yearbook

Though perhaps not the finest, challenging or most emotionally-wrenching moments of the past year, we did appreciate this curated gallery of photographs from the Atlantic that truly lives up to the label of the most 2017 images ever. There’s been a lot this year we could really do with less of in the next. There are certainly some iconic—rather unforgettable moments and movements captured here. What else would you include? If you we making a time-capsule to explain this time to future generations, what says 2017 like nothing else?

i’m a lineman for the county

It’s urgent and vital that Puerto Rico has its electricity and other essential utilities restored and made more robust and at the end of the day it does not matter who completes the task so long as it gets done, but unusually, as Super Punch reports, the lucrative contract has gone to a small company, only incorporated two years ago and having only two full-time staff members until very recently, rather than being farmed out to the already existing networks. The efficient and agile company has proven its mettle in challenging outages in the past and is willing to take the risk that the already bankrupt territory might default on its payments, and it also apparently helps to ascribe to the crony-capitalism that is at the regime’s core and to be from the same Montana small town as the Secretary of the Interior.

sopwith camel

The municipal airport serving Sonoma county was renamed in 2000 in honour of cartoonist and long-time Santa Rosa resident Charles M Schultz (Sebastopol to be specific whom Schultz created a contemporary of Charlie Brown and Linus van Pelt called Five for short but whose full name was 555 plus the postal code of the town, 95472, which is one of the few restrictions, numbers, on naming children in American) we discover thanks to Just a Car Guy, adorned with the logo of Snoopy outfitted in flying ace attire and piloting his dog house.
The former army airfield is not only a tribute to the creator of Peanuts and his cast of characters but also the chief staging area for California’s forestry protection against and where the firefighting aircraft battling the wildfires ravaging the state deploy from.  Sadly, we learn the Schultz’ homestead was also consumed by the fires along with untold thousands of others.

igneous

As an update to a project first covered last summer, we learn that an international consortium of engineers and alchemists have brought the first negative-emissions power plant on-line in Iceland.
The scientists and their backers were understandably muted about their works and successes—hoping that industry would do a better job of policing itself and leave direct-air capture—having filters sequester atmospheric carbon-dioxide by transforming it into stone—as an absolute last-resort. Additionally, despite the fact that we’ve probably passed that pivot point and considering what’s at stake, the scientists were also not wanting to seem too pie-in-the-sky considering the prohibitively high costs associated with constructing the facilities—but desperate times call for a symmetrical response and right now with many places battered by climate-change driven natural disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, no price can be too dear. This first prototype plant paired with the geothermal generating station in Hellisheiði (to make it truly carbon-negative) is so far able to reabsorb the annual emissions of an average family home, but a May demonstration project in Geneva captured the equivalent of twenty households with costs coming down.

the quicker picker-upper

While I try to ignore the boorish antics of Dear Dotard for as long as I can manage, the time in between one transgression that can’t be ignored until the next insult is galloping in frequency.
Given the fact that a majority of Puerto Ricans are still without essential services not to mention reliable internet connectivity, maybe the reaction to Trump’s reluctant visit to the island territory was somewhat muted (it’s just like making fun of the Amish, you Sh*t Gibbon), the game show, carnival-barker atmosphere was far more surreal than I could imagine. After calling-out the island’s indebtedness again, praising their optimal weather excepting the recent hurricane and saying that the number of casualties were acceptable given the scope of the storm, the humanitarian took it upon himself to distribute aide by lobbing paper-towels at the assembled crowd. No one should be allowed to forget that this is the nightmare we choose (no matter how we were influenced should we be tolerant or complacent) and that actions have consequences.

gravel and fire

Of course not without antecedents and followers in the same tradition and I guess that were are all standing on the shoulders of trolls, Public Domain Review introduces us to the land-developer turned politician (both of dodgy success) finally turned dystopian author and advocate for the Catastrophism trope of history began enjoying far greater reach and influence, master of disaster Ignatius Loyola Donnelly, who was more or less single-handedly responsible for the triad of the most irresponsible, intractable themes in pseudoscience and pseudohistory that were still made to entertain today. The Minnesota congressmen published his signature volume in 1882, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, whose theories propelled the allegorical ideal Republic of Plato into a rather more literal interpretation of a lost continent and an advanced civilisation that ring the edges of our collective thoughts. Though the flooding of the Mediterranean took a mere instance in geological terms and perhaps the earliest ancestors of modern humans might have been witness to a time when the sea was a dry valley, the change certainly was not overnight nor generational. Most academics do not ascribe to the theory that change is driven by cataclysmic events over the gradual progression of nature, but by dint of the monomyth of a Great Flood—though I imagine that any flood can be privileged in the imagination of those who experienced it—and the fact that the City of Troy was being excavated and was not just a story after all, it all proved too tantalising and Donnelly was able to channel the populist movement in science and was also credited with giving rise to Mayan studies and mysticism through various citations of contemporary exhibitions.
No Ancient Aliens quite yet but we’re seeing what a fertile ground Donnelly is creating in the imagination of his readership. Encouraged by the reception of his first work, he followed on a year later with Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel that held that a near-collision with a comet was incident to history’s accidents, including the extinction of the woolly mammoth and the romancing of Norse mythology, and while somewhat resonant in other fields, if the Earth were subject to such formative, disruptive events, life would have never had the plateau of stability needed to develop into complex beings. Moreover, Donnelly’s writings were fraught with all sorts of fanciful racial ideas that some people will always latch on to as validating. Under a pseudonym, he also published a series of anti-globalist speculative fiction novels, Caesar’s Column, set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America in 1980, informed by the Haymarket riots that had recently transpired in Chicago. Though we are all living with the legacy of Donnelly’s influence and appeal and many others championed these ideas, Donnelly was discredited in his own lifetime and never published again after a book tour in England where he tried to foist on the public his theory that Francis Bacon was the author of the canon of work attributed to William Shakespeare. The Britons were having none of that and shut him down.

ultramar

Though the people of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the rest of the Caribbean will survive and come once again to thrive despite of Trump’s nihilistic disdain for brown people whose vote and adoration could never be curried in a way that counts with the help of individuals and the world, it is deeply shameful who the Dear Dotard would rather focus his efforts at driving yet another wedge through a precariously united society and fanning the flames of a culture war by politicising sportsball than spare a thought for his territories beyond the seas.
Apparently his reticence over the devastation that Hurricane Maria wrought and the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico—with a population of three and a half million American citizens (with an asterisk of course since they are mostly affiliated with the Democratic Party, non-Caucasian and they cannot vote in federal elections) was beginning to surpass the threshold of bad press as Trump started to terrorise and ingratiate himself on the island’s poor governor who is beholden to Trump’s whims now and in the future, who in turn praises the federal government for its aide, in the face of Trump begging off because of logistical challenges—the Atlantic Ocean. To redress this empathy deficit (and for whatever reason, Trump sees now as an appropriate time to raise the spectre of Puerto Rico’s already wrecked economy and its indebtedness to Wall Street) in the meantime, several cruise ships have been diverted and formed a flotilla to deliver vital food, water and supplies and ferry thousands back to the mainland. The extent of the damage and the hardships ahead are really yet to be fully formulated as there’s been little chance to survey and assess, and this recovery is not Dear Leader’s reality television—please don’t let this too become his show—but rather we pave the path to restore the lives and means of seeking a livelihood to the peoples of the Caribbean and to make this moment a pivot point where our compassion for one another and consideration of our choices for the planet and the climate come into sharper focus—with or without the leadership of America, which is sadly now, even in these moments of crisis that they’re supposed to be a source of reassurance, only a divisive force to play both sides against the middle.

gyres and eddies

In order to draw attention to the daunting problem of oceanic pollution and the impending calamitous crisis of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a group of artists and activists are giving this whirling vortex of litter and plastic founded circa 1985 and the size of France all the trappings of statehood, with citizenship, passports, a flag, stamps and currency. On World Oceans Day observed a few months ago, the group applied on behalf of the Trash Isles to the United Nations for recognition and membership, in the hopes that with the primus inter pares effect, the world might start to take the problem with the severity it demands.

plane-spotting

Hurricane Irma is still unleashing her wrath and is leaving a path of destruction in her wake including the famed Maho Beach of Sint Maarten, where visitors could formerly watch the aircraft take-off and land on the nearby runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Directly under the flight path of aircraft, airliners passed just thirty metres overhead but the spectacle was not without its dangers and risk to observers.

campaign hat

In what’s surely to further unhinge Dear Leader in ways that we can’t predict, we learn from Super Punch, one major, disruptive retail outlet in selling knock-offs of the baseball caps (campaign hats are those typically worn by park rangers and Mounties) he’s been shamelessly promoting during press-conferences on the hurricane response and recovery in Texas for a quarter of the price. Although Dear Leader seems unable to move beyond campaign mode, apparently he can recognise when his merchandise has gone stale.

heart of sharkness

Though I can imagine dealing with a hailstorm of vicious man-eating sharks might seem presently rather mild and the preferred challenge in comparison to the plagues that Dear Leader is capable of calling down on civil society and the environment, in case you had not heard—as Dave Log informs, the disaster horror comedy movie franchise that has started to attract all sorts of bottom-rung actors who vie for cameo-roles was also courting the likes of Donald Trump to play none other role than president of the United States of America.
Although second choice after Sarah Palin refused the part, Trump was reportedly very keen to be presidential, even if it was in a gory and bad film, with David Hasselhof, and Charo, and several other reality television stars. Trump was rather crestfallen in January of 2015 when his team of handlers asked him not to appear in Sharknado: Oh Hell No! as production might interfere with his actual bid for the presidency they were pushing the serial candidate to announce soon. I wonder what kind of persuasive argument that had to weave in order to get Dear Leader to give up on a sure thing for laborious long-shot. In this instance, I think we can all wish that his baser instincts would have prevailed.

halophyte

To be able to adequately feed ourselves, conserve our biosphere and transition away from fossil-fuels and release carbon that albeit isn’t without consequence but was only not sequestered for millions of years and so have a zero-sum effect on the atmosphere, we are going to have to be willing to cede lands back to Nature and no longer encroach on wildness.
One solution, as Æon magazine puts forward, is to expand into those brackish, liminal lands and coastal deserts and bring with us those few, little studied salt-water tolerant plant varieties to raise food crops or bio-fuels. Whereas most plant-species that we are familiar with a cultivated, agricultural sense wither and die in the presence of salt—sowing tracts of land with salt was from ancient times a way to discourage re-settlement, dying the death that’s on one level equivalent to the effects of carbon-monoxide poisoning for mammals. Interest is building slowly, but with limited fresh water supplies also creeping upwards in salinity, hopefully a new approach to farming could help prevent further injury to both flora and fauna.

an inconvenient alternative

Due to revelations that you may have heard tell of, Al Gore’s sequel to his sobering, Academy Award-winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth will be treated to a quick recut.
While the feature is being updated ahead of its postponed, late summer box-office release date to reflect Dear Leader’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, audiences in select cities across the US will be treated to free screenings of the current version of An Inconvenient Sequel. The brutish wrongheadedness of his woefully unpopular stance is reflective of a hypocritical, insincere romancing of the Rust Belt and jobs that cannot and will not be brought back (advanced, clean technologies are surely offering better paying careers and would have been more sustainable for communities had Dear Leader not forfeited that opportunity), even if the regime were genuine in its concern over them.

6x6

of salterns and sinkholes: a look at the buried salt deposits that drive the geology of the Gulf of Mexico and we will drill at our peril

kit and kiln: captivating, hand-crafted art tiles from Ann Arbour, Michigan

flower shankar: machine learning tries its hand at coming up with band names, via Waxy

while my guitar gently shrieks: Dangerous Minds interviews Missus Smith, the heavy metal, conservatively-dressed busker who can really shred it 

sensory substitution devices: look with your brain, not with your eyes—via TYWKIWDBI  

bloop: the international scientific collaboration Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected the echoes of a massive merger of three black holes

we’re going to have the cleanest air—we’re going to have the cleanest water

To lump the outliers of the Paris Climate Accords in one basket is a real unkindness to Nicaragua and Syria, given that the former objected to the goals set forth were far too modest and the Central American country is aiming for no less than a ninety percent energy sourced in renewable, sustainable resources within the next decade, and the latter was in the midst of a protracted civil war with no functioning government (the same could arguably be said for the third party) and had no delegation to send.
Intent on keeping at least one campaign promise that panders to his base at the disdain for ever other living creature on the planet, Dear Leader proclaimed that he was elected to represent the “citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” as he announced that after weeks of playing coy about it his decision to reassert American sovereignty by breaking with the pact.  Poor Pittsburgh. Much as is the case with Brexit (Castle Mayskull is the only other world leader not to join the chorus of unanimous dissent over Dear Leader’s bad choice), the divorce proceedings are messy and the US won’t be released from its obligations until 2020—though a frightening amount of damage could be affected domestically by undoing decades’ worth of environmental regulations and protections.
America has no cachet in the world under this tin-pot regime that advocates wilful ignorance and is completely credulous in saying that global-warming is a Chinese conspiracy meant to steal American jobs, and whatever sort of race-to-the-bottom that the US is hoping to spark with its myopic, greedy, grubby recalcitrance—the rest of the world is not having it: Parisians and Pittsburghers are redoubling their efforts for environmental reform, scientists and other subnational jurisdictions and even businesses are committed to the goals outlined in COP21 despite what Dear Leader is advocating. We ought to not need to expend extra energy and effort just to neutralise or contain the arrogant and dangerous stupidity of Dear Leader and his criminal posse of free-loaders, but tyrannies will topple perhaps this was the transgression to trigger the regime’s overthrow and to inspire some real and positive change for our environmental stewardship.

plumbum or better living through geochemistry

Mental Floss has a thorough and circumspect long-format profile on scientist Clair Cameron Patterson that’s a fascinating bit of triangulation among the applied sciences, scholastics and environmental policy that is a fascinating biographic study in its own right and especially timely in this contemporary political environment when science is under assault—as are policies and regulations that promote public health and safety. To summarise (but it’s worth one’s while to read the article in its entirety) Patterson joined the Manhattan Project early on at the facilities at Oak Ridge Tennessee and figured out how to use mass spectrometers to separate out uranium isotopes and create enriched batches of the critical mass to sustain a nuclear explosion. After the war, Patterson took a teaching job and like so many scientists were eager for the chance for purely academic pursuits after having in the spirit of project leader J Robert Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” and was given an errant mission from a colleague to accurately measure the age of the Earth for the first time.
Having advanced from three thousand years old, to over ten thousand, several hundred thousand to millions and even billions, the scientific community had a ball-park figure and the consensus was generally not beyond three billion years old at this time. From his days as a nuclear researcher, Patterson knew that uranium had a given half-life at which point it would break-down into lead, and postulated that by sampling the ratio of lead to uranium inside very old rocks, he might be able to derive a more accurate means of dating the planet. His mass-spectrometry technique might be able to tease out these numbers but wherever he looked—even under laboratory conditions—there just seemed to be far too much lead, and instead of concluding that the world was many magnitudes older than experiments suggested, Patterson investigated further. Parallel to Patterson’s life and career, the automotive and petroleum industry had been advancing a-pace and sort of like that proverbial old woman that swallowed a fly, to alleviate the need for cranking a car to start it, then to reduce the infernal smells of fuel additives, then to eliminate noxious noise from engine knocking, chemist finally settled on what seemed to be the ideal solution of adding lead to petroleum. This meant that especially in urbanised areas, lead pollution and poisoning (the body’s biology misapprehends lead for calcium with highly toxic consequences) were impossible to get away from. Going to great efforts after conducting environmental sampling from remote and pristine areas to disabuse the public from the idea (propagated by the automotive and oil industries) that these levels of lead in the air and in the blood-stream and household products (paint, food cans, shoe heels, plumbing—the Romans knew better, etc) was acceptable or within healthy tolerances, Patterson created the world’s first ultra-clean room, free from outside pollutants, not only calculating the age of the Earth to four billion five-hundred million years but also directly launching a campaign against lead contamination that went on for decades and has been championed by many others. Patterson’s research, though it was a tough battle against the industry who had government in their back pockets, eventually saw the gradual removal of lead from products and a marked improvement in public health as a result. Stories like these seem to make our backsliding all the worse.

après nous, le déluge

Though the breach did not result in any loss of the seeds stored within and scientists are working to make the structure more secure, the fact that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault built in 2008 and designed to weather an eternity of assault is already showing signs that it’s not able to withstand catastrophic, run-away climate change is a depressing prospect. The integrity and diversity of seed banks has already been demonstrated as vital to rehabilitating civilisation and there are multiple repositories all over the world, and while it is frightening enough to find this ark prone to flooding due to melting permafrost, it’s an even more arresting thought that there will be no place where these food crops might be grown because of radical changes in temperatures and long-term weather patterns.

dark triad or but our princess is in another castle

Informed by the trope of the paid professional protester that supposedly presents a threat to America’s infrastructure and energy-security rather than the real agents provocateur that have infiltrated the highest offices of government in fact, the state of Oklahoma—whose antagonistic attorney general was recently elevated to agency secretary responsible for environmental protection—is introducing further legislation that could potentially bankrupt not only protestors that cross the fragile and thin-skinned lines of civil disobedience by causing material harm to properties appertaining to said energy-security or businesses working in support of it but would also hold conspirators financial accountable—by ten-fold.
This is a pretty broad-brush in favour of the petroleum industry that’s already managed to health, safety and environmental regulations that have been obstacles to greater profit, and now along with other anti-protest laws defacing equipment with a protest slogan or being kettled into trespassing could carry a fine of one hundred thousand dollars. The dark triad of the title refers to the three universal personality traits that typify intimidation, bullying and toxic leadership: narcissism, Machiavellianism (being duplicitous in statecraft and business dealings and without ethical standards) and sociopathy. This disdain that corporations have for the environment and individuals did not begin with this regime but certainly benefits from it and will spread if allowed to continue unchecked.

😱

The theory that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (Skrik) has its sky coloured by memories of the eruption of Krakatoa, which made the sunsets very dramatic in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for an entire year a decade prior to the work’s painting has been circulating since 2004 (the year it was stolen from an Oslo museum—to be recovered two years later. Now, however, geoscientists and meteorologists (it’s strange to think that the weather reporter is the only scientist that many of us see on regular basis) believe the swirling clouds may represent a recently classified but rarely occurring formation called a polar stratospheric or mother-of-pearl cloud, which become iridescent when the winter sun dips below the horizon.

wokey the bear

Via the ever inspiring Nag on the Lake comes a series of prints based on the original US National Parks promotional posters produced as a part of the federal arts offensive of the Works Progress Administration—except that Hannah Rothstein’s work shows what the fate of these treasured places will be if nothing is done to halt and reverse climate change. It’s a bit bleak but there’s hope yet, since if we work together and are truly committed, this vision is not an inevitable one.