Consummation

The New Yorker, August 6, 2007

Consummated. My final paper, essentially the culmination of what I’ve learned over the course of this project, is finished (a little late, but much the better for it). It covers a slew of topics from my notebook and readings. Among them:

Frogs, Bd and habitat Loss; Bats, WNS and habitat loss; Bees and CCS; Holocene Extinction and the 5 Big Extinctions; language death and ethnocide; Oryx and Crake; Arks, Svalbard Seed Vault, El Valle and Zoos; megafauna; post-apocalyptic novels; man-made extinction; partulid land snails; modern technology and exploration; the internet; new species; old species; the hydrosphere; anthropology and Mark Twain; epibatidine; immortality; mortality; “The March of Time” a la Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; impermanence; “Benjamin”; the Golden Toad; and Kermit the Frog.

Ideas from Notebook, IX

"Heart of the Andes" by Frederic Edwin Church

I went to both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and American Museum of Natural History while I was in New York City today. Limited time makes everything here seem to be of even greater proportion than the reality. The weekend outing was rewarding and frustrating in equal measure because of this, and meanwhile my notebook filled at a furious rate. I saw the modern art, neoclassical sculpture, and American landscape painting at the Met; the halls of biodiversity and ocean life, and the temporary exhibition on frogs – perfectly timed to open today and provide further material for my paper on extinction and preservation – at AMNH. Overall spectacular. The day was, as a whole, a boon to the senior project (which ended yesterday, I suppose) and general independent study (which will continue hereon). I just wish the promised WiFi on this Megabus were working so that I could watch TED talks on the way home. Without further ado:

Kermit the (oft-singing) Frog; iconography and iconoclasm; religious spaces in modern and classical imaginings; Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Ugolino and his Sons”; nationalist art; Edward Hopper; Georgia O’Keeffe, “From the Faraway, Nearby”; Charles Sheeler, “Americana,” and “Water”; The Wyeths; the Brandywine Museum; Norman Rockwell’s “Town Meeting”; Stephen Hannock; Pablo Picasso, “Dying Bull,” “Man with Lollipop”; Georges Braque, “Woman Carrying a Basket of Fruit”; Prestel, Skira, Abrams; Thomas Cole; Albert Bierstadt, “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak”; Frederic Edwin Church, “The Heart of the Andes” (i.e. the most impressive painting I have ever seen); Asmat ‘bis’ and death mythology; museums and the urge to touch – physical interaction with art or ancient works; Elephant ecology – a complicated web; luciferin; aestivation; North American wood frog; diamond mining; DeBeer’s; sustainable new growth forests and fisheries; coelacanth; Phyllobates frogs; Phantasma frog and epibatidine; Project Golden Frog; “Rough Guide to Climate Change”; “The Complete Walker”.

Ideas from Notebook, V

Crazy Horse Monument, Black Hills, SD

Viral chatter; bushmeat and poverty; industrialization of American agriculture; luck & happenstance in history; silkmoths and clawed frogs; Hive Collapse Syndrome; Barnes Museum; Hans Rosling; Amy Stewart; Equality Forum; limitations of sight; all matter emits light; gamma ray bursts; Yucatan asteroid; the Big Bang was silent; “Big Crunch”; Dark matter, Dark Energy; unilateral time and space; “becoming unstuck in time” and chrono-concurrency; Crazy Horse’s monument; Grand Canyon: 1000 yrs/in to deposit rock, 1000 yrs/ft to erode it, 5280 feet of depth; Everest, Goddess Mother of the World; Ethnosphere and Biosphere; language as a soul; lingual exogamy; ethnocide vs. genocide.

Food for Thought: Quotations

"You are a beautiful boy," he told the frog.
Above: Horned marsupial frog (Gastrotheca cornuta)

“Ethnobotany can give us a glimpse of the future,” (Ethnobotany 10).

“Coming from an industrial society where plants are primarily aesthetic parts of the urban environment…[one] must undergo a process of reeducation to see an environment shaped by plants and landforms, an environment where plants are an integral part of human lives,” (25).

“Long term changes in vegetation affect language and culture,” (26).

“Other cultures are not failed attempts at being modern, but alternate answers to the question, ‘what does it mean to be alive?’” – Wade Davis

“Of the many species that have existed on the earth – estimates run as high as fifty billion – more than ninety nine percent have disappeared. In light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error,” – Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction?”, in New Yorker magazine (52)

“Education should be used to animate and generate belief, not just sophisticated doubt.” – Michael Roth, Wesleyan University president

Ideas from Notebook, III

Cryptic species; William of Occam; “Buridan’s Ass”; Alberto Giacometti; Charles Demuth; Cezanne’s preoccupation with Montagne Sainte-Victoire; Back to Africa and the Nation of Islam; Nunn-Lugar; John Harshberger; Francis Alÿs on Cezanne and seeing*; ethnomusicology; Indo-European and ethnolinguisitics; schulzi bats in Suriname*; the Innocence Project; firestick, swidden and fallow; Bedouins, refugees, migrants and internally displaced peoples; “firewood crisis”; “Big Five” extinctions*; El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center; Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.