The Saunterer

Anne Magurran on the coming sixth mass extinction

    Runaway human breeding, whether by thoughtlessness or selfishness, is behind Anne Magurran’s words:

All other things being equal, the Great Barrier Reef has a life expectancy of about another 30,000 years. This is unlikely to be achieved, as we are now appear to be entering the sixth mass extinction, one that is set apart from its predecessors by the fact that it can be largely attributed to a single cause, the actions of Homo sapiens. [J. E. N.] Veron’s account of the threats that face the Great Barrier Reef make bleak reading. Mass bleaching, rising temperatures and the irreversible acidification of the ocean water, driven by anthropogenic climate change, could replicate the destruction last seen 65 million years ago, and at a much faster rate than before. Other marine systems, including fisheries, may also be fatally damaged.
    The British ecologist Charles Elton predicted, in 1958, that “wild beauty” would be lost within fifty years. At that time, only a handful of people were concerned about biological diversity and its loss. Yet half a century on, Elton’s prophecy is being played out to an extent that even he would have found alarming. Just as the Great Barrier Reef was built through countless millions of small actions by the organisms within it, so it is being threatened by the accumulation of small activities in each of our lives, events that are individually trivial but, added together, impose a huge burden on ecological communities.

    Quoted from Anne Magurran’s review of A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from beginning to end, by J. E. N. Veron. Harvard University Press. To preview the book, click here.
    For a brief biography of Anne Magurran, click here. For a brief biography of J. E. N. Veron, click here. For a brief biography of Charles Elton, click here.

Matthew Frederick on how creative problem solvers think

    In Matthew Frederick’s view, the most creative problem solvers continually monitor their thinking and make pertinent adjustments:

Meta-thinking means that you are aware of how you are thinking as you are doing the thinking. Meta-thinkers engage in continual internal dialogue of testing, stretching, criticizing, and redirecting their thought processes.

    Quoted from page 32 of 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, The MIT Press. 2007. For Matthew Frederick’s blog, click here.

Niles Eldredge on what agricultural development has done to ecosystems

    Niles Eldredge nails it:

Humans do not live with nature but outside it. Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. All other species, including our ancestral hominid ancestors, all pre-agricultural humans, and remnant hunter-gatherer societies still extant exist as semi-isolated populations playing specific roles (i.e., have “niches”) in local ecosystems. This is not so with post-agricultural revolution humans, who in effect have stepped outside local ecosystems. Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems.

    Quoted from Niles Eldredge’s ActionBioscience.org article, "The Sixth Extinction," published in 2001; to read it, click here.
    For Niles Eldredge’s website, click here. For images of and relating to Niles Eldredge, click here.

Emile Zola on idea and form in art

    Steps to average work: choose your form, then rummage for an idea to put into your form. Steps to possibly great work: envision your fine idea, then let the form of expressing it come naturally. Emile Zola:

Think of art, of the highest art; do not consider form alone, because form alone is commercial painting; consider the idea, dream lovely dreams; the form will come with work. . . .

    (Quoted from page 283 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Emile Zola, click here. For images of and related to Emile  Zola, click here.

Fred Hartley on the environmental attitude of far too many business people

    “Far too many” included himself. As president of Union Oil Company, Fred Hartley said in 1969:

I don’t like to call it a disaster, because there has been no loss of human life. I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds.

    Quoted from page 61 of Filling the Ark: Animal welfare in disasters, by Leslie Irvine, Temple University Press, 2009.
    For Fred L. Hartley’s recent obituary, click here. To learn about Leslie Irvine, click here.

Lucien Price on chastity of the mind

    Chastity of the mind, Lucien Price believed, works by a self-imposed rule:

There is a chastity of the mind, just as there is a chastity of the body. There are certain creative processes which a sincere thinker would no more reveal to casual eyes than he would strip in a public place. A rule of mental chastity: Do not hold promiscuous mental intercourse. The shallow would intrude into these austere places like picnickers in a sanctuary, littering it with their luncheon refuse.

    Quoted from page 156 of The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture, by Douglass Shand-Tucci; St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004. This book tells more about the life of Lucien Price than any other book we know of.

    For a brief biography of Lucien Price, click here. Henry David Thoreau’s ideas on the chastity of the mind predated and (we are guessing) influenced Price's. To read Thoreau’s, click here.

Karen Horney on how women can gain great power

    At the center she put emancipation from sensuality:

To be free of sensuality means great power in a woman. Only in this way will she be independent of a man. Otherwise she will always long for him and in the exaggerated yearning of her senses she will be able to drown out all feeling of her own value. She becomes the bitch, who begs even if she is beaten - a strumpet. It is a different thing if through the muting of all other instincts, the one instinct has become a power in her, i. e., when she is only “female.”
    Otherwise eternal battling. And every victory of the senses a Pyrrhic victory, bought with loathing, ever deadly loathing afterwards.
    And a man wants a woman calm and superior to these low instincts, of whose power he is only too well aware in himself. Everyone loves that which is higher.
    (Quoted from page 244 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
    For a brief biography of Karen Horney, click here. For images of and related to Karen Horney, click here.

John Evelyn on why gardens matter

    In a letter of 1657 to Sir Thomas Browne, John Evelyn explained why:

We will endeavour to shew how the aire and genious of Gardens operat upon humane spirits towards virtue and sanctitie. . . . How Caves, Grotts, Mounts, and irregular ornaments of Gardens do contribute to contemplative and philosophicall Enthusiasms.

    Quoted from page 153 of the second edition of Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, by Edward S. Casey; Indiana University Press, 2009.
    For a brief biography of John Evelyn, click here. For images of and related to John Evelyn, click here. For a brief biography of Sir Thomas Browne, click here. For a bit about Edward Casey, click here, and a bit about his book Getting Back into Place, click here.

Nadia Boulanger on how to work

    She spoke a truth:

But the essential condition of everything you do, and not only in music, the touchstone, must be choice, love, passion. You do it because you consider that the marvelous adventure of being alive depends entirely on the atmosphere you yourself create, by your enthusiasm, your conviction, your understanding.

    Quoted from page 174 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.
For a brief biography of Nadia Boulanger, click here. For images of Nadia Boulanger, click here.

Henry Beston on why we need pure dark nights

    Pure dark nights, Henry Beston reminds us, are not in the category of a nicety: they are primal:

   Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. . . .

    With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea. . . .

    These lines are from “Night on the Great Beach,” in his book The Outermost House, by Henry Beston, and they are on the frontispiece of Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, by Paul Bogard, University of Nevada Press, 2008.
    For a brief biography of Henry Beston, click here. For images of and about Henry Beston, click here. For a description and reviews of Let There Be Night, click here. For the website of The International Dark-Sky Association, click here.