Weekly Picks – May 19, 2024

Credits (on the left, clockwise from top left): reptiles4all/ Getty Images; Anouk Delafortrie for the EU ECHO via Flickr; Stuart Isett; Micha Bar-Am/ Magnum Photos; Nigel Van Wieck; Chase Lindberg. Credit (right): Kavan Chay.

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Aurora Banks Peninsula

The sun has been quite active for all of 2024; auroras should regularly be in the forecasts for the coming weeks, if not months. The heightened coronal mass ejections are the result of the most recent flip in the star’s magnetic poles, itself a mystery yet to be solved. But while they are, try to get out there and see the lights for yourself. You may not see all the colors, but there remains a magic to those dim, wispy flames that light up the atmosphere.

2. Not Too Wet To Burn

“A recipe for a forest starts with basic ingredients—soil, seeds, sun, and water. But just like the recipe for chowder or pancakes or any other well-loved dish, the composition and flavor varies from place to place.

The forests of the Pacific Northwest, for instance, are made with prodigious quantities of water. Some of the rainiest spots on the continent lie along a strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and the western slopes of the Cascade Range from northern California up to Oregon and Washington. The sodden conditions continue up the west side of the Coast Mountains in British Columbia and through the Alaska Panhandle to the edge of Prince William Sound, close to Anchorage, Alaska. All along this region grows a dense tangle of lush forest.

It is “a pretty good spot on the planet to grow big trees really fast,” explains University of Washington forest fire ecologist Brian Harvey on a vividly clear day in late July 2023. He and seven others—a mix of students and seasoned researchers—are standing in a patch of forest about 10 kilometers from the northeast entrance of Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State. The group traveled here by SUV from Seattle this morning. To reach this spot of trees, they also scrambled down a nearly 40-degree slope covered in twiggy undergrowth and soil so thick with layers of castoff tree needles that it was like walking on hay or feathers. The researchers hail from several locations—including Australia (with its famous eucalyptus forests) and inland California (with its drier landscapes of oaks and conifers). Some are less familiar with the northwest’s moist, mossy treescapes.

The forest here receives about one and a half meters of precipitation every year, and some spots along the coast and western side of the mountains are drenched with two and a half to four meters annually (at the higher end, about enough water to submerge a one-story building if it all fell at once).

Moreover, this particular spot is an old-growth forest: it has never been commercially logged. Forests of the coastal Pacific Northwest, especially old-growth forests, are exceptionally productive and store an impressive amount of carbon—holding it in the trees and greenery and soil. A recent report by Parks Canada found that forested national parks in this region were the most carbon-rich in that country. In another study that mapped the world’s major natural carbon reserves, the temperate rainforest along the coast of British Columbia and the US Pacific Northwest ranked among the top six (along with the Amazon rainforest and tropical and subtropical mangrove swamps around the world). These damp North American forests hold about five gigatonnes of carbon—or what all of Canada emits from human causes every seven years or so. In a time of climate change, that makes these forests exceptionally important to the carbon budget of the planet.

So the scientists are here to consider an important question: what happens when you add heat to this particular forest recipe? To put it differently, what happens to the West Coast’s old-growth rainforests in an era of more wildfire?”

3. The Modern Beggar

“In his unfinished work on nineteenth-century Paris seen through the smoke and mirrors of rising consumer culture, the critic Walter Benjamin noted Victor Hugo’s heroic portrayal of the beggar, most memorably in Les Misérables, a literary monument of popular commiseration. Its hero, Jean Valjean, is, after all, as Hugo characterizes him, “the beggar who gives alms,” whose rags-to-riches story is overwhelmingly rags, or what we now simply call “poverty porn.”

. . .

Around 1860, beggary became bohemian. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx counted beggars “alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie…vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jail-birds, escaped galley-slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni [idlers], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers,” as part of “the whole indeterminate, disintegrated, fluctuating mass which the French term the bohème.” For Marx, this comédie humaine represented a regressive social element, the lumpenproletariat. Easily manipulated, lacking everything down to “class consciousness,” it had nothing to contribute to the coming proletarian revolution.

But aspiring writers—Marx’s literati—soon found themselves honored under another name, in another social category. They were also flâneurs, poor and lazy strollers-about-town who did not hesitate to waste time as though in defiance of the fruits of capital all around them. It is thanks to another writer of the French Second Empire, Charles Baudelaire, who extolled the flâneur as the modern metropolitan artist-poet, that poverty was refashioned as creative, as bohemian in our post-Marxian sense. The greatest admirer of this facet of Baudelaire was again Benjamin. He saw the poet’s “modern heroism” as having been conjured out of misery like a “monstrous provocation.” The author of Les fleurs du mal, whom Arthur Rimbaud was among the first to recognize as the rightful “king of poets” (roi des poètes), had, “in the guise of a beggar,” Benjamin wrote, “continually put the model of bourgeois society to the test.”

Yet even beggars have many guises. They have long been cast among human archetypes, a fixture of civilization whose existence is predicated on individual material want. Before anyone had heard of public welfare, their social function of blessing in exchange for assistance had already made an institution of alms giving. This fluid reciprocity held together by religious belief has not survived capitalist modernity. Mendicancy, meanwhile, has grown and assumed new forms.”

4. Humans Are Driving a New Kind of Evolution in Animals

“The peppered moth is an iconic example of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. For centuries peppered moths (Biston betularia) were common in the forests around Manchester, England, and elsewhere. With their light-colored wings, peppered moths were camouflaged from predators against the light-gray bark of the trees they rested on during the day. By the early 19th century, however, soot from the industrial revolution had forged a new evolutionary environment, one that favored dark-colored moths, which matched the soot-covered trees better than their lighter peers. In the 1950s and 1960s evolutionary biologists found that in industrial areas, 80 percent of the moths were dark-colored, and the dark moths had a 2:1 survival advantage over light-colored moths in those areas. Today, in our age of molecular genetics, we know the mutation that probably produced the dark-colored moths occurred around 1819 and was the result of “jumping genes”—bits of DNA that change position in a genome and may create a mutation in the process.

The darkening of the peppered moth is also an example of anthropogenic evolution: evolutionary change caused by alterations humans make to the environment. In recent years scientists have identified many more cases of human-mediated evolutionary change. The full scope and effects of anthropogenic evolution are only now coming into focus. But already we have ascertained that humans are shaping the evolutionary trajectories of animals across the globe, from insects to whales. As a result of our influence, key aspects of animal behavior are changing, including where they live, where they breed, what they eat, whom they fight and whom they help. We are remodeling more than just the environments species live in. We’re altering the species themselves as they evolve in response to our impact on their surroundings.

One consequence of this change is that we are creating mismatches between animals and the settings in which they evolved. Creatures once well equipped to meet the challenges of their environment suddenly face a world in which their fine-tuned behavioral adaptations are no longer adaptive at all. In some species, natural selection is recalibrating behavior so that individuals are better suited to their new circumstances. The question is whether it will be able to do so fast enough to keep pace with human transformation of the planet we all share.”

5. The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

“This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.”

6. The world isn’t watching

“Several months ago, amid the eruption of the war in Sudan, my grandfather, a British Sudanese national, found himself trapped in his house in a high-risk area next to Sudan’s military headquarters. Despite the British government’s efforts to dispatch dozens of soldiers to evacuate their personnel from the embassy right across the street from my grandfather’s house, they failed to include him in their evacuation plan. After our relentless pleas to include both my grandparents, the main query from the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO) we received was “Does he have dual citizenship?”

After a few days, my grandfather was tragically shot numerous times while my grandmother was left to starve to death, as both the Radical Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) refused to cease fire. Upon my arrival at Heathrow Airport several days later, the first sight that greeted me was a banner advertising a pet scheme for animals that were trapped in the war in Ukraine. This stark contrast raised pressing questions: Why did the life of a pet in Ukraine seem to hold greater significance than that of a black British citizen?

Similarly, why was Suliman, another British citizen trapped in the war in Sudan, informed that only he and his kids could evacuate, and that they’d have to leave behind his heavily pregnant wife, as she was not a British national? The Ukrainian Family Scheme in the UK allowed spouses, fiancés, children, grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews of UK-based sponsors to access the UK for three years and freely work with no restrictions. The Canadian immigration pathway has taken in almost 100,000 more refugees from Ukraine than from Sudan, providing them with financial support, certification exemption, shorter processing time, and looser requirements for migration.

Beyond citizenship, we see many Sudanese activists tirelessly pleading for support by stating the concerning statistics of the Sudanese war—how it has produced the largest amount of displaced people globally while the country also suffers the world’s worst hunger crisis. Yet the United Nations has allocated only 5 percent of humanitarian funds for Sudan. The core question to ask here is: Why do certain lives hold more value in the world of humanitarianism than others?”

7. Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?

“For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called “language attrition” has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?

People who move to new countries often find themselves forgetting words in their first language, using odd turns of phrase or speaking with a newly foreign accent. This impermanence has led linguists to reconsider much of what was once assumed about language learning. Rather than seeing the process of becoming multilingual as cumulative, with each language complementing the next, some linguists see languages as siblings vying for attention. Add a new one to the mix, and competition emerges. “There is no age at which a language, even a native tongue, is so firmly cemented into the brain that it can’t be dislodged or altered by a new one,” Sedivy writes. “Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there.”

. . .

Even languages that seem firmly rooted in the mind can be subject to attrition. “When you have two languages that live in your brain,” says Monika S. Schmid, a leader in the field of language attrition at the University of York, “every time you say something, every time you take a word, every time you put together a sentence, you have to make a choice. Sometimes one language wins out. And sometimes the other wins.” People who are bilingual, she says, “tend to get very, very good at managing these kinds of things and using the language that they want and not having too much interference between the two.” But even so, there’s often a toll: the accent, the grammar or a word that doesn’t sound quite right.

What determines whether a language sticks or not? Age, Schmid says, is an important factor. “If you look at a child that is 8, 9 or 10 years old, and see what that child could do with the language and how much they know — they’re basically fully fledged native speakers.” But just as they are good language learners, children are good language forgetters. Linguists generally agree that a language acquired in early childhood tends to have greater emotional resonance for its speaker. But a child who stops speaking a language before age 12 can completely lose it. For those who stop speaking a language in childhood, that language can erode — so much so that when they try to relearn it, they seem to have few, if any, advantages, Schmid says, compared with people learning that language from scratch. Even a language with very primal, deep connections can fade into the recesses of memory.”

8. The age of uncertainty. Liminal time

“For 35 years, from 1980 to 2005, the moral and labour order of much of the world was governed by a set of basic principles. These principles encouraged an imagined and inevitable destiny for the course of societies. They underpinned the personal and family efforts with which individuals justified their daily activities, their sacrifices and their everyday strategies.

The free market was perceived as a “natural” mechanism for allocating resources, offering individuals a “niche of opportunity” for entrepreneurial ventures. Globalisation was seen as the path to a universalised humanity, where the prosperity and welfare of the world’s affluent would eventually percolate down to everyone, commensurate with their efforts. The minimalist state would liberate social energy and reduce taxation. The goal of zero fiscal deficit would shape the nation into a homestead austere in collective rights but auspicious in rewarding the competitive and successful. These guiding emblems served as perceived imperative destinies. Most governments, businesses, journalists, opinion “leaders”, social leaders, renowned academics, and families aligned their expectations of a bright future and their feasible possibilities for development and modernity with these principles.

It was the prevailing spirit of a world with a sense of direction. Societies anticipated an inevitable future. Families, a certainty of epochal proportions. Individuals saw an outlook, a predictive horizon under which they would shape their daily strategies. The distance to these goals did not matter, nor was it demoralising to face numerous failures or disruptions along the way or to consider the uneven odds of success. These were powerful ideas, part of a shared imagination, equipped with the tacit certainty of common sense, which made it possible to organise the fragmented patchwork of daily life towards a destiny of success and greatness.

“That’s just the way the world is, and that’s how one must be in the world”, nearly everyone said. The arrow of time was hurtling towards this optimistic future, and no one, unless utterly out of step with the times or the world, could claim otherwise.

The first early signs of the decay of this global order emerged from the peripheries of the capitalist world at the start of the 21st century. Latin America began experimenting with alternatives to the prevailing economic and political systems, implementing hybrid policies that combined sovereignty, expanded rights and free trade, followed by the global financial crisis of 2008. Then, there was a shift towards a semi-protectionist form of neoliberalism, exemplified by Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom. This shift led to the “geoeconomic fragmentation” of the global order into regional blocs that traded based on political alliances and geographical closeness. Overall, we are witnessing the slow and melancholic disintegration of the old free market order and the nascent rise of various alternative models, none of which has secured a definitive foothold yet. This scenario gives rise to a chaotic world, characterised by fleeting trajectories, still unable to discern a new order that, if established, could endure for another 40 to 50 years.”