Some birches in Liberty State Park [2016]

Trees, leaves, branches, the sun, and a glimpse of the city

Trees in Hoboken, 11th Street

Sociogenomnics, is it just another spin of the nature/nurture wheel, or will it (be allowed to) evolve into something genuinely new?

Dalton Conley, A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way, NYTimes, 13 March 2025.

Since Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.

Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field.

Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.

The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway.

Genes, it turns out, don’t affect who we become just on their own, inside our bodies — they work, in part, by shaping the environments we seek out or engender.

Picture a kid who is born with two working copies of what’s known as the sprinter’s gene, ACTN3. By elementary school she might be winning every game of tag, every race, and be chosen first whenever sides are drawn up. You could see how parents and coaches might encourage a kid like that to join an organized sports team and how she would be likely to receive positive feedback for her performance on it, which in turn might motivate her to train harder. By high school she makes varsity track and soccer, and the more she excels, the more coaching and training is made available to her.

Of course, any number of factors might cause her to quit sports — an injury, say, or a toxic team environment. But if she keeps at it, her starting position on a big college team won’t be the result of just her genes or her hard work. It will also be the result of how her genes shaped her environment, influencing the people and opportunities she encountered, and how her environment shaped the way and the degree to which her genes expressed themselves.

It’s a continuous feedback loop, in which neither nature nor nurture is a fixed entity.

Later:

The part of this research that really blows me away is the realization that our environment is, in part, made up of the genes of the people around us. Our friends’, our partners’, even our peers’ genes all influence us. Preliminary research that I was involved in suggests that your spouse’s genes influence your likelihood of depression almost a third as much as your own genes do. Meanwhile, research I helped conduct shows that the presence of a few genetically predisposed smokers in a high school appears to cause smoking rates to spike for an entire grade — even among those students who didn’t personally know those nicotine-prone classmates — spreading like a genetically sparked wildfire through the social network.

There’s much more at the link.

But I guess I’m going to declare myself skeptical, mostly on general principle. What’s the principle? Mostly that the academy is organized on intellectual boundaries laid down in the 19th century and it has so far resisted changing them in any fundamental way. Oh, in the last half century we’ve seen interdisciplinary-this and intedisciplinary-that and all sort of conferences and centers, lots and lots of interdisciplinary. But those ancient boundaries remain, which is why interdisciplinarity keeps cropping up as presenting itself as new.

What do I think about nature/nurture? Think of chess. On the one hand we have the rules of the game, the size of the board, the different pieces and their moves, and a couple other rules. That’s nature, that’s biology. In order to play chess at all, you have to know and abide by those rules. But to play chess well, that’s something else. For that you need to know tactics and strategies that have been build over centuries. That’s nurture, that’s society and culture.

Now, as that’s a metaphor, and only a metaphor, of course it fits this “new” scientific program, this new paradigm, this “sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics.” But how will this program unfold, develop? That is very much dependent on the surrounding intellectual environment. That’s what gives me pause.

Not outa' the woods yet

Look at me!

Entropy and Self-Organization on the Table Top [Emergence]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue: 1) on general principle, and 2)  because I was going to include some of this material in a paper that goes up on 3 Quarks Daily, but then I decided not to use it. So here it goes. Moreover (3), it's a good antidote to the all too frequent and casual use of the concept of "emergence," which more often than not is used as a sophisticated synonym for "magic." We don't really know what's going on so we'll call it emergence. Well, in this case, the appearance of convection cells, we know what's happening:

The tumbler was sitting on a window sill during the morning and mid-day on a sunny day. Sunlight came through the window and heated the water, just a bit. But the black carbon particles in the ink absorbed energy faster than the water molecules, making them warmer than the water in which they were immersed. That’s what supported the formation of those convection cells, which began dissipating within an hour after they had formed. No violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can download this discussion as a PDF from this link.

With a Note on What to do When You are Fascinated by Technical Concepts but Lack the Math: Call the Plumber!

Matter is not given. In the present-day view it has to be constructed out of a more fundamental concept in terms of quantum fields. In this construction of matter, thermodynamic concepts (irreversibility, entropy) have a role to play. 

–Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, 1984

I’ve been thinking a lot about entropy lately.

It is, of course, one of the foundational concepts of modern thought, haunting our dreams with the prospect of the universe grinding to a halt in heat death, but also animating our hope of understanding how life arose in the universe. In a Latourian context one might even speculate that entropy is the concept that, more than any other (except perhaps biological evolution, with which it has become richly intertwined), gives the lie to the Modern’s conceit that they are here and nature is somewhere over there, separated from one another by a sharp line of clear and distinct ideas. For the concept of entropy, unlike relativity and quantum mechanics, has arisen from deep within the world of classical physics.

According to the Wikipedia the term was coined in 1865 by Rudolf Clausius, but the work leading to the concept originated earlier in the century with the research of Lazare Carnot, a mathematician whose

1803 paper Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium and Movement proposed that in any machine the accelerations and shocks of the moving parts represent losses of moment of activity. In other words, in any natural process there exists an inherent tendency towards the dissipation of useful energy. Building on this work, in 1824 Lazare's son Sadi Carnot published Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire which posited that in all heat-engines whenever "caloric", or what is now known as heat, falls through a temperature difference, work or motive power can be produced from the actions of the "fall of caloric" between a hot and cold body.

There you have it, the machine, a mechanical device with moving parts. We have Newtonian mechanics with its three laws of motion and the grand suggestion that the universe works like a clock, a vast device of many parts all ticking away in perfect order, except when they don’t. And there’s La Mettrie’s 1748 treatise, Man a Machine.

Oh! how easy our intellectual life would have become if only the universe were nothing but a clock and we but little tick-tocks within it.

But it is not, nor are we. The mechanistic vision ground to a halt in the analysis of fire and we became but especially clever monkeys through Darwin’s elucidation of a pattern he traced though the geological, paleontological, botanical and zoological records.

Chasing Molecules

Though my interest in entropy is long-standing, my recent thoughts have been occasioned by various and numerous remarks the philosopher Levi Bryant has made at Larval Subjects, his blog. The post Entropy and Me is a representative example. Or, consider this passage from his book, The Democracy of Objects (pp. 227-228):

Entropy refers to the degree of disorder within a system. Suppose you have a tightly closed glass box and somehow introduce a gas into it. During the initial phases following the introduction of the gas into the system, the gas will be characterized by a high degree of order or a low degree of entropy. This is so because the particles of gas will be localized in one or the other region of the box. However, as time passes, the degree of disorder and entropy within the system will increase as the gas becomes evenly distributed throughout the box. In this respect, entropy is a measure of probability. If the earlier phases of the gas distribution indicate a lower degree of entropy than the later stages, then this is because in the earlier phases there is a lower degree of probability that the gas will be localized in any one place in the box. As time passes, the probability of finding gas particles located evenly throughout the box increases and we subsequently conclude that the degree of entropy has increased.

This seemed a bit, well, “off” to me. For one thing Bryant doesn’t say just how the gas gets introduced into the box. Surely he doesn’t mean that it gets magically whisked there through a Star Trekkian transporter. But what DOES he mean?

Well, he probably meant something like poking a small hole somewhere in the box and letting the air rush in. So that’s what I did. Not physically, of course, as I have no convenient source of high-vacuum boxes, but in my imagination.

I began imagining lots and lots of tiny tiny air molecules going in through the hole. Does that first cohort march in formation like a highly trained marching band or drill team, or do they twist and tumble every which way, pushed by the molecules behind them, and those behind them, and so forth? How fast do they move? Who’s the first to make it to the other side? And how do you measure their positions?

It seemed reasonable to think, as Bryant more or less stated (except, remember, he said nothing about a hole), that they’d be bunched up near the hole at the beginning and that, at the end, they’d be scattered evenly throughout the box. But how’d they get from one state to the other? Getting from New Jersey to New York is easy, there’s the Holland Tunnel, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and so forth. But the kind of states we’re talking about aren’t geographical regions and moving from one to the other is not like getting in a car, turning the key (or pushing the button) and driving away.

And, by the way, just what does “evenly” mean? It might mean that they’re at the vertices of a cubic lattice, or some other regular structure, but I suspect that that’s not what Bryant meant. If not THAT, though, then just what? Perhaps he was, in his imagination, dividing the box into lots of tiny cubes. We then count the number of molecules in each cube. It doesn’t matter just where they are in the cube, just so they’re inside it. Some place. And when we’ve done our count we find that there’s approximately the same number in each imaginary cube.

Now we’re getting somewhere, says I to myself, we’re making progress.

But no, we’re not, we’re just getting deeper and deeper into the quicksand. What’s the size of our imaginary cubes? Does it matter? And those molecules, they’re moving, right, always moving. Since we can’t possibly examine all these imaginary cubes at one time, but have to look at one after another, how do we keep those molecules inside their proper imaginary cubes? And, since the little critters are identical to one another, how can we be sure that some of them aren’t sneaking about from cube to cube just to mess up our count?

Now, you might say, this is all nonsense, this stuff about imaginary cubes and pesky molecules who are unwilling to sit still for the count. Well, yes, you’re right, it’s nonsense in a way. But, if Bryant’s talk about order and probability is to have any substantive meaning, then we really do have to have some way of locating and counting those molecules. We need some way of taking measurements and my imaginings, some of them anyhow, are aimed at the informal notion of evenness. If we're going to measure it, well, what does it mean? Without measurements we’re just talking gibberish.

Still, it’s clear that something isn’t working. My thinking was at an impasse, that’s clear. I’m in over my head. What to do?

Call the Plumber

My plumber is Tim Perper. Though he’s not a plumber, he’s not even a physicist. He was trained as a molecular biologist and geneticist, worked in industry for a bit, worked in academia for a bit, and then decided that he was really more interested in human courtship than in complex molecules. So he spent a couple years hanging out in bars, night clubs, church socials and such and wrote down what he saw people doing—all courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation. He wrote that work up in a book, Sex Signals (1985), that work and, of course, a lot more, including Ovid and Durkheim.

The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review

The UK government commissioned Partha Dasgupta to prepare a review: The Economics of Biodiversity. The complete text, along with various abridgments, is available on the web. Here's 9 key takeaways.

From Dasgupta's preface to the complete review:

As this is a global Review, I often speak of the demands humanity makes on Nature. But much of the time the Review is obliged to look closely at smaller scales and local engagement with Nature. Differences in the way communities are able to live tell us that people do not experience increasing resource scarcity in the same way. Food, potable water, clothing, a roof over one’s head, clean air, a sense of belonging, participating with others in one’s community, and a reason for hope are no doubt universal needs. But the emphasis people place on the goods and services Nature supplies differs widely. To farmers in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, it could be declining sources of water and increasing variability in rainfall in the foreground of global climate change; to indigenous populations in Amazonia, it may be eviction not just from their physical home, but from their spiritual home too; to inhabitants of shanty towns everywhere, the worry may be the infections they are exposed and subjected to from open sewers; to the suburban household in the UK, it may be the absence of bees and butterflies in the garden; to residents of mega-cities, it could be the poisonous air they breathe; to the multi-national company, it may be the worry about supply chains, as disruptions to the biosphere make old sources of primary products unreliable and investments generally more risky; to governments in many places, it may be the call by citizens, even children, to stem global climate change; and to people everywhere today, it may be the ways in which those varied experiences combine and give rise to environmental problems that affect us all, not least the COVID-19 pandemic and other emerging infectious diseases, of which land-use change and species exploitation are major drivers. Degradation of Nature is not experienced in the same way by everyone.

Nature has features that differ subtly from produced capital goods. The financier may be moving assets around in his portfolio, but that is only a figure of speech. His portfolio represents factories and ports, plantations and agricultural land, and mines and oil fields. Reasonably, he takes them to be immobile. In contrast, Nature is in large measure mobile. Insects and birds fly, fish swim, the wind blows, rivers flow, and the oceans circulate, and even earthworms travel. Economists have long realised that Nature’s mobility is one reason the citizen investor will not take the market prices of natural capital to represent their social worth even when markets for them exist. The Review studies the wedge between the prices we pay for Nature’s goods and services and their social worth (the Review calls their social worth ‘accounting prices’) in terms of what economists call ‘externalities’. Over the years a rich and extensive literature has identified the measures that can be deployed (the forces of the law and social norms) for closing that wedge. The presence of the wedge is why the citizen investor will insist that companies disclose activities along their entire supply chain. Disclosure serves to substitute for imperfect markets.

But in addition to mobility, Nature has two properties that make the economics of biodiversity markedly different from the economics that informs our intuitions about the character of produced capital. Many of the processes that shape our natural world are silent and invisible. The soils are a seat of a bewildering number of processes with all three attributes. Taken together the attributes are the reason it is not possible to trace very many of the harms inflicted on Nature (and by extension, on humanity too) to those who are responsible. Just who is responsible for a particular harm is often neither observable nor verifiable. No social mechanism can meet this problem in its entirety, meaning that no institution can be devised to enforce socially responsible conduct. It would seem then that, ultimately, we each have to serve as judge and jury for our own actions. And that cannot happen unless we develop an affection for Nature and its processes. As that affection can flourish only if we each develop an appreciation of Nature’s workings,

the Review ends with a plea that our education systems should introduce Nature studies from the earliest stages of our lives, and revisit them in the years we spend in secondary and tertiary education. The conclusion we should draw from this is unmistakable: if we care about our common future and the common future of our descendants, we should all in part be naturalists.

Whiskey Tango F...WTF! Whiskey fungus?

Michael Levenson, Whiskey Fungus Fed by Jack Daniel’s Encrusts a Tennessee Town, NYTimes. Mar. 1, 2023.

The ethanol-fueled fungus known as whiskey fungus has thrived for centuries around distilleries and bakeries. It’s been the source of complaints from residents who live near Kentucky bourbon distilleries, Canadian whiskey makers and Caribbean rum manufacturers.

Now, it is driving a wedge between some residents of Lincoln County, Tenn., and Jack Daniel’s, the famed distillery founded in 1866 in neighboring Moore County.

For months, some residents have complained that a sooty, dark crust has blanketed homes, cars, road signs, bird feeders, patio furniture and trees as the fungus has spread uncontrollably, fed by alcohol vapors wafting from charred oak barrels of aging Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

Jack Daniel’s has built six warehouses, known as barrelhouses, to age whiskey in the rural county, which is home to about 35,000 residents, and is building a seventh on a property that has room to house one more, a company spokesman said. The distillery has asked the county to rezone a second property where it could build six additional barrelhouses.

Christi Long owns a mansion that she operates as an event venue. Is suing the county to prevent more barrelhouses.

Ms. Long and her husband, Patrick Long, said that whiskey fungus had already inundated the property, darkening the copper roof and exterior walls, creeping over the rock garden and metal gate and encrusting the branches of magnolia trees. Nearby, it blackens metal road signs, they said.

The Longs said they use a high-pressure hose to wash the property every three months with Clorox bleach and water, but the fungus always returns.

“If you take your fingernail and run your fingernail down our tree branch, it will just coat the tip of your finger,” Mr. Long said. “It’s just disgusting.”

Ms. Long said her corner of Lincoln County “is going to be black as coal” unless Jack Daniel’s installs air filters in the barrelhouses, one of which sits about 250 yards from her property.

“This fungus now is on steroids,” she said.

Cut off its supply:

“The fungus is pretty destructive, and the only way to stop it is to turn off its alcohol supply,” Dr. Scott wrote in an email. “It wrecks patio furniture, house siding, almost any outdoor surface. I’ve seen trees choked to death by it. It is a small mercy that it does not also appear to have a negative impact on human health.”

There's more at the link.

Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights

An old post that I've decided to promote to the top of the list on general principle.

* * * * *

I first published this note on The Valve for December 30, 2009. It speaks to my recent posts on animals, especially in cartoons (e.g. Where'd the Animals Go?). Humankind's history of domestication and mutual adaptation with dogs is perhaps deeper than that with any other animal.

About a month ago I posted a bleg in which I asked whether or not anyone knew of any critical work which looked at Wuthering Heights in relation to contemporary lore and literature on feral children. In that bleg I quoted this important description of Heathcliff from chapter 10 in which Heathcliff is likened to a wolf:

Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

The wolf, of course, is biological cousin to the many forms of domestic dogs, and various forms of dogs do appear throughout Wuthering Heights. In particular, violence between dogs and humans takes place at important transition points in the novel. I’ve collected five such passages in this post and italicized the dog references within each passage.

 

* * * * *

Chapter I: Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange and goes to Wuthering Heights to pay his respects to his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff. In a sense this is the the most important transition of all because it gets us and Lockwood into the Wuthering Heights world.

I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.

'You'd better let the dog alone,' growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. 'She's not accustomed to be spoiled--not kept for a pet.' Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again, 'Joseph!'

Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-a-vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding aroused the whole hive: half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in reestablishing peace.

Chapter 6: Catherine and Heathcliff travel to Thrushcross Grange and look in through a window where they see Isabella and Edgar Linton fighting over a lap dog. Catherine is so badly bitten by a bull dog that she has to stay at the Grange for a month to recover. When she returns to the Heights she’s somewhat estranged from Heathcliff.

Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there; Edgar and his sisters had it entirely to themselves. Shouldn't they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess what your good children were doing? Isabella--I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy--lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping; which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them!

Heathcliff is telling the story to Nelly Dean, who’s telling it to Lockwood, who in turn is telling it to us. The story continues:

'Hush, hush!' I interrupted. 'Still you have not told me, Heathcliff, how Catherine is left behind?'

'I told you we laughed,' he answered. 'The Lintons heard us, and with one accord they shot like arrows to the door; there was silence, and then a cry, "Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here. Oh, papa, oh!" They really did howl out something in that way. We made frightful noises to terrify them still more, and then we dropped off the ledge, because somebody was drawing the bars, and we felt we had better flee. I had Cathy by the hand, and was urging her on, when all at once she fell down. "Run, Heathcliff, run!" she whispered. "They have let the bull-dog loose, and he holds me!" The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly: I heard his abominable snorting. She did not yell out--no! she would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though: I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom; and I got a stone and thrust it between his jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A beast of a servant came up with a lantern, at last, shouting--"Keep fast, Skulker, keep fast!" He changed his note, however, when he saw Skulker's game. The dog was throttled off; his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendent lips streaming with bloody slaver.

Chapter 12: Heathcliff elopes with Isabella Linton. Suave charmer that he is, he hangs Isabella’s dog.

'She abandoned them under a delusion,' he answered; 'picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But, at last, I think she begins to know me: I don't perceive the silly smiles and grimaces that provoked me at first; and the senseless incapability of discerning that I was in earnest when I gave her my opinion of her infatuation and herself. It was a marvellous effort of perspicacity to discover that I did not love her. I believed, at one time, no lessons could teach her that! And yet it is poorly learnt; for this morning she announced, as a piece of appalling intelligence, that I had actually succeeded in making her hate me! A positive labour of Hercules, I assure you! If it be achieved, I have cause to return thanks. Can I trust your assertion, Isabella? Are you sure you hate me? If I let you alone for half a day, won't you come sighing and wheedling to me again? I daresay she would rather I had seemed all tenderness before you: it wounds her vanity to have the truth exposed. But I don't care who knows that the passion was wholly on one side: and I never told her a lie about it. She cannot accuse me of showing one bit of deceitful softness. The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself. But no brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now, was it not the depth of absurdity--of genuine idiotcy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her?

Chapter 17: Catherine Linton has died in the previous chapter. We’re at Wuthering Heights, miserable home of Isabella and Heathcliff; Hindley and Hareton live there as well. Isabella is pregnant. Hindley takes a shot at Heathcliff; Heathcliff beats him half to death. The next day Isabella flees:

'The back of the settle and Earnshaw's person interposed between me and him; so instead of endeavouring to reach me, he snatched a dinner-knife from the table and flung it at my head. It struck beneath my ear, and stopped the sentence I was uttering; but, pulling it out, I sprang to the door and delivered another; which I hope went a little deeper than his missile. The last glimpse I caught of him was a furious rush on his part, checked by the embrace of his host; and both fell locked together on the hearth. In my flight through the kitchen I bid Joseph speed to his master; I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes: precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon-light of the Grange. And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than, even for one night, abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again.'

I find this incident particulary telling, set as it as, amongst some much violence between humans and however briefly the puppy hanging is mentioned. Just another day at the Heights.

Isabella gives birth to Linton Heathcliff a bit later in the chapter.

Chapter 18: Catherine Linton (the younger) goes from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights and her dogs get into a fight with Hareton’s.

The summer shone in full prime; and she took such a taste for this solitary rambling that she often contrived to remain out from breakfast till tea; and then the evenings were spent in recounting her fanciful tales. I did not fear her breaking bounds; because the gates were generally locked, and I thought she would scarcely venture forth alone, if they had stood wide open. Unluckily, my confidence proved misplaced. Catherine came to me, one morning, at eight o'clock, and said she was that day an Arabian merchant, going to cross the Desert with his caravan; and I must give her plenty of provision for herself and beasts: a horse, and three camels, personated by a large hound and a couple of pointers. I got together good store of dainties, and slung them in a basket on one side of the saddle; and she sprang up as gay as a fairy, sheltered by her wide-brimmed hat and gauze veil from the July sun, and trotted off with a merry laugh, mocking my cautious counsel to avoid galloping, and come back early. The naughty thing never made her appearance at tea. One traveller, the hound, being an old dog and fond of its ease, returned; but neither Cathy, nor the pony, nor the two pointers were visible in any direction: I despatched emissaries down this path, and that path, and at last went wandering in search of her myself. There was a labourer working at a fence round a plantation, on the borders of the grounds. I inquired of him if he had seen our young lady.

'I saw her at morn,' he replied: 'she would have me to cut her a hazel switch, and then she leapt her Galloway over the hedge yonder, where it is lowest, and galloped out of sight.'

You may guess how I felt at hearing this news. It struck me directly she must have started for Penistone Crags. 'What will become of her?' I ejaculated, pushing through a gap which the man was repairing, and making straight to the high-road. I walked as if for a wager, mile after mile, till a turn brought me in view of the Heights; but no Catherine could I detect, far or near. The Crags lie about a mile and a half beyond Mr. Heathcliff's place, and that is four from the Grange, so I began to fear night would fall ere I could reach them. 'And what if she should have slipped in clambering among them,' I reflected, 'and been killed, or broken some of her bones?' My suspense was truly painful; and, at first, it gave me delightful relief to observe, in hurrying by the farmhouse, Charlie, the fiercest of the pointers, lying under a window, with swelled head and bleeding ear. I opened the wicket and ran to the door, knocking vehemently for admittance. A woman whom I knew, and who formerly lived at Gimmerton, answered: she had been servant there since the death of Mr. Earnshaw.

. . . . . .

This, however, is not making progress with my story. Miss Cathy rejected the peace-offering of the terrier, and demanded her own dogs, Charlie and Phoenix. They came limping and hanging their heads; and we set out for home, sadly out of sorts, every one of us. I could not wring from my little lady how she had spent the day; except that, as I supposed, the goal of her pilgrimage was Penistone Crags; and she arrived without adventure to the gate of the farm-house, when Hareton happened to issue forth, attended by some canine followers, who attacked her train. They had a smart battle, before their owners could separate them: that formed an introduction. Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going; and asked him to show her the way: finally, beguiling him to accompany her. He opened the mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other queer places.

That’s 18 out of 34 chapters. I’ve not had time to scout out the rest of the book for such incidents. Truth be told, I didn’t have time to scout out these five cases either. I just took them from old notes. Apparently that’s as far as I got with this project back in the day. Still, it’s enough to give you a sense of how dog imagery is used in the book.

Over (and into?) a volcano

From YouTube:

After weeks of thousands of earthquakes on the peninsula of Reykjanes in Iceland on March 19th 2021 the ground opened up and the lava reached the surface. The volcano of GELDINGADALIR at the FAGRADALSFJALLI was born. Right after I heard from the eruption I flew to Iceland waited for the end of my quarantine and then I spent several days and nights at the volcano. It was such an incredible adventure. Every day the volcano looked completely different.

For this footage I brought 3 Mavic 2 Pro drones with me. One was „sacrificed“ for the very close up shots. As those flights through the lava spray were pure luck and the drones records the footage internally I recorded the screen of my remote control that in case of loosing it I would at least have the final shots saved on my mobile phone. But this lucky bee survived to the very end. The drone is completely melted from the outside and there are so many malfunctions and errors that it’s funny to fly - BUT it still flies and captures photos and videos.

ATTENTION: You are NOT allowed to use any of this footage without purchasing a license - this also applies for non-commercial use. Any use without a license for commercial or non-commercial/private use will be prosecuted by the lawyers team of photoclaim. Of course it is allowed to embed or share the original youtube-link to my movie on my channel but it is not allowed to use any Youtube-Download tools and upload or edit my footage in any form. My footage has been featured in well-known TV-Productions (BBC, TerraX,...) and in multiple projects of globally active organizations (Google LTD, Hisense, BMW, WWF,...).

Sorry for the watermark, but I have some serious issues with people stealing my footage and selling it illegally on Shutterstock. We are currently conducting a major lawsuit against Shutterstock. The injunction was submitted in summer 2020. Thank you for your understanding.

Details
Cinematography: Stefan Forster
Cut and Editing: Stefan Forster Music: Hampus Naeselius ES
Drone: Mavic / D-Log-M 4K 30P HQ
Software: Davinci Resolve Studio 17

The Sahara Desert was created by humans 5000 years ago

As recently as 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was not a desert, but green. Dramatic changes can arise from even gradual planetary shifts. First the change comes slowly, then fast, in just a few hundred years.

This is some high quality twitter content in this thread: https://t.co/TMy3pxXApj

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) September 2, 2019

Nature insisting on life among the detritus of civilization

William Bryant Logan, writing in The NYTimes, July 20, 2019, about the resurgence of nature in the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island 18 years after it had been closed;

Moving on, we walked into a rolling landscape where the soils were part dirt, part garbage, part riprap gravel. The makeshift stream beds were pus green. Willows struggled along watercourses that were edged with thick rinds of stone. Some cottonwoods had managed to reach a respectable height, but most had been pulled down by hydra-headed vines. Scrawny red maples ran uphill right into a descending phalanx of branchy black cherries. Royal paulownia, the queen of weed trees, sat on garbage bluffs along the canals, beside the threadbare poles of pear trees. It was a mix of natives and invasives, but each was a tree or a vine that liked to live in what ecologists call “disturbed landscapes.”

I became disturbed just looking at them. One fallen black cherry had turned up a root plate six feet in diameter. Rootlets wound in and out of the rough surface, like the filigree in some Tiffany brooch. Packed among the exposed roots were green, clear and brown bottles of a dozen sizes; half a child’s red plastic dump truck; fragments of plates, cups and dishes; and a few hardy red and yellow labels. Stretched taut in a corner was a beige nylon stocking, one end of which adhered to the top of the root plate while the other clung stubbornly to the ground.

I was spellbound, so I almost stepped on a snake. She gathered herself into a loose coil a foot away from me, regarding me appraisingly, her tongue flicking in and out. A beautiful yellow-striped garter snake! My first thought was, “What is she doing here!?” My second was, “This is the first wild snake I have ever seen in the city.”

What does the forest know?

We know how long it takes most kinds of leavings to decay. Organic material goes quickly: cardboard in three months, wood in up to three years, a pair of wool socks in up to five. A plastic shopping bag may take 20 years; a plastic cup, 50. Major industrial materials will be there for much longer: An aluminum can is with us for 200 years, a glass bottle for 500, a plastic bottle for 700, and a Styrofoam container for a millennium.

The forest does not know this. It does not think. It just acts. Because it is so good at sprouting, resprouting, reiterating, and repeating the entire process, it can keep up the living and dying for as long as it takes, even if that is a thousand years. The trees are not conscious. They are something better. They are present. [...]

We think of woodlands as places of beauty and repose. We are accustomed to judge a picturesque woodland as a good one and an ugly wood as bad. When Mount St. Helens exploded in 1980, there were endless plans to make it better. Instead, the rangers and scientists mainly stood back and watched. A new forest is slowly emerging. We need to change our thinking: Ask not just what these landscapes look like, but also what they are doing. Fresh Kills Landfill taught me that they may be places of struggle and healing as well, particularly when they come to restore what people have deranged.

In a similar fashion, nature has reclaimed the Bergen Arches in Jersey City, a deep mile-long trench that had once had for train tracks in it:

In a polluted pond just outside the Arches:

Does that turtle realize, or care, that it's sunning itself amid trash?

Spot the spider (Bergen Arches)

Woodland scene painted by Peder Mørk Mønsted

#TheNewPainting

Peder Mørk Mønsted (10 December 1859 – 20 June 1941) was a Danish realist painter. He is best known for his landscape paintings.

The woodland glade, 1898

Source/Photographer: 19th Century Realism
Private Collection

Beauty in #Art #HistoryofPainting pic.twitter.com/kk0B9Ny7E6

— History of Painting (@TheNewPainting) August 2, 2018

Cooperative hunting among the orcas?

From the National Post:

The orcas will wait all day for a fisher to accumulate a catch of halibut, and then deftly rob them blind. They will relentlessly stalk individual fishing boats, sometimes forcing them back into port.

Most chilling of all, this is new: After decades of relatively peaceful coexistence with cod and halibut fishers off the coast of Alaska, the region’s orcas appear to be turning on them in greater numbers.

“We’ve been chased out of the Bering Sea,” said Paul Clampitt, Washington State-based co-owner of the F/V Augustine.

Like many boats, the Augustine has tried electronic noisemakers to ward off the animals, but the orcas simply got used to them.

“It became a dinner bell,” said Clampitt.

John McHenry, owner of the F/V Seymour, described orca pods near Alaska’s Aleutian Islands as being like a “motorcycle gang.”

“You’d see two of them show up, and that’s the end of the trip. Pretty soon all 40 of them would be around you,” he said.

A report this week in the Alaska Dispatch News outlined instances of aggressive orcas harassing boats relentlessly — even refusing to leave after a desperate skipper cut the engine and drifted silently for 18 hours.

Sperm whales are getting into the act too. Here's a video of whales skimming a line:

"After a particularly heavy assault by sperm whales, fishers are known to pull up lines in which up to 90 per cent of the catch has disappeared or been mangled."

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Back to Basics: Green, Yellow, and Wet

After all the recent shaky-cam theatrics I figured it was a time for some of the basics. I shot these yesterday in Liberty State Park in Jersey city, NJ.

Urban Kids Afraid of Nature

From a NYTimes interview with Maria Conroy, founder of the "Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden, an eight-acre, $62 million, mostly open-air learning center" at the Dallas Arboretum:

I WAS STRUCK BY A PUBLIC REMARK YOU MADE : “MANY CHILDREN ARE AFRAID OF NATURE.” WHY DO YOU BELIEVE THAT?

We see a lot of children here, and we have watched many times a butterfly come flying at a group of 10-years-olds, and they scream and duck because they’re afraid it’s going to sting or bite them. If you don’t live where there are flowers, you don’t see butterflies. They’re afraid of the squirrels running around. And they’re terrified of the bees. They don’t know why they’re on that flower and the difference between themselves and that flower, as far as that bee is concerned.

Hemlock in the River

A Photo Essay in Which Your Author Contemplates the Nature of Graffiti and Continues Around the Same Old Circle

The river of life, the ever-flowing Heraclitean river, you know, the one you can’t step into twice–that's what I'm talking about. As for Hemlock, it was awhile before I even knew it was Hemlock (I forget who told me). But there’s someone else up on that wall too, someone beneath Hemlock.

This is how the wall looked when I first saw it, though I would have been approaching from the East rather than the West, as in this shot:

Here’s a bit more context:

They–that is, the images of interest–are on the wall at the far right and to the rear, where sunlight has rendered them invisible to the camera. That elegant Remix piece (by Raels) at the lower left is now under three or four layers of paint. The masonry and steel superstructure supports Route 139 as it heads off toward the Pulaski Skyway.

That’s right, we’re down in the Bergen Arches, a man-made trench cut through Jersey City’s Bergen Hill early in the 20th Century. It’s been closed off at the East end and three of the four train tracks ripped out. It’s abandoned (not quite) and gone to seed (most wonderfully).

Here’s that wall straight on:

It was one of my favorites when I first saw it in the summer of 2007 and remains so six years later, though it’s now a bit more worn.

Just WHAT is it? Well, sure, it’s graffiti, we know that. But what’s IN the graffiti, what’s it represent?

Nature is no longer an Exotic Foreign Land, out there somewhere (over the freakin' rainbow)

"The old museum genre has been turned on its head: this is not a narrative of an all-seeing culture evolving out of the wilds of nature, but of a culture tentatively trying to find its way into nature."

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is remaking the natural history museum. The old-style museum, writes Edward Rothstein in The New York Times, "evolved in the 19th century, displaying the geological cataclysms that molded the earth’s surface, the creatures that clambered into habitats and the indigenous cultures that were once considered closer to nature."

Something old, something new:

The stunning dioramas that were mounted in the 1920s and ’30s remain graciously intact. So do the museum’s greatest fossils. The original 1913 Beaux-Arts rotunda still makes its antique promise of nobility and grandeur. What natural history museum, though, would display, as we find here, one of the first crucifixes to make its way to California in the 18th century? Or the carefully scuffed shoes and torn clothes of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp from “City Lights”? And while we would expect to see the skeletal remnants of a baby Tyrannosaurus, why the chassis of an equally extinct Tourist, a 1902 wooden car that was the best-selling automobile in California before World War I?

And our own activity has become entered into the tattered old Book of Nature: