Is Conservation Extinct?

Conservationists are used to justifying their work. Since the movement first took shape in the 1800s, they’ve provided a litany of contemporary arguments for conserving the natural world, from economic (protecting forests for wood) to spiritual (preserving places that stir the soul) to scientific (safeguarding biological systems). But lately they’ve been wrestling internally with another fundamental question about their task: not why we should save nature, but what exactly we should save and how we should save it. Against a backdrop of growing global resource demand and climate change — as well as emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology — that are wreaking philosophical havoc, finding the answers is urgent.

At issue is how to modernize a predominantly 20th-century enterprise. Since at least the 1960s, biodiversity conservation has largely taken its cue from the health of particular species. It’s been reactive, focused on stopping things: habitat loss, habitat fragmentation, extinction. But despite valiant efforts, billions of dollars and years of long-fought battles, conservation seems perpetually on the losing side of a war.

“We know absolutely that something has to be different,” says Jon Hoekstra, chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. “In the 21st century, instead of starting with only 2 or 3 billion people, we start with 6 and go to 9, and do it under changing climate conditions and intense resource demands. The context of conservation is going to be profoundly different.” (...)

Chat with a conservation leader today and you’re likely to hear some fairly surprising things. We can’t do it species by species. Protected areas aren’t going to be enough. Saving the last place or the last of the species is not our focus.

The exact messages may differ — after all, there may be as many distinct conservation agendas as there are places, creatures and ways of life — but the theme is constant: Something needs to change. Conservation today is in need of a far more potent approach.

Answering those looming questions — what to save, how to save it — has sparked heated debate among practitioners. Last year the Breakthrough Institute, the pragmatic think tank that’s been a thorn in the side of traditional environmentalism since its inception in 2003, published an essay by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy; Robert Lalasz, TNC’s director of science communications; and Michelle Marvier, an ecologist at Santa Clara University. Titled “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” the essay argued that conservation is failing in its efforts to save both biodiversity and ecosystems, despite setting aside an impressive number of protected areas. To succeed, the authors wrote,

conservation could promise instead … a new vision of a planet in which nature — forests, wetlands, diverse species, and other ancient ecosystems — exists amid a wide variety of modern, human landscapes. For this to happen, conservationists will have to jettison their idealized notions of nature, parks, and wilderness — ideas that have never been supported by good conservation science — and forge a more optimistic, human-friendly vision. (...)

Reactive and defensive almost by definition, conservation has long made its living by explicitly looking backward. It’s an approach that made perfect sense, for a time. “We wanted to restore a species so that it spanned the breadth of its historic range,” says Hoekstra. “We would look to the past and say, ‘We should have this much of this habitat back again, or it should look this way.’” But while this strategy may still work in certain specific cases, as an overarching vision it no longer fits. You can’t “dial back time” in a world of 9 billion people demanding water, food and energy.

Hoekstra’s pivot is a 180-degree turn, shifting conservation to face the future. Population trends and global warming will leave the world looking very different than it does now, and no amount of money or effort seems destined to stop that. But we can, Hoekstra believes, try to ensure that a changed planet isn’t a less healthy one. The way forward is to look forward: “Anticipating some of the trends that will be driving that change,” Hoekstra says, “how can we influence it so as much nature comes with it as possible?” In other words, we can’t stop progress, but we can shape it.

by Hillary Rosner, Ensia |  Read more:

Image: ©iStockphoto.com/Taalvi & ©iStockphoto.com/Jasmina81

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The Constant Traveler

At its most basic, the spy movie reduces international conflict to the level of individual agency. It is decided not by armies or bureaucrats, but by the actions of one person, usually opposed by a tiny handful of enemies. So, if she's going to avert global catastrophe, of course the spy is going to have to travel. And if she's traveling anyway, why not have her swing past the Taj Mahal? Isn't it more fun for the audience to see inside the Monte Carlo Casino than some office block in Brussels? Even in spy movies that don't depict famous locations, screenwriters and directors go out of their way to concoct a romance of travel. For a large portion of the American/Western/advanced-industrial film audience, travel might be the activity in which geopolitics most noticeably intrudes on their lives — in the inconvenience of borders, passports, languages, currencies, customs. But none of that fazes the spy. He either circumvents restrictions entirely or he comes equipped with the tools he needs to pass through them. He doesn't wait in line unless he's in disguise.

What's the first thing the spy does after arriving in a new city? You and I haul our bags to the hotel and stand shifting our weight while a bored clerk pecks at a keyboard; the spy is led briskly to an all-white room where he's left alone with a safety deposit box. Inside the box: multiple passports, a wad of cash in different currencies, a gun with a silencer, an envelope with the name of a contact — everything he needs to navigate his new surroundings. If we see his hotel, it's luxurious. If we see him on a plane, he's either flying it himself or it's a private jet. We are repeatedly shown — more often, or at least more indelibly, than in the books some of these stories are based on — that the elements of travel we ourselves find exhausting and stressful have been magically made easy for the spy. The spy never worries about not understanding a language; whatever it is, he already speaks it, and fluently, with no trace of an accent. Instead of sitting around in train stations and dealing with subway platforms, something he'll do only if it's part of a chase, the spy procures a car (who knows how) or a helicopter, or a speedboat, or whatever vehicle he needs, which he always knows how to operate expertly, even if it's a Soviet tank. And you'd better believe he knows his way around at 100 miles an hour — he'll take shortcuts the locals haven't discovered yet. None of your panicked on-the-fly deciphering of Parisian road signs in your rented Renault Twingo.

When you and I pack for a trip, we're so preemptively defeated by the thought of weather and strange places that we take crushable hats and wicking layers and comfort-fit pants with legs that zip off at the knee. The spy, whether he's stylish like Bond or casual like Jason Bourne, never looks like he's traveling. But rain or shine, he always has just the right outfit. That may be why, whereas we stick to tourist areas and look in a guidebook to figure out where to have dinner, the spy can go anywhere he wants. He strolls into the classiest and most dangerous bars, the finest and grimiest restaurants, the ritziest and seediest casinos. He may pay for this freedom by being, say, attacked by komodo dragons. But doesn't that only guarantee that, unlike our own vacations, the spy's trip will never become tedious or disappointing, but will always see him living each moment to the fullest?

The link between the spy movie and tourism has been obvious since 1962, if not before — that was the year Bob Hope and Bing Crosby spoofed Dr. No in The Road to Hong Kong, the last entry in their long-running travel series. But I've never seen spy films that give away the game quite as happily as the Red franchise, the second of which opens Friday. The gimmick of Red, which is made even more explicit in Red 2, is that Bruce Willis, a retired CIA operative, just wants to live a normal life, while Mary-Louise Parker, his girlfriend, is a normal person who wants to be a spy. At the start of the second movie, they're in a Costco, and the joke is that Willis is bursting with enthusiasm for every average-joe implement of suburban routine, and Parker is bored and wants to go on another spy mission. He wants a backyard grill and some new bed linens; she just wants a vacation. And of course the movie gives her one, and because this is 2013 she doesn't even have to be chastised for it — never has to learn a bogus lesson about how home and safety are better than risk and excitement. She has none of the lethal repertoire of black-ops skills that the other characters possess; she misfires her gun, and when the team disguises her as a Russian security guard she can barely remember her one line. But she has a blast, because the movie is as much a travel fantasy for her as it is for the audience. The first film uses postcards as intertitles to establish scene changes. At one point in the second, when Willis is convalescing from a sedative a rival spy has dosed him with, she treats herself to a Parisian shopping spree on one of his mysterious rolls of cash. It's a pure prank, a movie built on the architecture of escapism while openly flourishing the blueprints. You think you want to be a character in a spy movie, it seems to be telling us. This is what it would look like if you really were.

by Brian Philips, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: Digital Trends

Solala

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The Civil Wars

The Crystalline Wall

If I had to describe being shy, I’d say it was like coming late to a party when everyone else is about three glasses in. All human interaction, if it is to develop from small talk into meaningful conversation, draws on shared knowledge and tacit understandings. But if you’re shy, it feels like you just nipped out of the room when they handed out this information. W Compton Leith, a reclusive curator at the British Museum whose book Apologia Diffidentis (1908) is a pioneering anthropology of shy people, wrote that ‘they go through life like persons afflicted with a partial deafness; between them and the happier world there is as it were a crystalline wall which the pleasant low voices of confidence can never traverse’.

Shyness has no logic: it impinges randomly on certain areas of my life and not others. What for most people is the biggest social fear of all, public speaking, I find fairly easy. Lecturing is a performance that allows me simply to impersonate a ‘normal’, working human being. Q&As, however, are another matter: there the performance ends and I will be found out. That left-field question from the audience, followed by brain-freeze and a calamitous attempt at an answer that ties itself up in tortured syntax and dissolves into terrifying silence. Though this rarely happens to me in real life, it has occurred often enough to fuel my catastrophising imagination. (...)

In her recent book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012), Susan Cain worries about a world ruled by what she calls the ‘extrovert ideal’. This, she suggests, found its most malign expression in the excessive risk-taking of those who brought about the banking crisis of 2008. Much of Quiet consists of telling introverts how wonderful they are: how we think more deeply and concentrate better than extroverts, are less bothered about money and status, are more sensitive, moral, altruistic, clear-sighted and persistent. If you’re an extrovert, the book probably isn’t for you.

Yet introversion is not the same as shyness, as Cain is careful to point out, although the two do often overlap. Introverts are people whose brains are overstimulated when in contact with too many other human beings for too long — in which case I am most definitely a shy introvert. If I’m in a noisy group of people for more than about an hour, my brain simply starts to scramble like a computer with a system error, and I end up feeling mentally and physically drained. Introverts such as me need to make frequent strategic withdrawals from social life in order to process and make sense of our experiences.

Shyness is something different: a longing for connection with other people which is foiled by fear and awkwardness. The danger in simply accepting it, as Cain urges us to do with introversion, is that shyness can easily turn into a self-fulfilling persona — the pose becomes part of you, like a mask that melds with your face. There is always something we cling to in an unhappy situation that stops us escaping from it. In my case, it is the belief that lots of voluble people do not really listen to each other, that they simply exchange words as though they were pinging them over a tennis net — conducting their social life entirely on its surface. A small, self-regarding part of me thinks there is something glib about easy articulacy and social skill.

by Joe Moran, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: A shy Yves Saint Laurent is pushed onstage to be acclaimed for his Spring-Summer collection, Paris, January 1986. Photo by Abbas/Magnum

A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold

Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

Tyler Clay, a forklift driver who worked at the Goldman warehouses until early this year, called the process “a merry-go-round of metal.”

Only a tenth of a cent or so of an aluminum can’s purchase price can be traced back to the strategy. But multiply that amount by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year — and add the tons of aluminum used in things like cars, electronics and house siding — and the efforts by Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years, say former industry executives, analysts and consultants.

The inflated aluminum pricing is just one way that Wall Street is flexing its financial muscle and capitalizing on loosened federal regulations to sway a variety of commodities markets, according to financial records, regulatory documents and interviews with people involved in the activities.

The maneuvering in markets for oil, wheat, cotton, coffee and more have brought billions in profits to investment banks like Goldman, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, while forcing consumers to pay more every time they fill up a gas tank, flick on a light switch, open a beer or buy a cellphone. In the last year, federal authorities have accused three banks, including JPMorgan, of rigging electricity prices, and last week JPMorgan was trying to reach a settlement that could cost it $500 million.

by David Kocieniewski, NY Times |  Read more:
Image David Walter Banks

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If You Care About Music, Should You Ditch Spotify?

On Tuesday, a press release from Nielsen SoundScan announced that Jay Z’s “Magna Carta… Holy Grail” had experienced “the biggest first week for an album in Spotify history,” with “over 14 million streams in the U.S., topping recent new releases from Mumford & Sons, Daft Punk, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West and many more.” The album also had “the biggest single day for an album in Spotify U.S. history.” But here’s something, call it a hedge: Jay Z (whose midlife-crisis red Ferrari was removing his hyphen) sold a million copies of “Magna Carta” to Samsung at five dollars a pop. They were then given away for free to a million Galaxy phone owners seventy-two hours ahead of the official release date, through a specific app, which was apparently buggy, to the dismay of the rapper, who was nonetheless not dismayed enough to return the five million dollars he’d earned before the album was even available for purchase.

The Samsung deal does not sound like the plan of a man who was depending on Spotify for revenue. (The album went on to sell a million traditional, non-Galaxy copies in the first two weeks.) But this is only inference; there have been many explicit complaints about the streaming service. A few days ago, the collaborators Nigel Godrich and Thom Yorke removed a batch of the albums they’ve been involved with from Spotify. Godrich took to Twitter to explain why Atoms For Peace, Ultraísta, and Yorke’s solo album “The Eraser” would no longer be available.This Storify thread condenses tweets from both Godrich and Yorke, who was less vocal, into an adequate summary. (To read every single thing Godrich and Yorke tweeted on this subject, visit their respective Twitter feeds.) The shortest version is that the Spotify model does not favor new artists. The larger grumbling about streaming services in the musician community is that the various services, which are governed by fluid and complex laws that are changing as we speak, favor nobody but the major labels that helped fund and grow some of them.

David Lowery, of the rock band Cracker, recently posted a royalty statement from the “internet-radio” site Pandora and then posted similar statements from satellite and terrestrial radio stations, exposing the extremely low revenues he received from Pandora. Which should probably concern you, at least a little.

On Twitter, Godrich’s main point was that Spotify is geared to reward catalogue recordings (he mentions EMI’s golden pig, Pink Floyd) that have long since recouped any costs and are profitable for labels. The rates for these catalogue streams—though most are unaware of this—are higher than rates offered to smaller, newer acts.

The issue beneath all the complaints about micropayments is fundamental: What are recordings now? Are they an artistic expression that musicians cannot be compensated for but will create simply out of need? Are they promotional tools? What seems clear is that streaming arrangements, like those made with Spotify, are institutionalizing a marginal role for the recordings that were once major income streams for working musicians—which may explain the artist Damon Krukowski’s opinion that music should simply be given away, circumventing this entire system. But first, some words from Godrich, from his Twitter feed, condensed and edited for clarity.

by Sasha Frere-Jones, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Spotify

All My Exes Live in Texts

[ed. I don't know... are young relationships really this complicated, or is this an outlier? 36 ex-boyfriends?!]

I have 700 friends on Facebook, 36 of whom I consider exes. Not all are ex-boyfriends—in the eleven years that “boyfriend” has been a name for men in my life, I have referred to nine as “boyfriends.” The rest are men I dated casually, guys I dated disastrously, make-out buddies, one-night stands, vacation flings, and a few boys I never touched but flirted with so heavily they can no longer be categorized as “just friends.” These people aren’t ex-boyfriends but they’re ex-something, weighted with enough personal history to make my stomach drop when they message me or pop up in social-media feeds. Which is pretty often.

There was a time, I am told, when exes lived in Texas and you could avoid them by moving to Tennessee. Cutting ties is no longer so easy—nor, I guess, do we really want it to be. We gorge ourselves on information about the lives of our exes. We can’t help ourselves. There’s the ex who “likes” everything you post. The ex who appears in automated birthday reminders. The ex who appears in your OkCupid matches. The ex whose musical taste you heed on Spotify. The ex whose new girlfriend sent a friend request. The ex you follow so you know how to win him back. The ex you follow so you know how to avoid her in person. The ex you watched deteriorate after the breakup. (Are you guilty or proud?) The ex who finally took your advice, after the breakup. (Are you frustrated or proud?) The ex whose new partner is exactly like you. (Are you flattered or creeped out?) The ex whose name appears as an autocorrection in your phone. (Are you sure you don’t talk about him incessantly? Word recognition suggests otherwise.) The ex whose new partner blogs about their sex life. The ex who still has your naked pictures. The ex who untagged every picture from your relationship. The ex you suspect is reading your e-mail. The ex you watch lead the life you’d dreamed of having together, but seeing it now, you’re so glad you didn’t.

My peers and I have all these exes, in part because we have more time to rack them up before later marriages, because we’re freer about sleeping around, because we’re more comfortable with cross-gender friendships and blurring sexual boundaries, because not committing means keeping more love interests around as possibilities, and because the digital age enables us to never truly break up. We don’t have to shut the door on anything. Which is good, because shutting the door on something is not something we ever want to do.

by Maureen O'Connor, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Image via: Coolchaser

[ed. Sorry for the interuption. Traveling again and just got back. Posts will start again soon.]

Mark Tipple, Escape
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Barack Obama, Punahou School basketball team, 1977.
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Alex Webb, View from a barbershop near Taksim Square, Istanbul, 2001
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Ben Quilty, Whytie
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Fishermen load their catch of sardines into crates on the Adriatic Sea, May 1970. James P. Blair, National Geographic.
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Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems

[ed. See also: The Trucker and the Professor.]

When Bob Santilli, a senior project manager at UPS, was invited in 2009 to his daughter’s fifth grade class on Career Day, he struggled with how to describe exactly what he did for a living. Eventually, he decided he would show the class a travel optimization problem of the kind he worked on, and impress them with how fun and complex it was. The challenge was to choose the most efficient route among six different stops, in a typical suburban-errands itinerary. The class devised their respective routes, then began picking them over. But one girl thought past the question of efficiency. “She says, my mom would never go to the store and buy perishable things—she didn’t use the word perishable, I did—and leave it in the car the whole day at work,” Santilli tells me.

Her comment reflects a basic truth about the math that runs underneath the surface of nearly every modern transportation system, from bike-share rebalancing to airline crew scheduling to grocery delivery services. Modeling a simplified version of a transportation problem presents one set of challenges (and they can be significant). But modeling the real world, with constraints like melting ice cream and idiosyncratic human behavior, is often where the real challenge lies. As mathematicians, operations research specialists, and corporate executives set out to mathematize and optimize the transportation networks that interconnect our modern world, they are re-discovering some of our most human quirks and capabilities. They are finding that their job is as much to discover the world, as it is to change it. (...)

A mathematician claimed the prize, and a regal $10,000. But the contest organizers could only verify that his solution was the shortest of those submitted, and not that it was the shortestpossible route. That’s because solving a 33-city problem by calculating every route individually would require 28 trillion years—on the Department of Energy’s 129,000-core supercomputer Roadrunner (which is among the world’s fastest clusters). It’s for this reason that William J. Cook, in his book In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman, calls the traveling salesman problem “the focal point of a larger debate on the nature of complexity and possible limits to human knowledge.” Its defining characteristic is how quickly the complexity scales. A six-city tour has only 720 possible paths, while a 20-city tour has—by Cook’s quick calculations on his Mac—more than 100 quadrillion possible paths. (...)

By now it should be clear that we are not talking just about the routing needs of salesmen, for even the most trenchant of regional reps does not think about hitting 90,000 far-flung burghs on a call. But the Traveling Salesman Problem, and its intellectual cousins, are far from theoretical; indeed, they are at the invisible heart of our transportation networks. Every time you want to go somewhere, or you want something to get to you, the chances are someone is thinking at that very moment how to make that process more efficient. We are all of us traveling salesmen.

by Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Peter and Maria Hoey