Signs From Earth

Rare African Cheetah Photographed

The BBC reports on camera-trap sightings in Algeria of the rare Northwest African, or Saharan cheetah. Estimates have populations of the cat, which is thought to range over six north African countries, at 250 or fewer mature adults. The research is being conducted by the Zoological Society of London and Office du Parc National de l'Ahaggar.

BBC: Rare Cheetah Captured on Camera

ZSL : New Evidence of Critically Endangered Cat

Incredible Shrinking Trophy Fish

Trophy fish caught on Key West charter boats in (a) 1957, (b) early 1980s and (c) 2007. From Monroe County Library

If you are not convinced that our overfishing of the seas is having an effect, look at the shrinking "trophy fish" of the Florida Keys.

Scripps Institution graduate student Loren McClenachan rounded up more than five decades worth of archival photographs of Florida Keys fish catches, and what she found showed a drastic decline in the size of "trophy fish" caught in the seas around Key West, Florida. 

Her analysis of photographs from the 1950s through 2007 showed that fish caught today are nearly 90 percent smaller in estimated weight than those caught in the 1950s. Her research, part of the emerging field of historical marine ecology, is being published by Conservation Biology.

McClenachan discovered a cache of historical images of nearly 1,300 fish in the Monroe County Library in Key West which gave her visual baseline fish size data for her analysis. 

These images showed fish on a hanging board next to the sport fishing passengers of the day who caught the fish.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: Historical Photographs Expose Decline in Florida's Reef Fish

Abstract of Paper: Historical Photos Document Changing Reef Fish Communities 

Interview with Smithsonian Magazine editor who discusses McClenachan's work.

The Whole Earth is Now Online

The Whole Earth Catalog and its spawn CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review were among my favorite reads and inspirations in the decades when they were in print.

Long gone from the dead tree publishing landscape, my fading collection of several Catalogs and an almost complete set of Co-Evolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review still graces my shelves.

The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. 

Transformed from paper to electrons, this wonderous archive marks a period in our recent history when the contemporary environmental movement was beginning to take shape.

Carrying motto "Access to Tools," Whole Earth was handbook and manual for those seeking instructions and tools to create a better world and self-sufficient life with their own initative, passion, and energy.

Edited by Stewart Brand and a host of smart people like Kevin Kelly, Whole Earth is where I first saw the work of agrarian poet and essayist Wendell Berry and ecological agriculturalist Wes Jackson, who started The Land Institute in Kansas.

Whole Earth led me to Berry's influential book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, and to Jackson's New Roots for Agriculture.

I discovered the work of Donella Meadows here, a MacArthur Fellow and one of the authors of the 1970's book The Limits to Growth.

Meadows' essay Places to Intervene in a System is significant, along with her sequel essay Dancing With Systems.

"Places" is mandatory guide to understanding any type of system: an organization, economy, living body, ecosystem, or a city, and explains why a small shift in one thing can create a big shift in most everything. She explains why most change is misguided, misapplied, and mistimed because of a failure to recognize "leverage points."

The Catalog's influence was documented in a 2007 book by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.

The Whole Earth family of publications was the internet before there was an internet, blogs before blogs. The arrival of a new edition or issue was an event, everything else was set aside until a full perusal of the copy that had just shown up in the mailbox.

--DD

Links:

Turbulence In Our Midst

An October 21st interview on PBS Newshour with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the book The Black Swan, and Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician who postulated the "the butterfly effect" in addition to his work with fractals.

Turbulence. We are in its midst. No one knows how severe it will eventually become.

Marine Life Census in 2010

From Eurekalert

Scientists announce major progress towards historic Census of Marine Life in 2010

Among report's revelations: Antarctic ancestry of many octopus species, behemoth bacteria, colossal sea stars, mammoth mollusks, more..