Collide-a-scape

Anthropologists are fretting over the Jared Diamond fallout.

Dudes, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t engage the public (which is what many of you want) without risking that your work will be interpreted in ways that you never intended. Diamond is an easy straw man because he’s not a member of your club. (And, yeah, because he now might be in a heap of trouble.)

I also have a hard time believing that one writer could embody a whole field, which is what anthropologists seem to believe. If Diamond is the public face of anthropology, don’t blame him. Blame yourselves, blame your own field for not cultivating any cross-over scholars that know how to write for your flagship journals as well as for Harper’s or The New Yorker.

Historians don’t have this kind of problem (or defensive posture). Nor do political scientists or biologists.

So stop bitching about Diamond and start writing (especially if you have tenure) for larger audiences than a couple of dozen fellow scholars. Yes, a place like Savage Minds is a good start, but it’s still an insular world.  Take a look at Patty Limerick’s example if you want to see how it’s done. She’s a highly respected environmental historian who over the years has written regularly for newspapers, including a guest op-ed stint for the NY Times.

Calling all Savage Mind bloggers. I’m sure one of you can rise to the occasion.

The riddle of EPA’s reluctance to consider soot a contributor to global warming has befuddled me since I read this story, which I thought made a solid case:

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide.

Then my confusion deepened when this odd pairing of politicians called attention to black carbon’s linkage to climate change.

As Roger Pielke Jr., wonders:

So if the science is robust and the political will is there, why would EPA steer away from black carbon as an “easy win” on climate change?

Pielke guesses that EPA has “painted itself into a corner” with its recent global warming endangerment finding:

If black carbon is a pollutant due to its role in global and regional climate change, then as a precedent it opens up the door to a lot of uncomfortable questions and potential actions. For instance, if black carbon is an important forcing that affects the climate system with negative impacts, then why not water vapor emissions from land use, which also has been shown to influence local and regional climates? What about other land use change that alters surface energy budgets, such as albedo changes, irrigation, urbanization, and land clearing? And so on. Black carbon is an inconvenient forcing, and thus for EPA, rather than open up a can of worms, they have decided to follow the tried and true approach of hiding behind uncertainty.

Okay, can Roger Pielke Jr., or someone else then explain why James Inhofe has signed on to the congressional black carbon fact-finding mission? Following Pielke’s logic, is he looking to call EPA’s bluff, or is Inhofe motivated by true concern for the environment in this instance?

“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country,” predicts Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

He’s not referring to the current Taliban insurgency in Pakistan, but to the madrasas that poor Pakistani families are increasingly relying on to feed and house their children. The New Security Beat covered this looming issue last week, which I discussed here.

Today’s NYT piece by Sabrina Tavernise (who btw, had a great story in yesterday’s Times on the muddle that is Pakistan) probes much, much deeper.

Mexico may still be in lockdown mode, but I suspect American fears of swine flu are ebbing. Alas, we may have only a short reprieve before pandemics starting hitting with regularity, warns epidemiologist Larry Brilliant in the WSJ weekend edition:

In our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes, we will face a broad array of dangerous emerging 21st-century diseases, man-made or natural, brand-new or old, newly resistant to our current vaccines and antiviral drugs. You can bet on it.

Yeesh. Turns out we’re headed for a perfect storm of viral contagion. Brilliant lists bioterror, climate change, overpopulation, and deforestation as threat multipliers.

One big concern, he says, is that humans and wild animals (and their viruses) are living in increasingly tighter quarters, “because there is less rain forest, jungle and wild lands separating” us.

This, he asserts, is exacerbated by global warming.  For example, the loss of agricultural land from sea rise causes

farmers to cut down jungle, creating deforested areas which once served as barriers to the zoonotic viruses that each day have more opportunities to jump from bats and rodents and monkeys and civet cats to humans.

Did you catch that “each day” part? There’s a a chance I might die “each day” too. Still, I get his point. Here’s the rest of that climate change-viral hot house scenario Brilliant envisions:

As temperatures rise and seashores change, animals head inland and to higher ground, moving into heavily populated human areas. Soon there will be human climate refugees on the move into land once thought inhabitable. All of these changes increase the potential for humans and animals to exchange new viruses.

The bottom line, Brilliant says, is that the current swine flu scare is a mild harbinger of what lurks around the corner:

Indeed, we might be entering an Age of Pandemics.