How our environment is making us sickâand what we can do about it
From air pollutants to pesticides in food and cosmetic additives, modern life means constant exposure to environmental chemicals. Picking apart the effects will help us boost the health of humans and the planet.
How many trees are there on Earth? Mission to measure planet's biomass
Trees are our biggest ally against climate change - but we've never been sure how big. New space-based technology is revealing their potential for the first time.
from The Economization of Life by Michelle Murphy (Duke UP, 2017)
In 1905 Begum Roquiah Shekhawat Hossein, a celebrated advocate for womenâs education and equality and an elite Muslim woman from what is now called Bangladesh, wrote a story about dreaming technoscience that is now considered the first feminist science fiction story. At sixteen, Begum Roquiah married the deputy magistrate of Bhagalpur, who would die young. With the money left to her, she opened the first school for Mus- lim girls in India, which still exists today. In the portrait gallery of Dhakaâs Pink Palace Museum, Begum Roquiah is the single female face looking out from the gallery walls.
Called Sultanaâs Dream, Begum Roquiahâs story begins with the narrator falling asleep as she is âthinking lazily of the condition of Indian woman- hood.â She then wakes into a dream. Alert within her imaginary, she finds herself walking unveiled in daylight in another world where the gendered structures of elite South Asian Muslim society are reversed: men are now confined to their chambers and women have become the scientists and public subjects. In this other world, âladyâ scientists have turned away from building military machines and war. Instead they have invented ways to harness rain from the sky and share energy from the sun. One school of women scientists had âinvented a wonderful balloon, to which they attached a num- ber of pipes. By means of this captive balloon which they managed to keep afloat above the cloud-land, they could draw as much water from the atmosphere as they pleased.â Another university had âinvented an instrument by which they could collect as much sun-heat as they wanted. And they kept the heat stored up to be distributed among others as required.â The most distinguished science of this other world was botany. The roads were formed of a âsoft carpetâ of moss and flowers, and the city itself was a marvelous garden. Sewing too was a celebrated art, and beauty highly valued. In the garden, âevery creeper, every tomato plant was itself an ornament,â such that the products of science were as much aesthetic as functional. In this other world, science had a âsentimentalâ quality, not divorced from feeling or beauty. In this world, women were all educated and married late, while men minded the children. Kinship was expanded such that âa distant cousin is as sacred as a brother.â It offered an alternative vision of how to live with plants and ecologies as part of the fabric of society. Revisioning gender, kinship, and science, Sultanaâs Dream conjures a feminist techno- science through a counterfactual world, a world turned upside down.
Awake to its own phantasy, the story calls on dispossessed women to dream with technoscience at a moment when South Asian Muslim women had begun agitating for access to formal education. Dreaming otherwise, the story draws on a tradition of Western utopian fiction and the revelatory force of dreams in Bengali culture to generate medical innovation and moral demands. While the inversion of menâs and womenâs worlds reverses rather than unravels gendered norms, the text suggests that dreaming is a domain where the possibilities of technoscience are contested. The inauguration of feminist science fiction as a South Asian Muslim feminist project disrupts the cartographies of knowledge-making that posits South Asian women as the objects to be counted rather than the subjects who dream with technoscience. Through its figures of gardens, clouds, and pleasure, Sultanaâs Dream suggests the possibility that technoscience might do life and phantasy differently.
The premise of Sultanaâs Dream has something to teach about the work of phantasmagrams. What would it mean to be awake, rather than asleep, to the dream? There is a politics in the invitation to become alert to the phan- tasy. How does one awaken to the phantasma of economy and population?
Gaia rebooted: New version of idea explains how Earth evolved for life | New Scientist, 20 March 2019
The controversial Gaia hypothesis sees Earth as a superorganism adapted to be perfect for life. A weird type of evolution may finally show how that actually happens.
But there might be another way, says Lenton. What if Gaia works like Ashbyâs Homeostat? In other words, he suggests, Earth and the early life on it might have interacted haphazardly at first. Unstable configurations â those, say, with little or no cycling of key elements such as nitrogen â would have failed quickly, requiring life to reboot nearly from scratch. Eventually, though, the system must have stumbled on a stable configuration, with better cycling and tighter regulatory mechanisms. It should be no surprise, then, that the planet of today has strong regulatory systems.
This process, called âselection by persistenceâ, evades the requirements for competition and reproduction that make natural selection so problematic as a mechanism for explaining the evolution of Earth. âI think of it like a search algorithm,â says Lenton. â[Earth] can undergo repeated trials over time until it falls into a stable configuration. And once it does, that tends to persist.â
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If Lenton is right, this would have triggered a period of planetary instability followed by the gradual emergence of a new, increasingly stable Earth system as the biosphere accumulated fresh metabolic pathways to regulate its novel regime.
Environmental Humanities and Sustainable Modernity in Asia (and Beyond)
by Prasenjit Duara | November 7, 2017
Prasenjit Duara makes a strong case for the relevance of the humanities in understanding the human dimensions of environmental and climate change. Multiple aspects of the environmental crisis of the Anthropocene, not least questions of environmental justice in efforts to adapt to and mitigate climate change, can be engaged through humanistic inquiry. With a focus on Asia, Duara argues that questions of identity, representation, religion, ethics, knowledge systems, and moreâcentral concerns of the humanitiesâare deeply embedded in imagining how to respond to present environmental challenges.
Growing crops in the city, without soil or natural lightâŠPlants create themselves partly out of thin air. Salad greens are about ninety per cent water. About half of the remaining ten per cent is carbon. If AeroFarmsâ vertical farm grows a thousand tons of greens a year, about fifty tons of that will be carbon taken from the air.
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