Dedicated to the holy in nature. The life in the seed. The beauty that feeds the world.
After spending the morning with Margaret and kissing both her and my daughter goodbye, I headed out on the road. Driving south through Colorado on I-25, I traveled a route I have taken for many years to New Mexico. Once I had passed Walsenburg everything …
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, …
Sometimes spiders ride the wind. They spin out lines of silk that are caught by the breeze and carry them aloft. They have been reported to rise a mile or two above the earth, and perhaps even to cross oceans.
It’s called ballooning.
Moonsung Cho, an aeronautical engineer, was in Australia the first time he saw the flight of a spider. It was autumn, when baby spiders often balloon en masse and spread to new areas.
He was completely taken by the phenomenon and made it the subject of his studies toward a doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin.
The flights of spiders are well known, but not their physics, so Mr. Cho tested crab spiders both in nature and in a wind tunnel, and discovered, among other things, what holds the spiders up in the air.
They don’t actually have balloons, but rather numerous strands of silk that they spin up to six feet long. And those threads of silk, from 100 to a few hundred nanometers wide (a human hair is 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers in diameter), are so thin and lightweight that they are suspended in the air like a thread, or a hair, in molasses.
Daniel Popper, an artist from Cape Town, South Africa has created “Ven a la Luz” (Come Into the Light), located on a Tulum, Mexico for the Art With Me Tulum festival.
Within decades of the discovery of America, Europeans were eating its potatoes and tomatoes, while China and India were consuming its peppers. These imports also had a profound impact. “In China, for example, the arrival of maize allowed drier lands to be farmed, driving new waves of deforestation and a large population increase,” say the authors.
“A good example is provided by the earthworm,” said Maslin. “In the US, most of the earthworms you will find there are actually European. They are better at competing for nutrients. So they have taken over the soil in North America since Europeans brought them across the Atlantic in the 16th century. That is not something you can unpick. They are there for good.”
This last point is summed up by the two authors: “The Anthropocene began with widespread colonialism and slavery; it is a story of how people treat the environment and how people treat each other.”
