In the past, artificial and natural elements have been studied separately, but urban ecologists seek to understand the interplay between them — such as how heat and high carbon dioxide levels boost plant growth, how trees cool cities and how green spaces improve animal habitat.
Using ecological methods to tease apart those relationships can improve urban areas for people as well as natural systems, says Phillips. “The scientific study of cities should yield practical benefits in terms of making our cities more sustainable,” he says.
Ed Yong covers a fascinating new study that uses dots of absent ink in old woodcuts to map the historical biogeography of two wood-boring beetles—the common furniture beetle and the Mediterranean furniture beetle. That alone would make it a neat paper, but wait, there’s more. Because the two beetles were once regionally distinct but have become continentally cosmopolitan, the study also charts the growth of international trade throughout Europe.
Whether or not you care about pupfish, this plan represents a major philosophical change in how we think about our relationship with nature—because it doesn’t end with the pupfish. It ends with us becoming architects, engineers, and contractors for entire ecosystems. The old approach involved fencing off swaths of wilderness and stepping aside. In the new order, we’d be the stewards not just of land or wildlife but of individual chromosomes.
For millennia, we’ve wanted to control nature. Well, now we do. Welcome to the future. It’s going to be a lot more work than we imagined.
Justin Gillis and Felicity Barringer, reporting for the New York Times:
Less widely known about than flood insurance are the subsidies from the Stafford Act, the federal law governing the response to emergencies like hurricanes, wildfires and tornadoes. It kicks in when the president declares a federal disaster that exceeds the response capacity of state and local governments.
Experts say the law is at least as important as the flood program in motivating reconstruction after storms. In the same way flood insurance shields families from the financial consequences of rebuilding in risky areas, the Stafford Act shields local and state governments from the full implications of their decisions on land use.
Why and how Americans, who pride themselves on being fussy consumers, have put up with this mid-20th-century rail system is a mystery.
I whole heartedly agree with Reinhardt, but I should point out much of Europe’s infrastructure had to be rebuilt after it was bombed to hell in World War II. I’m not saying that was a good thing, just that Europe probably has more experience rebuilding infrastructure than the U.S. and so is more willing to on an ongoing basis.
Also, people are less willing to do something they aren’t familiar with. To Americans, rebuilding infrastructure is expensive and inconvenient, and because we haven’t done a lot of it recently, we’re skeptical that it’ll be worth it.
Nearly forty years after people, the Japanese island of Hashima is lifeless, sagging and absolutely uninhabitable to man, unless of course you’re a crazed nemesis of James Bond, plotting to take down the British secret service.
Hashima was at one point the most densely populated place on the planet. No more.
“Are oysters enough?” Orff says. “No. Is a storm barrier enough? No. Are making trap doors to our tunnels enough? No.”
That’s in part because we’ve built many of our cities right up the the water’s edge, where they are most vulnerable. We’ve filled wetlands that had historically acted as mops during storm surges. We’ve placed important pieces of infrastructure under sea level. And we’re changing the climate in a way that’s causing the sea level to rise, which compounds all of the problems listed above.
On the good-news side, they found that antibiotic use — a driver of antibiotic resistance particularly when the use is for diseases that don’t respond to antibiotics — is dropping across the country, by 17 percent when averaged for all the states.
But on the not-good side, they found that the trend is far from uniform. In Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and West Virginia, antibiotic use either dropped so minimally that the change was insignificant, or actually increased. Compare that to Colorado, Florida, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Dakota and Vermont, where antibiotic use sank by as much as one-third over that same period.
Cutting the data another way: Per capita, people in Kentucky and West Virginia take twice as many antibiotics every year as people in New Hampshire or Colorado.
Rising carbon dioxide levels at the edge of space are apparently reducing the pull that Earth’s atmosphere has on satellites and space junk, researchers say.
Obviously the political views of white men have changed over the years, but it’s a point well made. As electorates change, so do the outcomes of elections. In the past, that was because of a shifting legal landscape. Today, demographics are what’s in flux.
I’m from California, but I just spent three months living in Michigan and was pleased to find that Michiganders really do regularly reference their state’s geography or the location of certain cities by using their own built-in Michigan hand map.
I should point out that we from Wisconsin use a modified version of the Michigan hand map. With your right palm facing you, squeeze your thumb’s first knuckle toward your index finger. Leave the tip of your thumb arcing out, like you’re taking an oath. That’s Wisconsin. Your wrist is the border with Illinois, your thumb is Door County, and your pinky and ring fingers are the state’s shores of Lake Superior.
There’s more than just a “green case” for not rebuilding them, there’s a strong economic one, too. Barrier islands are amorphous stuff. We never should have built permanent anything on them. Want proof that they can change frequently and in big ways? Take North and South Stradbroke Islands in Australia. They used to be one island until a storm in 1896 slashed them in two. Why do we think such a thing couldn’t happen to the Jersey Shore?
“We know from geological surveys — and New Jersey is a prime example — that offshore sand, high-quality sand, is a highly finite resource,” said S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal scientist with the United States Geological Survey and the University of Hawaii.
Underwater ridges of sand lie offshore, but engineers must go farther and farther (and spend more and more) to find them, Mr. Williams said, adding that eventually “it is not going to be there.”
Do we want to spend it on the Jersey Shore, now? I get the feeling there will come a day when we really need beach sand and there won’t be any left.
There are lots of reasons why the 2012 presidential election broke the way it did, but one that’s not often reported—but particularly germane to Per Square Mile—is the divide between cities and the country. I’ve been thinking for a while now about this split as a driving force behind the polarization of U.S. politics, and I know I’m not alone. (On election night, Adam Rogers tweeted as much.)
But I was curious. Can we actually see the divide between cities and the country in the electoral map? In short, yes, but I’ll let the maps to the rest of the talking.
Swipe back and forth to see how population density relates to each candidates’ electoral result.
Thanks to Andy Woodruff of the always interesting Bostonography for the shapefile of the election results.
Justin Davidson, writing for New York Magazine back in 2010:
Barry Bergdoll, the head of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design department, divvied New York Harbor among five teams of designers and challenged them to figure out how a low-lying metropolis might deal with rising sea levels and violent storm surges. Their answers will appear (starting March 24) in the MoMA exhibit “Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” and they vary from spongy streets to reefs made of glass or oysters to apartment buildings dangling above the brine.
I’m not talking about oysters to eat — although a dozen would be nice to go with that leftover bottle of Champagne that I really should drink if the fridge goes off. I’m talking about the oysters that once protected New Yorkers from storm surges, a bivalve population that numbered in the trillions and that played a critical role in stabilizing the shoreline from Washington to Boston.
