I had a truly excellent holiday period visiting Finland and jolly old England. I reconnected with a lot of old friends and lived in little slots of comfortable old lives. And although I was sad to leave I feel energised for this new semester - I'm taking a wonderful class on the Arctic (pretty much anything and everything to do with it), continuing my non-fiction writing class, taking a class specifically in science writing later on and going to a conference in Montreal in March. And then I have more fun work to do with the CFI, and hanging out with friends and my boyfriend will be around for at least 3 months... yes, a lot to keep me busy, which is for the best.
Anyway, although I haven't been posting over the hols I've been mulling over quite a few things.
Does God care about global warming?
A short musing - it seems odd to me somehow that all those fundamentalist Christians are often the most consumerist, truck-driving capitalists. Surely it should be a Christian virtue to care about the Earth? I expressed this to the CFI at a meeting, and got a worrying response from Brent - that things like that don't matter to people who believe we're living in the End Times. That the global climate going a bit crazy is just proof of the coming Armageddon apparently... worrying.
Short memories
I watched a documentary about the Boxing Day tsunami, and the part that made me think was when people were describing how they had no idea what was going on when the sea suddenly went out really far. Around the world today, that situation would probably not happen - there would be enough people that remembered what it means that people would run away instead of standing and staring. But how long would this effect last? There are numerous examples in the past of collective 'forgetting' leading to fresh disasters. How many people live in the path of Vesuvius today, despite it being one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in history? For all our mass media, I think we still have pretty short memories.
Is climate change the death of science journalism?
Reading Unscientific America and listening to a special of the (fabulous, locally produced) Skeptically Speaking, I've learned a lot about the history of science journalism. I seems that it has enjoyed the greatest popularity when the science is positive: when we were reaching for the moon or sequencing the human genome. The blame on the decline of science reporting is often placed in the public's lack of interest, but it seems to me that the constant barrage of depressing news about global warming has a hand in it. I'm not saying there shouldn't be reporting on climate change, but perhaps there should be more of a balance with other topics, positive topics.
This thought was furthered when I began reading the latest instalment of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, an excellent annual collection of articles picked each ear by a guest editor. This year the editor is Freeman Dyson, who begrudgingly admits he had to give over two thirds of the volume to Nature writing, since that's 'what's fashionable now'. To me then, it seems that falling back on environmental topics has a degree of laziness - if it's not something truly new and revolutionary then it's just drumming into the public something they're already sick of, and ignoring plenty of other more fascinating, more ground-breaking research discoveries.
The key to beauty?
While reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing on the plane over to the UK I got absorbed in many interesting articles. There was a section dedicated to neurology, and how it's displacing many of the previous theories for the things we do and experience; an article about a guy dedicating himself to researching the causes of strange conditions, things people believe are just 'craziness'. He set about proving that many of them have deep neurological causes, helping us better understand the way our brains work.
But as I read over a fact I'd heard before I started to think. When we see, most of the time there's simply too much information to process all at once, so a lot of what we image is just 'filled in' by our brain, based on what we've seen before. As we banked around London and I stared out at the winking lights, I wondered if that was what made things 'beautiful' - when they contain so much detail we can't fill in that we just have to look and look at them. Why we stare so long at intricate paintings or flowing waterfalls. There's just too much strange and wonderful information. Whimsical, or am I on to something?
The Arctic is a book of untold stories
Finally, my good friend Jess pointed me to an article the local Arctic specialist journalist Ed Struzik had written when he accompanied her and her supervisor John England on their field research this past summer. She expressed surprise at some parts of the article, how Struzik talked about England, and how she was put out he talked about the gruelling food when she insisted they made him pancakes every morning! I guess it added to the bleak picture of Arctic research, but I think pancakes in the northern desert would have made a funnier anecdote !
