There are a lot of stories about, and a lot of predictably silly reactions to, yesterday’s proposal for “Re- Wilding” America. Here is a relatively sober one from New Scientist. One from CNN yesterday– no longer available– contained some remarkable statements. The outrage from the stockman’s association was predictable but sad– I actually support public …
Category: Uncategorized
Very Old Rock Art Blogging
In light of Steve’s post on Pleistocene Park and his suggestion that it start in Utah, I wanted to share this petroglyph of a mammoth from….Utah. This is the only North American rock art that I am familiar with that depicts extinct megafauna. The rock face where this image lies is in the Moab area. …
American Pleistocene Park?
For several years I have been keeping track of Sergei Zimov’s Siberian Pleistocene Park, where with the help of Universty of Alaska biologists he hopes to at least begin to bring back the Mammoth Steppe and, in the words of California beat poet Michael McClure, to “Revive the Pleistocene!” Now from Peculiar comes the welcome …
Stranger in a Strange Land
Reading Wendell Berry’s collected stories, That Distant Land, is like viewing a geologic record of American culture—or maybe its medical record from birth to an early death. Berry writes the history of fictional farming town Port William, Kentucky, from the 1880s forward. Whether his period representations are accurate, I don’t have the credentials to know, …
Great Game
A new article in the Moscow Times Online discusses what it calls the renewal of the Great Game in Central Asia, pitting a putative alliance of Russia and China against the interests of the U.S. Maybe. I am known as an optimist about Central Asia’s and Russia’s intentions, and a pessimist about China’s, so consider …
Poetry Time!
From Fred Turner’s lyrical epic Genesis, a piece of satirical rather than lyrical writing worthy of Roy Campbell, on a journalist: “Ah, Bill, you ask an ode of me, lest you And all your brothers vanish like the dew; Your virtues are not trumpet- tongued, and must Be duly whistled ere they turn to dust. …
Clone Gay Sheep?
Contrarian evolutionary and economics blogger Steve Sailer has a lot in his archives on a biological– but not necessarily genetic– component or cause for male homosexuality. (He convincingly argues that biologically- anthropologically “Lesbians aren’t gay”– I can hardly wait to argue this one with my friends Kath and Athena when they come back from Greece). …
Rock Art Blogging
Last May my wife Connie and I were lucky enough to take part in a tour of archaeological sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base here in Santa Barbara County, California. The tour was set up by Santa Barbara County Archaeological Society and guided by Larry Spanne, Chief of Cultural Resources at VAFB and I want …
Prehistoric Passenger Pigeons 2
The genesis of my idea that passenger pigeons as Europeans knew them– Aldo Leopold’s “biological storm”– were a post glacial phenomenon erupting into a new niche came to me as I discussed pre- Columbian America with our little Pigeon Forum– what Dr. John Burchard calls “pigeons for polymaths”. I bounced some of the details off …
REALLY ugly dog!
Several people have sent me various links to this… dog (it is alleged to be a dog). Myself, I think it is more akin to H. P. Lovecraft’s witch familiar “Brown Jenkin”.