So great: A soundtrack for Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America, Jon Mooallem’s sublime meditation on wilderness and what it means to be human.
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We’ve entered what some scientists are calling the Anthropocene — a new geologic epoch in which human activity, more than any other force, steers change on the planet. Just as we’re now causing the vast majority of extinctions, the vast majority of endangered species will only survive if we keep actively rigging the world around them in their favor. … We are gardening the wilderness. The line between conservation and domestication has blurred.
America’s management of its wild animals has evolved, or maybe devolved, into a surreal kind of performance art.
Leaving your kids a world without wild animals feels like a special tragedy.
Wild Ones – absolutely fantastic read about wilderness, legacy, and being human.
On Earth Day, Open Road Media honors conservationist Rachel Carson, who awakened the American public to environmental awareness.
I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures. If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things — because we can wonder … And now I must dress to receive the Planets, dear, as I won’t wish to take the time after they appear — and they will not wait for anybody.
Willa Cather marvels at the majesty of the cosmos in this sole surviving letter to her partner, Edith Lewis
Rare Lenticular Clouds
The stunning meteorological phenomena of lenticular clouds (Altocumulus lenticularis) is a rare spectacle. Looking more like UFO’s than clouds, they are created by three conditions: warm and moist air, winds with constant height and something big, like a tall mountain. When a current of air hits an obstacle in its way, it begins to travel upwards and starts to condense forming a lens-shaped cloud with multiple layers.
Both absolutely fascinating and absolutely stunning. Complement with The Cloud Collector’s Handbook.
Oh, amazing planet: 101 new species of beetles recently discovered in the tropical rainforest of New Guinea.
Why are blue whales, the largest creatures to ever roam Earth, so big?
Complement with this poetic paper animation about the afterlife of a whale.
At 200 meters, we leave the Photic Zone and enter the first layer of the deep sea – the Twilight Zone. At this depth, there’s less than 1% of the sunlight at the surface, the pressure has increased twentyfold, and the temperature has dropped to 4º — but we find a world of extraordinary beauty.
Oh, amazing planet. Mesmerizing excerpt from BBC’s The Deep Sea.
(↬ Doobybrain)
While travelling in Antarctica, journalism student Melissa Brennan captured an intersection of a penguin highway.
(ᔥ MetaFilter)
So you know, where we get our fresh water.
The mesmerizing rotifer Limnias melicerta, a microanimal that lives in a self-built tube attached to waterplants – one of the best microscope videos of 2012.
EU fishing law is not just failing our fish – it’s failing our fishermen, too.
Fantastic visual narrative based on Greenpeace’s investigation into the British fishing industry, animated by Bill Porter.
