Collide-a-scape

It happens every summer when tourists pass through the ancient burial caves on their way to Mt. Pulag in the Philippines: they can’t keep their hands off the mummies.

According to the Philippine Inquirer, local officials are still promoting the popular trek this year, but they “have a piece of advice for visitors: respect the mummies.”

The local town’s mayor, noting that in years past “many mummies have been stolen from caves,” warns:

The mummies should not be touched. Stealing them or getting their bones could bring bad luck.

You’d think that the burial sites would be off limits to tourism, but they actually are a main draw. In fact, the mayor also says:

Visitors are allowed to take pictures of the mummies or to have their pictures taken with the mummies. But the mummies should not be touched or brought out from their coffins.

Right now the biggest contagion is fear. So if you’re looking for varied, broader perspective, the N.Y. Times provides it here.

In the coming days, lots of people are going to be dazed and confused (and increasingly edgy) from the Swine Flu-athon already in media overdrive.

I’ve been trolling around for a one-stop shop that offers virus authority in a readable, lighthearted manner.

Maggie Koerth-Baker to the rescue, courtesy of boingboing.

This thoughtful essay argues for reconciling the institutional divide between history and archaeology.  Daniel Lord Smail, a professor of history at Harvard, writes that

The discovery of ‘deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of biology, archaeology and geology. We are only just beginning to realise, however, that the time revolution also shaped the practice of history itself.

After tunneling separately back in time, the moment has come, Smail asserts, for archaeology and history to join forces:

The bodies of evidence now available to students of the human past are growing by leaps and bounds. To the pot shards, texts and phonemes…we have added genes, isotopes and other traces. Imagine each as a filter in a different colour. Using just one, you see your subject in an unreliable light. But now layer them one on top of the other and peer through the ensemble and, if you do so, the bright light of the original can be reconstituted to some degree.

What kind of history might such a merger yield?

So if you want to find out what was really going on in Anglo-Saxon Britain you need to layer any texts at hand on top of the coins and the shards, the ceramics and the glassware, and then add the chemical traces of spices left in pots, the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen left in bones and the modern distribution of genes. The result isn’t a truth but it is a more robust understanding of something we did not know before. And it is a vision of the historical enterprise that is indifferent to specialisation and method.

Uh oh, looks like someone’s stuck in reverse. Must be a slow day on the global warming “media stunner” watch if Romm’s  picking over a three-week old interview, as if it was a fresh scab.

I guess he didn’t read part one and part two of this colorful memo from one of his Grist colleagues.

Still can’t fathom why global warming isn’t more of a bugaboo to the average American (unlike, say, a case of pandemic hysteria)?

Read Nate Silver’s take on this survey conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and George Mason’s Center for Climate Change Communication.

The survey contains various permutations of questions and lots of wonky polling data to chew on. But to Silver, the data, taken as a whole,

reveals that Americans are concerned about global warming in the abstract — but perhaps only in the abstract.

Silver also realistically assesses the world we live in:

Although more aggressive policy responses on climate change generally poll fairly well, they are also often the first things to be sacrificed in Americans’ minds when something else intervenes, such as a recession or higher energy prices. Advocates of cap-and-trade may need to find ways to personalize the terms of the debate.

All this was elaborated on in greater context in last week’s New York Time’s magazine, which I discussed here.

Bottom line: peddling visions of Mad Max meets Soylent Green won’t cut it.

Half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people already rely on emergency food aid. Now, according to this UN dispatch,

food shortages are being compounded by elephants eating and trampling the villagers’ crops.

The scenes sound like something out of a Hitchcock movie, with villagers also guarding their agricultural fields from marauding baboons, wild pigs, and flocks of quelea birds.

Oddly, many of the animals are coming from Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe’s biggest animal sanctuary. There, the elephant population exceeds 100,000. One villager tells the U.N. that

“We light fires to drive away the elephants. In most fields we light unattended fires 50 metres apart to scare the elephants away, but you find that the fields are quite large and policing every inch becomes a problem – at times the elephants are aggressive and they attack the villagers, who are forced to flee.”

What’s weird about this story is that we’re accustomed to hearing about humans preying mercilessly on Africa’s vulnerable wildlife. And elephants were once among the biggest victims. But it seems that anti-poaching efforts have enabled elephants to rebound nicely in some African countries, perhaps beyond sustainable numbers, as Ted Kerasote ruminated here a few years back.

However, the bigger picture is more complex, with some researchers recently asserting that the illegal ivory trade is still so robust that large groups of elephants in Africa will be extinct by 2020.

If the severity of this particular situation in Zimbabwe true, then I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the elephants there experience the full wrath of villagers.

Wildlife conservation in Africa has long been a complicated affair. It’s even dicier in countries such as Sudan and Rwanda, which have been torn apart by war, sectarian violence, and environmental degradation.

So as unfortunate as the elephant rampage in Zimbabwe sounds, it hardly seems representative of the vexing wildlife conservation issues felt elsewhere in Africa.

I’m confused. Several weeks ago Stephen Payne at Oil and Gas Investor said the latest James Bond movie taught him a valuable lesson, which he boiled down to this:

in order to have access to oil, geopolitics unfortunately requires politicians to have a sort of flexible morality when it comes to from where we import our energy.

Payne fantasized about reading the riot act to Putin and telling “Hugo Chavez to stick his oil where the sun don’t shine, but that’s not a realistic move.”

The moral of the Bond movie, according to Payne:

Until we find a more viable source of energy, it seems that we’re going to have to continue to do business with disreputable business partners.

However, the recent sight of Barack Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez has given Payne second thoughts. This, says Payne, “does not bode well for the American public.”

I’ll be looking forward to similar pangs of moral concern from Payne when Obama is photographed shaking hands with Putin and America’s other “disreputable business partners.”

Discovery.

You just never know what’s going to turn up during that pre-trial phase.

This op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that “environmental engagement” could serve as sort of a back-door channel for easing U.S.-China tensions:

Environmental collaboration is unlikely to hit politically sensitive buttons, and thus offers great potential to deepen dialogue and cooperation. Military-to-military dialogue can facilitate the sharing of best practices on a range of environmental security issues. It can help both nations and their regional partners prepare for natural disasters – which are expected to intensify in a warming world – and improve the ability of civilian agencies and militaries to adapt to the impacts of climate change. It can also develop personal relationships that can provide deeper understanding in times of crisis.

This is a good example of the nexus between the maturing field of environmental security and foreign policy.

However, in terms of any future global agreement limiting carbon emissions, climate change is a sensitive issue for China that could also further complicate U.S.-China relations, something the op-ed authors gloss over.

Still, I think they are on to something:

Environmental security issues – and climate change in particular – could be among the most productive avenues for US-China military cooperation. The world’s largest per capita emitter (the United States) and its largest total emitter (China) of greenhouse gases should identify specific areas for cooperation before the upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Environmentalists recognize the upside too, with some offering a detailed set of recommendations here, on how the U.S. and China can engage on climate change-related issues in advance of the Copenhagen meeting.

UPDATE: As the Guardian reported earlier this week, perhaps China is softening its position on climate change.