Benjamin Grant’s Instagram project, Daily Overview, has been sharing high definition satellite photographs to give everyone access to a unique above-Earth perspective.
Grant has shared a selection of unpublished images from this project with The Atlantic in The Awesomeness of Earth from Above. Click here to view the entire gallery.
Henry David Thoreau offers reflections and musings on the diversity of the apple in his essay from the November 1862 issue.
When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature’s bounty, even though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hill-side has grown an apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the apple emulates man’s independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.
Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.
Words from Henry D. Thoreau in the cover story “If Mr. Thoreau calls, tell him I’ve left the country,” written by Ray Mungo from the May 1970 issue:
“To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had. Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written to-day for the next ten years with sufficient accuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend” — Henry D. Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
J. Weston Phippen writes in Can Bears and Humans Coexist?:
It was 9:45 in the morning, high in the mountains of Flagstaff, Arizona, on a ranch road that runs alongside a dried-up lake named Dry Lake, when a bear wandered into town. The Arizona Game and Fish Department is responsible for managing wildlife, and sometimes that means killing them. For three hours last Friday, agents chased a black bear across roads, through thickets of pine trees, down hills, and over neighborhood fences. The bear was a male, three years old, and so considered an adult. A fatal category. Agents shot the bear with a tranquilizer near a busy highway, then they killed it.
It’s a precarious thing to live near the wild. Most people move to places like Flagstaff, known for its ponderosa pine forests and the red rock buttes to the south, precisely because of its proximity to nature––to be able to walk out the door and become lost in country that feels as raw as it did 200 years ago. But part of living so close to nature means living in wandering distance of animals that can kill, like mountain lions or black bears. After the agency killed the bear, it was not the town’s safety that concerned the most vocal residents. Instead, it started a conversation across the state that’s also come up recently in Los Angeles with a mountain lion named P-22, with wolves in rural Oregon and anywhere around Yellowstone National Park, and also with black bears in a gated community in central Florida. Can people, so comfortable to living unchallenged in the food chain, peacefully coexist with predators?
Read more about the tenuous relationship between bears and humans here.
Read More:
A Blueprint for Protecting the World’s Oceans
There is really only one ocean. But over time, it’s been cordoned off into various regions, with the most fluid of boundaries. Today, geographers recognize more than 50 seaswithin five major oceans. There are also more than 150 Exclusive Economic Zones where individual coastal nations exercise sovereignty up to 200 nautical miles from their shores.
Now, thanks to the rise of marine protected areas (MPAs), the global ocean is becoming increasingly partitioned. The term is a catchall for sites like ocean sanctuaries, marine parks, and no-fishing zones—scattered havens where marine life is supposed to thrive, free of human interference (or, at least, subject to limited human interference). The world’s 5,000-plus MPAs include national treasures like the Galápagos and the Great Barrier Reef, but they also include small “fishery-management zones” that are undistinguished except for fine-print prohibitions on certain types of fishing gear. Even the Great Barrier Reef is open to extractive activities like trawl fishing and deep-sea dredging.
Only 2 percent of the ocean is currently covered by some sort of MPA. (In contrast, 12 percent of the world’s land is protected in national-park systems and wildlife preserves.) And only half of that 2 percent—a mere 1 percent of the ocean—is classified as “no-take,” or completely closed to fishing and other extractive activity.
The international conservation community has long heralded the role of MPAs in protecting ocean resources.
Read more. [Image: MPAtlas.org ]
A Caretaker and a Killer: How Hunters Can Save the Wilderness
Stereotypes of gun-toting brutes and tree-hugging hippies miss the basic facts about who is protecting nature—and why.Read more. [Image: kkirugi/Flickr]
For Deer in Germany, the Cold War Never Ended
The barbed wire, electric fences, watchtowers, and heavily armed guards that once lined the Iron Curtain are long gone, but red deer wouldn’t dare jump the border. Behavior learned at the height of the Cold War lives on among the herds that roam land that used to straddle the former Czechoslovakia and West Germany. The once heavily fortified borders separating East from West today traverse national parks and remote landscapes that serve as popular summertime migratory destinations for the imposing beast.
In the spirit of post-Cold War fellowship, Germany’s Bavarian Forest National Park and the Czech Republic’s Sumava National Park established a transboundary wilderness area where animals like the red deer could find refuge. But as it turns out, the deer populations on either side of the former Iron Curtain roam along the border and remain reluctant to cross.
Read more. [Image: Luke MacGregor/Reuters]
Editors of the Prestigious Journal Nature Get Serious About Reddit
Nature is one of the world most prestigious science journals.
Reddit is a website teeming with readers. Readers, readers, and more readers clicking on and discussing articles from all over the Internet, on topics ranging from The Walking Dead to Kierkegaard.
One of Reddit’s busiest subsections is r/science. The subreddit has more than 4,000,000 subscribers. At this very moment, some 2,000 are active on the site. They congregate there, every day, and link to and chat about science news from all over the world. Often, that news comes from Nature.
Editors at Nature took notice of these conversations, and sometimes participated. They’d help to explain a story they had written, answer questions that readers had, and direct people toward additional materials. Now, a new collaboration between Nature and r/science, adds a bit of formality to that routine, giving Nature editors and reporters little status markers (known as flair) next to their names that will identify their role at Nature, which, the journal’s chief online editor Ananyo Bhattacharya explained to me over email, “gives our reporters and editors some prominence while clearly signaling that we have chips in the game.”
Read more. [Image: Nature/Reddit/Rebecca J. Rosen]
In Focus: A Sea of Clouds Fills the Grand Canyon
Weather conditions in Arizona’s Grand Canyon last week gave rise to a rare phenomenon called total cloud inversion. Last Friday, and again on Sunday, the ground apparently released some of its heat rapidly enough at dawn to create a layer of cool, damp air inside the canyon, trapping it beneath the unusually warmer sky above the canyon walls and filling the space with a sea of fog. Park officials said the phenomenon is a once-in-a-decade occurrence and ran to capture these fantastic photos.
(Source: The Atlantic)
In my latest animation, the Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes coming to America for college and being floored by how little...
“Rather than sticking with turgid socialist clichés, in 1958 East German...
Listen to MIke D yell at an ill-informed radio producer because sometimes it’s really fun to be wrong: http://bit.ly/UralXA
–Sean, Sideshow
From Cats Dressed as People, 100 Years Ago, one of 15 photos. The Aviator. (Harry Whittier Frees/Library of Congress)
Memento Mori by Henrik Hondius (1626)
Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - Part 1
Some claim that evolution is just a theory, as if it were merely an opinion.