he was baffled by what was happening in the subprime mortgage market until late 2005, when it was too late. Greenspan is often blamed for letting interest rates sink too low for too long, but he says if the Fed had stepped in, the outcome would have been painful:
“We could have basically clamped down on the American economy, generated a 10 percent unemployment rate. And I will guarantee we would not have had a housing boom, a stock market boom or indeed a particularly good economy either.”
Uh, excuse me, but with all due respect, Mr. Greenspan, what in the world do we have now?
*' Tonight' was several days ago
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7.
We've put together a guide outlining some of our favorite ways to help establish a Do Not Mail Registry in the U.S. Will you help promote the petition online, create a junk mail monster, or help build the Do Not Mail Coalition? Get your free action toolkit now.
Take it from NASA's leading climate scientist Dr. James Hansen: A Do Not Mail Registry is long overdue.
* "20 years after I first testified before Congress on the threats posed by climate change, we have reached a point at which we must remove unnecessary carbon emissions from our lives, or face catastrophic consequences. It is hard to imagine waste more unnecessary than the 100 billion pieces of junk mail Americans receive each year, and these new findings, revealing that the emissions of junk mail are equal to that of over nine million cars, underscore the prudent necessity of a Do Not Mail Registry."
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8.
(I lost the attribution on this item, but the item itself is important for advice regarding your experience with San Francisco's Park Patrol):
Thank you so much for writing your concerns about the Rangers. On our own part, we have witnessed the Rangers being effective and responsive in our respective park areas, but if that has not been the case for you and others, then it is important that this information be given to the Ranger management, so that they can work with the staff.
Please, in the future – and if you have the contacts for the people who were unhappy in the past – ask the people to send their complaints to the Rangers. They now have dispatchers, one of whose jobs it is to record and report all issues. To reach the dispatchers, call 415-242-6390 or call 311 and ask to be transferred.
If anyone feels uncomfortable talking directly to the Rangers about problems, then they should contact Dennis Kern, RPD Director of Operations, and express their concerns to him. Mr. Kern can be reached at Dennis.Kern@sfgov.org
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9. Feedback
On Feb 10, 2009, at 1:32 PM, Nancy Dunn wrote:
The literally incredible suggestion was intended more as a joke than anything else. Some humor does not transfer well to email.
Steve Neff:
but wouldn't it ruin the flow of my joke to spell "loo" correctly? It is so hard sometimes to know how to tell jokes properly in the e-mail age!
I know, Steve, I know. Yours is not the first one I misinterpreted. I have had a hard time learning about how we communicate, and I have constantly underestimated (Dubya would say "misunderestimated") the non-verbal aspects: body language, inflection, &c. I am learning the hard way about being careful with joking via email. All you have is words in black and white, without all those non-verbal clues we depend on.
I shouldn't confine it to joking: One has to be careful about expressing oneself in general via email. Email is good for data and other information. Beyond that, be careful, especially with people who are not close friends and who do not know you well. This applies to my newsletter, and I think of it always when writing things. Even then, many people are unsure of how I mean something; it's a risk I have to take.
yeah, e-mail is easily misinterpreted. I'm not really sure why it is different from writing letters. I've had friendships lost through e-mail, but never through letters. I think it FEELS to us like verbal conversation, maybe because it is instantaneous, but it sure ain't. For all its advantages, I think we as a society are losing something important.
Marck Menke:
The one I was referring to is included in the collection 'Consider The Lobster' under another title: 'Authority and American Usage'. I can't do the article justice in a summary but it brings up a lot of interesting points around the questions "Whose language?" and "Who decides what
is good usage versus poor." Wallace doesn't come out in favour of no prescriptions but he does suggest humility and argumentation that goes beyond "Because I say so or my dictionary or class system do it that way".
As for whether you are any of those pejorative terms I listed (BTW, "snoot" is Wallace's own term for draconian usage obsessives.)... I'll leave you and everyone else to self-define (unless backed into a judgmental corner.). I'm not beyond, being stymied or non-plussed by some word misapplications, such as the misuse of "literally"... but I really hate squabbling and snickering over bullshit like the number of syllables in 'forte'.
So perhaps I am a 'snoot' myself, in a anarcho-progressive way... but I'm definitely not a 'creationist'. Its exciting to find new words an usage patterns to try out, even before the dictionary gives me its sanctimonious permission to do so.
Well, Marck, I am a conservative when it comes to language. I formerly was obsessed with efficiency, and spelled words like tonite, lo-cost, enuf, &c. Slowly I evolved to honoring the derivation, as there is rich historical and cultural association in words like enough, dialogue, although, &c. I like to know that catalogue and dialogue came from the French, and English -ough words have a story to tell. Many aspects of the world are sterile and homogenized enough, and I like to preserve a trail to word origins.
I don't know what to say about the pronunciation of forte. Perhaps you're right; I can be anal and nitpicky, and I can't make a case for this being a to-the-barricades issue. (Nitpickers have a place, too, however; don't dismiss their contributions entirely.)
However, I didn't hear a reaction from you regarding words like pristine, incredible, genuine. Although they are used, sometimes even by semi-serious people, for all practical purposes they have lost their meaning from overuse or misuse, and there is no word to replace them. If we don't have a word to express a concept, that means that the concept disappears. We are impoverished. I consider this a serious matter.
Apropos an item which I am omitting here:
BTW, as an aside--not directly related to this--I recall riding in the back of a car with someone who asked me if I was aware of how many times I said "you know". (This was in the 1970s, when "you know" and "like" were the lingua franca of the young. I was no longer young, but I picked up the expression from hearing it constantly.) I denied using it; she said she would poke me every time I said it. As we were talking, she kept poking me in the ribs. "Stop it," I said, annoyed and a little angry. "I'm not saying it all those times." "Yes, you are," she said. She kept it up until I started hearing myself saying it. I couldn't believe it. For months afterward I kept catching myself, and I evolved to the point where I checked myself before uttering it. I found it difficult to realize that I never listened to what I was saying. How could I have said it a dozen times in about 2-3 minutes and not even be aware of it? JS
On Feb 9, 2009, at 5:36 PM, Stephen Shotland wrote:
Oh for an interesting malapropism. Be it intentional or not.
How about the head of Grace Steamship Company, in supporting Ronald Reagan's stand on abortion: "We were all feces at one time. I was a feces; you were a feces."
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10. AVE Madrid
Early morning at Barcelona's railway station and the platform crowd looks smarter than it would have done a year ago. But these are not ordinary weekday commuters. They are besuited businessmen heading for Madrid, almost 500 km away. A sleek new high-speed AVE train will whisk them to the capital at speeds of up to 300 kmph in plenty of time for their morning meetings.
...Domestic airlines have lost a fifth of their passengers in the space of a year...This shift is the consequence of an ambitious programme for high-speed rail...Spain's high-speed network is still in its infancy. Another 9,000 km of lines are planned over the next decade. The aim is to create Europe's most extensive high-speed network, with 90% of Spaniards living within 50 km of a station.
Excerpted from The Economist 07.02.09
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11. Born 15 February 1564: Galileo Galilei
In May 1609, Galileo received a letter from Paolo Sarpi telling him about a spyglass that a Dutchman had shown in Venice. Galileo wrote in the Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius) in April 1610:
"About ten months ago a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby. Of this truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons believed while other denied them. A few days later the report was confirmed by a letter I received from a Frenchman in Paris, Jacques Badovere, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to investigate means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument. This I did soon afterwards, my basis being the doctrine of refraction."
By the end of 1609 Galileo had turned his telescope on the night sky and began to make remarkable discoveries. Swerdlow writes:
In about two months, December and January, he made more discoveries that changed the world than anyone has ever made before or since.
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12. A new golden age for stargazing
The International Year of Astronomy is already sparking innovation and competition
It’s been 400 years since University of Padua professor Galileo Galilei had the bright idea of turning a modified spyglass toward the night sky. What he saw forever shattered the Earth-centered cosmos.
Four centuries later, telescopes reveal daily that the universe is vaster, stranger and more violent than Galileo could have imagined. He incited the compulsion to tunnel deeper into the sky, and the universe shows no sign of running out of surprises.
…Galileo “wouldn’t have had the cultural reference frame to appreciate or understand all this stuff,” said (an astronomer). “First of all, he’d get stuck on the scale of the universe.”
A constant in the history of the telescope is that new instruments inevitably change our view of the cosmos. Another constant is that the Copernican model, in all its significance, continues to hold. There does not appear to be anything particularly special about our place in the universe.
“Life is sort of a small fraction of what the universe is about—depending on your perspective. If you look out in the universe, it’s a pretty dead place…Anyone coming from Galileo’s time would be shocked by the diminution of mankind in the context of the universe. Galileo would be less shocked than most,” said Adam Burrows, a Princeton astronomer.
Excerpted from Washington Post
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