Daedalus articles from March 2008

Daedalus archives from March 2008

The challenge to environmentalism.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Quantity can redefine quality: meaning can and does change if something gets big enough to pass some invisible but real threshold. Consider, for instance, how the atom bomb redefined the ways we thought about conflict and war. The old...

The idea of nature in America.
March 22, 2008... The idea of nature is--or, rather, was--one of the fundamental American ideas. In its time it served--as the ideas of freedom, democracy, or progress did in theirs--to define the meaning of America. For some three centuries, in fact, from the...

Beasts in the jungle (or wherever).(Essay)
March 22, 2008... When Byron wrote that "the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold" ("The Destruction of Sennacherib," 1815), his audience had no trouble understanding the simile or feeling its force, even though wolves had not threatened most British...

Where the wild things were.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Georges Fabre was a forester in late-nineteenth-century France. In the region known as the Cevennes, villages were doing well: the silk and chestnut industries were booming, and shepherds banded together to make the yearly 'transhumance,'...

Nature & human nature.(reconciliation ecology)(Report)
March 22, 2008... People working in quite different fields with different methodologies and research agendas nevertheless often shared a veiled antipathy, trying to keep their distance from the implications of two ideas: Our minds are just what our brains...

Precautions & nature.(Precautionary Principle)(Report)
March 22, 2008... All over the world, there is increasing interest in a simple idea for regulation of risk: In cases of doubt, follow the Precautionary Principle. (1) Avoid steps that will create a risk of harm. Until safety is established, be cautious; do not...

The boundaries of the thinkable.(environmentalism and the sacred value protection model )(Report)
March 22, 2008... Be it conservatism or liberalism, Marxism or libertarianism, or our topic at hand--environmentalism--all 'isms' come with conceptual boundaries--and litmus tests for which opinions fall inside or outside the bounds of reasonableness for that...

Nature does nothing in vain.
March 22, 2008... Man alone among living things knows that he has evolved. Man alone is able to decide what direction or directions he desires his own future evolution to follow, and can set about acquiring the knowledge he needs to achieve the desired...

The contested earth: science, equity & the environment.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Since World War II, an army of advocates and agitators, some of them scientists, have shaped our attitudes toward nature. Among the best known is Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring, first published in 1962, warned that chemical weed killers and...

Rousseau in England.(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)(Report)
March 22, 2008... On January 15, 1766, the London Chronicle announced: "On Monday last arrived in town the celebrated Jean-Jacques Rousseau... [who] has been brought into much trouble and vexation, both in Switzerland and in France, for having ventured to...

Because We Have Been Here Before.(Poem)
March 22, 2008... Because We Have Been Here Before It is imagined that all of the world bears our mark, holds our form, and that the land is reminiscent in detail of all that ever came of its issue, was built on its foundation. What is not in...

Body and soul.(Short story)
March 22, 2008... There was a small group of musicians waiting for Coleman Hawkins when his ship docked in New York City. Coleman had been away in Europe for five years. But with war simmering to a boil, he knew it was time to get himself on the first ship...

On options & epidemics.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... The pricing of call and put options seems to have nothing in common with attempts to control the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. But it turns out that, in both cases, identifying and influencing the variance of a probability...

On philosophy as a guide to well-being.
March 22, 2008... Philosophers disagree about whether philosophy can teach us much about human well-being. A long Western tradition, whose roots lie in Plato and Aristotle, holds that philosophical methods, skillfully and wisely deployed, can yield substantive...