A advertência subtil, mas marcante, do rei Carlos III à América

Monarca britânico discursou perante o Congresso norte-americano, numa abordagem direta e contundente, suavizada pelo profundo respeito pelos anfitriões e pelas relações históricas entre os dois países

Numa nova era de revolta, foi preciso um rei para lembrar à América os seus valores republicanos: o Estado de direito, a democracia e o poder do seu exemplo internacional.

O rei Carlos III escolhe as suas palavras com precisão - tal como fazia a sua falecida mãe, a rainha Isabel II. O significado real tem frequentemente de ser inferido.

Mas, para os padrões reais, o seu discurso numa sessão conjunta do Congresso na terça-feira foi surpreendentemente direto.

Carlos não repreendeu nem criticou a administração Trump. Mas o monarca desaprovou implicitamente a atual direção política dos Estados Unidos e defendeu os pilares da democracia ocidental: freios e contrapesos internos, alianças e tolerância inter-religiosa.

Carlos apelou ainda à defesa firme da Ucrânia. E a “natureza”, disse ele, deve ser protegida, num apelo velado para combater as alterações climáticas, que o presidente Donald Trump chamou de “burla”.

E o rei salientou que os amigos podem discordar sem romper laços eternos, uma referência velada à “relação especial”, que tem sido abalada pela recusa do Reino Unido em aderir à guerra contra o Irão.

“As palavras da América têm peso e significado, tal como têm desde a independência”, disse Carlos, no hemiciclo da Câmara dos Representantes. “As ações desta grande nação importam ainda mais”.

A versão do rei sobre os valores dos Estados Unidos provavelmente agradou mais aos democratas “No Kings” do que ao vice-presidente JD Vance, que tem opiniões sobre o declínio civilizacional do Reino Unido e da Europa e que se sentou atrás dele na Câmara dos Representantes.

Mas Carlos amenizou a sua crítica demonstrando profundo respeito pelos anfitriões. Citou Trump, afirmando que o “laço de parentesco” entre os EUA e o Reino Unido é “inestimável e eterno”. E o seu discurso esteve repleto de elogios às conquistas históricas americanas.

E os pontos mais contundentes foram suavizados pela pompa coreografada de uma visita de Estado que retribui uma viagem de Trump no ano passado. Parafraseando o presidente Theodore Roosevelt, o rei falava suavemente enquanto empunhava um grande cetro.

O presidente não mostrou sinais de se sentir ofendido pelas observações de Carlos III. Donald Trump orgulha-se das suas relações pessoais com os líderes mais famosos do mundo. O rei também condenou por duas vezes a alegada tentativa frustrada de assassinato contra o presidente numa gala para a imprensa no sábado.

“The Firm”, como a família real é frequentemente conhecida, já passou por tudo isto antes. O rei Carlos III mencionou, num raro jantar de Estado de gala na Casa Branca na terça-feira à noite, que a sua mãe tinha vindo a Washington em 1957 para reparar as divisões entre os EUA e o Reino Unido provocadas pela crise de Suez.

“É difícil imaginar algo assim a acontecer hoje, mas não é difícil ver como a relação continua a ser importante, em assuntos visíveis e invisíveis”, disse o rei.

E Carlos III ofereceu ao presidente um presente único - o sino original da torre de comando do HMS Trump, um submarino da Marinha Real que esteve em serviço no Pacífico durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

“Se alguma vez precisar de nos contactar, basta dar-nos um toque!”, afirmou Carlos.

Esta forma cerimonial de abordar as divisões ideológicas de uma forma não ideológica destacou um paradoxo: os monarcas britânicos estão vinculados por convenção constitucional a serem apolíticos, mas a sua contenção confere-lhes um enorme poder simbólico quando optam, com moderação, pelo contrário.

Taxa extraordinária sobre bilionários permitiria vacinar todos os adultos no planeta

Uma taxa de 99% estritamente sobre a riqueza acumulada pelos 2.690 bilionários de todo o mundo seria o suficiente para garantir a vacinação de todos os adultos do planeta, e ainda garantir o pagamento de 20 mil dólares para cada trabalhador atualmente desempregado, concluiu a Oxfam.

Ainda assim, a taxa permitiria que os bilionários ficassem com mais 55 mil milhões de dólares do que antes da pandemia.

Durante a primeira grande guerra mundial, os Estados Unidos da América subiram os impostos dos rendimentos nos escalões mais elevados para 67%. Na segunda grande guerra mundial, Franklin Roosevelt tentou limitar rendimentos individuais nos 25 mil dólares. Em dezembro de 2020, a Argentina introduziu uma taxa extraordinária para pessoas com mais de 200 milhões de pesos argentinos, cerca de €2,1 milhões, resultando numa receita de 2 mil milhões de euros.

Segundo a Forbes, os bilionários aumentaram a sua riqueza em 5,5 biliões de dólares entre março de 2020 e 31 de julho de 2021. Esta acumulação exponencial de riqueza não tem paralelo, sendo equivalente à mesma riqueza acumulada por bilionários nos 15 anos anteriores à pandemia.

A administração de cada vacina a um adulto está calculada em 7 dólares (€6), resultando num custo total de 70 mil milhões de dólares para vacinar os 5 mil milhões de adultos no planeta.

Os proveitos desta taxa extraordinária permitiriam ainda pagar 20 mil dólares a cada trabalhador desempregado. A Organização Mundial do Trabalho calculou que haverá 220 milhões de desempregados em todo o mundo.

Atualmente, 30,7% da população mundial está vacinada, mas apenas 1,2% da população em países em desenvolvimento receberam a primeira dose. O Fundo Monetário Internacional e a Organização Mundial do Comércio alertaram já para a difícil recuperação económica caso a distribuição da vacina não seja facilitada.

O que é a reflação e como ela afeta a sua vida

Este fenómeno que surge após uma recessão entrou nos debates sobre o pós-pandemia. Entenda o conceito e como isso ocorre.

Nos últimos meses, a reflação tem sido um tema constante nos debates sobre o cenário económico internacional e os seus reflexos na economia. O motivo da maior discussão sobre o assunto é a retoma económica pós-pandemia de covid-19 em todo o mundo.

O principal mercado onde a reflação preocupa é o norte-americano, onde os estímulos trilionários promovidos pelo governo do presidente Joe Biden e os juros baixos alimentam o debate sobre o efeito nos preços.

A junção destes fatores pode culminar numa escalada da inflação além do esperado e num aumento das taxas de juro nos EUA, afetando diretamente os investimentos globais e em mercados emergentes. No entanto, o tema da reflação levanta dúvidas sobre o seu real significado e as possíveis consequências práticas.

O que é a reflação

De forma resumida, a reflação é um movimento de alta acelerada dos preços após um período de crise e recessão económica.

O principal fator gerador da reflação são os estímulos monetários e fiscais promovidos pelo governo de um determinado país.

Estes estímulos são criados para fazer com que a economia retome a trajetória de crescimento e de criação de emprego.

O economista norte-americano Irving Fisher (1867-1947) foi o criador do termo e o pioneiro no estudo sobre a reflação.

Exemplo

O maior exemplo de como se forma um movimento de reflação está na própria situação que a originou.

Fisher, o criador do termo, analisava durante os anos 1930 o processo de recuperação dos EUA após o colapso da bolsa de valores de Nova Iorque, ocorrido em 1929.

Após a gigantesca crise, o governo norte-americano, então liderado pelo presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt, procurou recuperar a economia com um enorme pacote económico – chamado “New Deal” – através da promoção de obras públicas para reativar o consumo e a economia do país.

Roosevelt investiu em infraestruturas, com a construção de barragens hidroelétricas, pontes, estradas, e concedeu estímulos a setores básicos da indústria para que os milhões de desempregados encontrassem novos postos de trabalho.

Simultaneamente à criação de emprego, o governo trabalhou em leis e sistemas focados no ambiente social, como o sistema de segurança social do país, estabelecido em 1935.

À medida que o chamado bem-estar social regressava à sociedade americana, o consumo aumentou e, com ele, a inflação dos preços.

A reflação no debate atual

O ganho de espaço da reflação na agenda do debate sobre a economia deve-se aos pacotes de 1,9 biliões (trillions no original em inglês) de dólares de apoio social e de 2,2 biliões de dólares de investimentos em infraestruturas do governo federal dos EUA para recuperar a economia, duramente afetada pela pandemia.

O conjunto de medidas envolve, por exemplo, a construção de 500 mil estações de carregamento para carros elétricos, o aumento de impostos sobre as grandes empresas e a subida do salário mínimo.

Soma-se a isto o facto de a Reserva Federal (Fed, o banco central dos EUA) contribuir para os planos do governo de Biden através da manutenção do intervalo das taxas de juro entre 0% e 0,25%.

Reflexos das ações dos EUA

As taxas de juro mais baixas, além de ajudarem a tornar o crédito mais barato, incentivam os investidores a procurarem ativos de risco.

Este movimento acontece porque as obrigações do Tesouro norte-americano – consideradas as mais seguras do mundo –, que têm uma remuneração ligada aos juros da Fed, tornam-se menos atrativas.

Enquanto os investimentos e o consumo nos EUA avançam, os preços dos produtos voltam a acelerar. A inflação norte-americana medida pelo CPI (Índice de Preços ao Consumidor) registou uma alta de 0,8% em abril face a março.

O avanço representou também uma subida em relação ao mesmo mês de 2020, de 4,2%. A inflação subjacente (core), que exclui itens mais voláteis, subiu 0,9% na margem, o aumento mais rápido desde 1982.

Caso a inflação atinja níveis mais elevados do que a Fed espera, as taxas de juro podem começar a subir nos EUA, retirando a atratividade às obrigações e títulos de outros países.

Neste cenário, vários bancos centrais informaram estar atentos ao risco de reflação, com a possibilidade de uma escalada duradoura da inflação norte-americana.

Atualmente, o debate é sobretudo preventivo: procura apenas antecipar-se às possibilidades de um gasto fiscal excessivo nos EUA.

Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA

She was one of a group of black women mathematicians at NASA and its predecessor who were celebrated in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”

Katherine Johnson, part of a small group of African-American women mathematicians who did crucial work at NASA, in 1966.Credit...NASA/Donaldson Collection, via Getty Images

By Margalit Fox

Feb. 24, 2020

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians.

Mrs. Johnson at her desk at Langley in an undated photo. Credit...NASA

But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.

In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February.

Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort.

In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.”

In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.

She “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, “even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space.”

Taraji P. Henson portraying Mrs. Johnson in a scene from the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures.”Credit...Twentieth Century Fox, via Associated Press

As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts.”

For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers.

“As Good as Anybody”

But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues — myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines — won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race.

“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”

Nor, she said, did she.

“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.

“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.

But what a job it was — done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.”

Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer.

From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky.

“I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.

But for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va.

In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University.

Mrs. Johnson at NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1980.Credit...NASA

Mr. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world-renowned resort there.

Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. The next year she entered West Virginia State. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer.

Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her.

“You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his 17-year-old charge. “And I am going to prepare you for this career.”

“Where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

“That,” he replied, “will be your problem.”

After graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a double major in mathematics and French, she found, unsurprisingly, that research opportunities for black female teenage mathematicians were negligible. She took a job as a schoolteacher in Marion, Va.

In 1940, she was chosen by the president of West Virginia State to be one of three black graduate students to integrate West Virginia University, the all-white institution in Morgantown.

Two years earlier, ruling in the civil-rights case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia’s governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state.

Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, studying advanced mathematics.

“The greatest challenge she faced,” Ms. Shetterly wrote, “was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.”

But after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade.

NASA Opens to Women

Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians.

The oldest of NASA’s field centers, Langley had been established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1917. In 1935, it began hiring white women with mathematics degrees to relieve its male engineers of the tedious work of crunching numbers by hand.

Within a decade, several hundred white women had been employed as computers there. Most, unlike the male scientists at the agency, were classified as subprofessionals, paid less than their male counterparts.

In June 1941, as the nation prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in the defense industry. In 1943, with the wartime need for human computers greater than ever, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, as the research facility was then known, began advertising for black women trained in mathematics.

Among the first hired was Dorothy Vaughan, who began work that year. In 1951, Mrs. Vaughan became the first black section head at NACA, as the advisory committee was known, when she was officially placed in charge of Langley’s West Area Computing Unit, the segregated office to which the black women were relegated.

It was in this unit that Katherine Goble began work in June 1953, tabulating sheets of data for the agency’s engineers.

By the time she arrived, the company cafeteria had already undergone de facto desegregation: Its “Colored Computers” sign, designating a table in the back for the women, had been a salubrious casualty of the war years. But the separate bathrooms remained.

Quite by accident, Katherine Goble broke that color line herself. While the agency’s bathrooms for black employees were marked as such, many bathrooms for whites were unmarked.

Without realizing it, she had been using a white women’s restroom since her arrival. By the time she became aware of her error, she was set in her routine and disinclined to change. No one took her to task, and she used the white bathrooms from then on.

Two weeks into her new job, she was borrowed by the Flight Research Division, which occupied an immense hangar on the Langley grounds.

There, the only black member of the staff, she helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes. For that task, as she quickly demonstrated, she came armed with an invaluable asset.

“The guys all had graduate degrees in mathematics; they had forgotten all the geometry they ever knew,” Mrs. Johnson said in the Fayetteville Observer interview. “I still remembered mine.”

She remained in the division for the rest of her career.

Mrs. Johnson did the trajectory analysis for the launch of Freedom 7 in 1961, the Mercury program mission on which Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space.Credit...NASA

By the early 1960s, with the United States provoked by Soviet prowess in space, NASA was under great pressure to launch an astronaut. It fell to the Flight Research Division to do many of the associated calculations.

“Our assignment was the trajectory,” Mrs. Johnson explained to The Associated Press. “As NASA got ready to put someone in space, they needed to know what the launch conditions were. It was our assignment to develop the launch window and determine where it was going to land.”

Clandestine Calculations

Their work was secret — at times even from the mathematicians themselves.

“We were the pioneers of the space era,” Mrs. Johnson told The Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper, in 1990. “You had to read Aviation Week to find out what you’d done.”

She routinely logged 16-hour days, once falling asleep at the wheel of her car and waking up — safe, providentially — at the side of the road.

But the work engaged her deeply.

“I loved every single day of it,” she told Ms. Shetterly. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.”

It helped sustain her through the death of her first husband from brain cancer in 1956, leaving her, at 38, a widow with three adolescent daughters. She married James A. Johnson, a United States Army captain, in 1959.

Over the years, Mrs. Johnson published more than two dozen technical papers. She was among the first women at NASA to be a named author or co-author on an agency report.

Ceaselessly curious about the aerospace technology that underpinned her work, she made it possible for women to attend the agency’s scientific briefings, formerly closed-door affairs reserved for male staff members. (“Is there a law against it?” Mrs. Johnson asked, and when her male colleagues, after some head-scratching, concluded that, no, there was no law, they let her in.)

After retiring from NASA, Mrs. Johnson became a public advocate for mathematics education, speaking widely and visiting schools.

Her death was announced by NASA. She is survived by two daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore; six grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Connie Garcia, died in 2010; her second husband, James Johnson, died in 2019.

Mrs. Johnson, left, and her fellow former NASA scientist Christine Darden in 2016 at the Hampton History Museum in Virginia.Credit...Chet Strange for The New York Times

Mrs. Johnson’s colleague Mary Jackson died in 2005; Dorothy Vaughan died in 2008.

An autobiography by Mrs. Johnson for young readers, “Reaching for the Moon,” was published last year.

In 2016, Mrs. Johnson, self-effacing as ever at 98, seemed somewhat indifferent to the fuss surrounding the feature film about her life.

“I shudder,” she told The New York Times that September, some three months before the film’s release, having heard that the screenwriters might have made her character seem a tiny bit aggressive. “I was never aggressive.” (As things transpired, Mrs. Johnson liked the finished film very much, Ms. Shetterly said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.)

Mrs. Johnson may not have been aggressive, but she was assuredly esteemed. An index of just how esteemed she was came from Mr. Glenn, Mercury astronaut and future United States senator, who died in 2016.

In early 1962, a few days before he prepared to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, Mr. Glenn made a final check of his planned orbital trajectory. The trajectory had been generated by a computer — not the flesh-and-blood kind, but the electronic sort, which were starting to supplant the agency’s human calculators.

Electronic computation was still something of a novelty at NASA, and Mr. Glenn was unsettled by the use of a soulless mass of metal to divine something on which his life depended.

He asked that Mrs. Johnson double-check the machine’s figures by hand.

“If she says the numbers are good,” he declared, “I’m ready to go.”

Grande Entrevista a Noam Chomsky: “As pessoas já não acreditam nos factos”

Prestes a fazer 90 anos, acaba de abandonar o MIT. Ali revolucionou a linguística moderna e se transformou na consciência crítica dos EUA.

Noam Chomsky (Filadélfia, 1928) superou faz tempo as barreiras da vaidade. Não fala de sua vida privada, não usa celular e em um tempo onde abunda o líquido e até o gasoso, ele representa o sólido. Foi detido por opor-se à Guerra do Vietnã, figurou na lista negra de Richard Nixon, apoiou a publicação dos Papéis do Pentágono e denunciou a guerra suja de Ronald Reagan. Ao longo de 60 anos, não há luta que ele não tenha travado. Defende tanto a causa curda como o combate à mudança climática. Tanto aparece em uma manifestação do Occupy Movement como apoia os imigrantes sem documentos. 

Mergulhado na agitação permanente, o jovem que nos anos cinquenta deslumbrou o mundo com a gramática gerativa e seus universais, longe de descansar sobre as glórias do filósofo, optou pelo movimento contínuo. Não se importou com que o acusassem de antiamericano ou extremista. Sempre seguiu em frente com valentia, enfrentando os demónios do capitalismo − sejam os grandes bancos, os conglomerados militares ou Donald Trump. À prova de fogo, sua última obra volta a confirmar sua tenacidade. Em Réquiem para o sonho americano , ele põe no papel as teses expostas no documentário homônimo e denuncia a obscena concentração de riqueza e poder que exibem as democracias ocidentais. O resultado são 192 páginas de Chomsky em estado puro. Vibrante e claro. 

Preparado para o ataque.

Pergunta. O senhor se considera um radical?

Resposta. Todos consideramos a nós mesmos moderados e razoáveis.

P. Defina-se ideologicamente. 

R. Acredito que toda autoridade tem de se justificar. Que toda hierarquia é ilegítima enquanto não demonstrar o contrário. Às vezes pode se justificar, mas na maioria das vezes, não. E isso... isso é anarquismo.

Uma luz seca envolve Chomsky. Depois de 60 anos dando aulas no Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachusetts (MIT, na sigla em inglês), o professor veio viver nos confins do deserto de Sonora, no Arizona. Em Tucson, a mais de 4.200 quilómetros de Boston, ele se instalou e estreou um escritório no Departamento de Linguística da Universidade do Arizona. O centro é um dos poucos pontos verdes dessa cidade abrasadora. Freixos, salgueiros, palmeiras e nogueiras crescem em torno de um edifício de tijolos vermelhos de 1904 onde tudo fica pequeno, mas tudo é acolhedor. Pelas paredes há fotos de alunos sorridentes, mapas das populações indígenas, estudos de fonética, cartazes de atos culturais e, no fundo do corredor, à direita, o escritório do maior linguista vivo. 

O lugar não tem nada a ver com o espaço inovador do Frank Gehry que o abrigava em Boston. Aqui, mal cabe uma mesa de trabalho e outra para sentar-se com dois ou três alunos. Recém-estreado, o escritório de um dos acadêmicos mais citados do século XX ainda não tem livros próprios, e seu principal ponto de atenção recai em duas janelas que inundam a sala de âmbar. Chomsky, de calças jeans e longos cabelos brancos, gosta dessa atmosfera calorosa. A luz do deserto foi um dos motivos que o levaram a se mudar para Tucson. “É seca e clara”, comenta. Sua voz é grave e ele deixa que se perca nos meandros de cada resposta. Gosta de falar longamente. Pressa não é com ele.

P. Vivemos uma época de desencanto? 

R. Já faz 40 anos que o neoliberalismo, liderado por Ronald Reagan e Margaret Thatcher, assaltou o mundo. E isso teve um efeito. A concentração aguda de riqueza em mãos privadas veio acompanhada de uma perda do poder da população geral. As pessoas se sentem menos representadas e levam uma vida precária, com trabalhos cada vez piores. O resultado é uma mistura de aborrecimento, medo e escapismo. Já não se confia nem nos próprios fatos. Há quem chama isso de populismo, mas na verdade é descrédito das instituições.

P. E assim surgem as fake news (os boatos)? 

R. A desilusão com as estruturas institucionais levou a um ponto em que as pessoas já não acreditam nos fatos. Se você não confia em ninguém, por que tem de confiar nos fatos? Se ninguém faz nada por mim, por que tenho de acreditar em alguém?

P. Nem mesmo nos veículos de comunicação? 

R. A maioria está servindo aos interesses de Trump.

P. Mas há alguns muito críticos, como The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN… 

R. Olhe a televisão e as primeiras páginas dos jornais. Não há nada mais que Trump, Trump, Trump. A mídia caiu na estratégia traçada por Trump. Todo dia ele lhes dá um estímulo ou uma mentira para se manter sob os holofotes e ser o centro da atenção. Enquanto isso, o flanco selvagem dos republicanos vai desenvolvendo sua política de extrema direita, cortando direitos dos trabalhadores e abandonando a luta contra a mudança climática, que é precisamente aquilo que pode acabar com todos nós. 

P. O senhor vê em Trump um risco para a democracia? 

R. Representa um perigo grave. Liberou de forma consciente e deliberada ondas de racismo, xenofobia e sexismo que estavam latentes, mas que ninguém tinha legitimado.

P. Ele voltará a ganhar? 

R. É possível, se conseguir retardar o efeito letal de suas políticas. É um demagogo e showman consumado que sabe como manter ativa sua base de adoradores. Também joga a seu favor o fato de que os democratas estão mergulhados na confusão e podem não ser capazes de apresentar um programa convincente.

P. Continua apoiando o senador democrata Bernie Sanders? 

R. É um homem decente. Usa o termo socialista, mas nele significa mais um New Deal democrata. Suas propostas, de fato, não seriam estranhas a Eisenhower[presidente dos EUA pelo Partido Republicano de 1953 a 1961]. Seu sucesso, mais que o de Trump, foi a verdadeira surpresa das eleições de 2016. Pela primeira vez em um século houve alguém que esteve a ponto de ser candidato sem apoio das corporações nem dos veículos de comunicação, só com o apoio popular. 

P. Houve um deslizamento para a direita do espectro político?

R. Na elite do espectro político sim, ocorreu esse deslizamento, mas não na população em geral. Desde os anos oitenta se vive uma ruptura entre o que as pessoas desejam e as políticas públicas. É fácil ver isso no caso dos impostos. As pesquisas mostram que a maioria quer impostos mais altos para os ricos. Mas isso nunca se leva a cabo. Frente a isso se promoveu a ideia de que reduzir impostos traz vantagens para todos e que o Estado é o inimigo. Mas quem se beneficia da reduzir [verbas para] estradas,hospitais, água limpa e ar respirável?

P. Então o neoliberalismo triunfou?

R. O neoliberalismo existe, mas só para os pobres. O mercado livre é para eles, não para nós. Essa é a história do capitalismo. As grandes corporações empreenderam a luta de classes, são autênticos marxistas, mas com os valores invertidos. Os princípios do livre mercado são ótimos para ser aplicados aos pobres, mas os muito ricos são protegidos. As grandes indústrias de energia recebem subvenções de centenas de milhões de dólares, a economia de alta tecnologia se beneficia das pesquisas públicas de décadas anteriores, as entidades financeiras obtêm ajuda maciça depois de afundar… Todas elas vivem com um seguro: são consideradas muito grandes para cair e são resgatadas se têm problemas. No fim das contas, os impostos servem para subvencionar essas entidades e com elas, os ricos e poderosos. Mas além disso se diz à população que o Estado é o problema e se reduz seu campo de ação. E o que ocorre? Seu espaço é ocupado pelo poder privado, e a tirania das grandes corporações fica cada vez maior.

P. O que o senhor descreve soa a George Orwell.

R. Até Orwell estaria assombrado. Vivemos a ficção de que o mercado é maravilhoso porque nos dizem que está composto por consumidores informados que adotam decisões racionais. Mas basta ligar a televisão e ver os anúncios: procuram informar o consumidor para que tome decisões racionais? Ou procuram enganar? Pensemos, por exemplo, nos anúncios de carros. Oferecem dados sobre suas características? Apresentam informes realizados por entidades independentes? Porque isso sim que geraria consumidores informados capazes de tomar decisões racionais. Em vez disso, o que vemos é um carro voando, pilotado por um ator famoso. Tentam prejudicar o mercado. As empresas não querem mercados livres, querem mercados cativos. De outra forma, colapsariam.

P. Diante dessa situação, não é muito fraca a contestação social?

R. Há muitos movimentos populares muito ativos, mas não se presta atenção neles porque as elites não querem que se aceite o fato de que a democracia pode funcionar. Isso é perigoso para elas. Pode ameaçar seu poder. O melhor é impor uma visão que diz a você que o Estado é seu inimigo e que você tem de fazer o que puder sozinho.

P. Trump usa frequentemente o termo antiamericano. Como o senhor entende esse termo? 

R. Os Estados Unidos são o único país onde, por criticar o Governo, te chamam de antiamericano. E isso representa um controle ideológico, acendendo fogueiras patrióticas por toda parte.

P. Em alguns lugares da Europa também ocorre isso.

R. Mas nada comparável ao que ocorre aqui, não há outro país onde se vejam tantas bandeiras.

P. O senhor teme o nacionalismo?

R. Depende. Se significa estar interessado em sua cultura local, é bom. Mas se for uma arma contra outros, sabemos aonde pode conduzir, já vimos e experimentamos isso.

P. Acha possível que se repita o que ocorreu nos anos trinta?

R. A situação se deteriorou. Depois da eleição de Barack Obama se desencadeou uma reação racista de enorme virulência, com campanhas que negavam sua cidadania e identificavam o presidente negro com o anticristo. Houve muitas manifestações de ódio. No entanto, os EUA não são a República de Weimar [democracia alemã anterior ao nazismo]. Precisamos estar preocupados, mas as probabilidades de que se repita algo assim não são altas.

P. Seu livro começa lembrando a Grande Depressão, uma época em que “tudo estava pior que agora, mas havia um sentimento de que tudo iria melhorar”.

R. Eu me lembro perfeitamente. Minha família era de classe trabalhadora, estava desempregada e não tinha educação. Objetivamente, era uma época muito pior que agora, mas havia um sentimento de que todos estávamos juntos naquilo. Havia um presidente compreensivo com o sofrimento, os sindicatos estavam organizados, havia movimentos populares… Tinha-se a ideia de que juntos podíamos vencer a crise. E isso se perdeu. Agora vivemos a sensação de que estamos sozinhos, de que não há nada a fazer, de que o Estado está contra nós…

P. Ainda tem esperanças?

R. Claro que há esperança. Ainda há movimentos populares, gente disposta a lutar… As oportunidades estão aí, a questão é se somos capazes de aproveitá-las.

Chomsky termina com um sorriso. Deixa vibrando no ar sua voz grave e se despede com extrema cortesia. Em seguida, sai do escritório e desce as escadas da faculdade. Fora, esperam-lhe Tucson e a luz seca do deserto de Sonora.

Fonte: El Pais 2018/03/06

Franklin D. Roosevelt e as Florestas

"Uma nação que destrói os seus solos está a autodestruir-se.  As florestas são os pulmões da nossa terra, purificando o ar e dando nova força para o nosso povo~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people "~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Obama, o Nobel da Paz que se tornou o 1º presidente dos EUA a estar em guerra durante todos os dias de seu governo

Muitos chegaram a perceber a ironia. Barack Obama, que recebeu o prémio Nobel da Paz em 2009 quase que como "presente de boas-vindas" à Casa Branca, passou os seus dois mandatos em guerra.

Na verdade, o presidente que deixará o cargo nesta sexta-feira é o primeiro a completar oito anos completos de gestão com tropas de seu país em combate ativo.

A informação é publicada por BBC Brasil, 19-01-2017.

Nem mesmo Franklin Roosevelt, o presidente que encabeçou o esforço militar americano na Segunda Guerra Mundial, passou tanto tempo em guerra.

"Obama será lembrado como um presidente de tempos de guerra, o que é irônico, porque isso é a última coisa que ele planejava ou desejava", disse à BBC Eliot Cohen, professor de história militar na Universidade Johns Hopkins.

"Mas ele lançou nossa terceira guerra no Iraque (contra o Estado Islâmico), permaneceu no Afeganistão, expandiu a campanha alvejando terroristas e apoiou a empreitada europeia para derrubar Khadafi na Líbia", afirmou.

Nem um dia de paz

Seu antecessor, George W. Bush, teve ao menos os primeiros meses de seu mandato - antes dos ataques de 11 de setembro de 2001 às torres gémeas de Nova York - para aproveitar um governo sem guerras.

E Bill Clinton, o último presidente do Partido Democrata antes de Obama pode se orgulhar de ter conseguido oito anos à frente do governo americano "em paz".

A realidade para Barack Obama, porém, foi diferente. Ele assumiu o cargo em 20 de janeiro de 2009 já "herdando" dois conflitos - os Estados Unidos tinham tropas de combate no Iraque e no Afeganistão.

Ele acabou conseguindo cumprir parcialmente a sua promessa de reduzir drasticamente a presença militar americana no Iraque.

E no Afeganistão a situação é diferente hoje em comparação com o começo do seu mandato. Mas no dia 20 de janeiro de 2017, quando passar o posto a Donald Trump, Obama não poderá dizer que conseguiu terminar as guerras que herdou.

Combate ativo

Estima-se que cerca de 8,4 mil soldados americanos ainda estejam servindo o Exército em missões no Afeganistão nesse final de mandato de Obama.

E ainda há combates. Em 3 de novembro, por exemplo, na cidade afegã de Kunduz, dois soldados americanos morreram e dois outros ficaram feridos em uma batalha contra o Talibã. Os Estados Unidos lançaram bombardeios aéreos na zona de conflito contra tropas do Talibã que ameaçavam tomar a cidade. E em 8 de janeiro, Obama enviou 300 fuzileiros à província de Helmand, uma das mais problemáticas do Afeganistão.

É a primeira missão de tropas americanas na região desde 2014.

E não é só no Afeganistão que as tropas americanas estão engajadas em conflitos. A guerra contra o Estado Islâmico no Iraque e na Síria custou sete vidas americanas em situações de combate desde 2016.

No final do seu mandato, Barack Obama deixará cerca de 4 mil militares americanos no Iraque. Militares americanos também participaram de ações na Líbia, no Paquistão, na Somália, e no Iémen.

Presidente das guerras?

Mas apesar de ser o primeiro mandatário a completar dois mandatos com o país envolvido em guerras, ele dificilmente entrará na história dos EUA como o "presidente das guerras".

Afinal, ele recebeu um governo com 200 mil soldados em guerra no Iraque e no Afeganistão. Agora, após oitos anos, ele termina o seu mandato com uma presença militar de menos de 10% desse número em outros países.

E se tivesse forçado a retirada de todos os soldados da região, com certeza teria enfrentado resistência e ouvido reclamações de muitos americanos que consideram indispensável a presença militar dos Estados Unidos para garantir a segurança do país no exterior e dentro de suas próprias fronteiras.

Obama também ouviu muitas críticas quando, durante seu mandato, resistiu a ordenar intervenções militares em lugares como Síria e Líbia.

No fim, Obama contrariou tanto pacifistas como os que queriam uma presença militar americana mais ativa em áreas de conflito.

Em dezembro de 2009, ao receber o prémio Nobel da Paz, Obama disse no seu discurso: "Não trago comigo hoje a solução definitiva para o problema da guerra."

E acrescentou: "Há que se aceitar a dura realidade. Não encerraremos nunca o conflito violento em nossas vidas."

Desde o início de seu primeiro mandato, ele parece ter tentado reduzir as expectativas sobre possíveis mudanças que poderia trazer. Mas isso não atenua a decepção para os que esperavam um "presidente da paz".

Natural History is Dying and We Are All the Losers

By Jennifer Frazer on June 20, 2014

(artigo do Scientific American muito bom, a ler até ao fim)

A few weeks ago, I came across a new paper in BioScience called “Natural History’s Place in Science and Society” that contained the following graph.

The minimum number of natural history–related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US institutions (the bars; the median is indicated within each bar) and the proportion of introductory biology texts devoted to natural history–related material (the circles, right axis; see the supplemental material). The error bars represent the (positive) standard error of the mean.

On the right axis and indicated by the line surrounded by dots is the proportion of introductory biology texts devoted to natural history since 1935.

The left axis and the bars show the minimum number of natural history-related courses required for a BS degree in biology in US colleges and universities since 1955. The median number is indicated in writing inside the bar. You’ll note that since 1995, the median number of courses has been zero. Zilch. Zip.

In other words, the people society depends on to know the most about life — people with college biology degrees — in nearly all cases have no obligation to learn anything about actual living organisms. To me, this is a shocking dereliction.

My Story

As a child, I had access to something that few children do today: nature. I remember roaming the big yard and woods around our rural Tennessee home solo at four, five, six years old.

That quiet time wandering, listening, and looking among the loblolly pines and playing in the red dirt planted a love in me of nature that didn’t germinate until years later. It wasn’t until late high school, in fact, that I realized I loved biology and wanted to be a biologist (incredibly, in middle school and early high school I thought I wanted to be a lawyer).

But within two years of arriving at college, I knew two things. 1) I loved biology with all my heart. 2) I could never be a biologist. The thought of interminable hours spent in a windowless room staring at tubes of clear liquids and working on one tiny slice of molecular biology to the exclusion of all other intellectual curiosities depressed me beyond belief. I wanted to be a generalist — to study lots of different kinds of things. It got so bad I felt physically ill every time it was time to go into the lab where I was doing my independent research. And yet I had no desire to change my major. I LOVED biology.

In oceanography my freshman year of college, we studied ocean currents, salinity, and the ecology of plankton. We studied vague notions of food webs and nutrient cycling rather than learning what dinoflagellates or copepods were. The chapters on the diversity of life in the ocean? We skipped those. But those were the ones I wanted to read most.

Fonte: Scientific American

I lovedd the classes especially that taught me about the diversity of life, that took me out into the field to see it up close, that let me watch it moving and wiggling under the microscope, that let me dissect animals or flowers to see how they worked, that taught me about their evolution and the history of life on Earth. But no biologist did that stuff any more — at least not for the major part of their time. What they did, I found, was sit in an office staring at a computer screen writing grant applications and papers or creating computer models of their organisms or studying molecular biology. Occasionally, they went to meetings or mentored students or taught a class. That was *not* the bill of goods I felt I’d been sold on what biology was — and what it meant to be a biologist — as a chi

A life as a biologist would, ironically, prevent me from learning about life — or, at least, the spectrum of life that I wanted to learn about — and sharing it with the public. And so I became a science writer (albeit with career prospects arguably even worse than those of a scientist), and when the time was right I founded this blog dedicated to natural history and biodiversity.

There are other reasons I did not become a professor, but the lack of ability to be a natural history generalist was one of them. In another age, in another time (and assuming I’d been born a man), I might perhaps become a professor of natural history, a generalist who taught students biology and natural history, perhaps specialized in one or two extremely large groups of organisms (plants, fungi, etc.), wrote popular articles for the public, and wrote scientific papers about this or that interesting thing I’d noticed in the field. But by my time, those days had gone. That was no longer an option. And the reason for that is another story. 

The Unfashionable Science
Just what is natural history? One thing that has not helped it, perhaps, is that name. The term is beautiful but also old-fashioned and a bit puzzling. I know what nature is. I know what history is. So is natural history the story of life on Earth? That’s part of it, but the term is meant more broadly. When the phrase was coined, history meant something more like “description”, according to mammologist David Schmidly, and so you could view natural history as a description of nature, and naturalists those who describe it, ask questions about the creatures’ origin, evolution, behavior, anatomy and relationships using science. Vague “ecology” and unwieldy “organismal biology” encompass much the same thing, but lack the romance of the older term. Naturalists are interested in organisms and groups of organisms for their own sake, and not just what those organisms can tell them about higher order processes like DNA replication or genetic drift. Rather, they are more interested in what higher order theories and processes can tell them about their organism.

Aristotle was the first practitioner of this science that we know of, and some of his observations on sea creatures betray a skill for detailed observation and deduction that remains impressive today. Natural history did not flourish, however, until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Linnaeus, Darwin, and even U.S. Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt were avid and avowed naturalists. It was a time when basic knowledge of local plants and animals was considered part of a good education — and of being a good citizen (although it should be said the fad for natural history led to some unfortunate over-collecting and braggadocio as well).

The enthusiasm encompassed schoolchildren as well. Anna Botsford Comstock, who attended and taught at my own alma mater Cornell, published a textbook in 1911 for elementary students and teachers called Handbook of Nature-Study which exploded in popular sales. Between 1890 and 1940 texts such as hers were an essential part of classrooms across America. The aim was to train teachers and facilitate direct contact between children and living organisms in order to create an “essential nature literacy“, as Robert Michael Pyle described it in Orion in 2000.

Naturalists, too, commanded respect at universities, and taught many field classes and courses dedicated to identifying and understanding the life histories and evolutionary relationships of particular groups of organisms: flowering plants, mosses, lichens, mammals, fungi, insects, invertebrates, birds, insects, fossils, birds, and so on — a host of tangible living things to which people could directly relate.

After World War II, everything changed. Pyle attributes the subsequent decline in natural history to the ascendency of the hard sciences in the era of the atom bomb and Sputnik, and to the large-scale desertion of the farm (and its surrounding forests, bogs, and streams) for the nature-impoverished city and suburbs. The fundamental and accelerating problem is the increasing distance between people — particularly biologists and children — and nature.

That most professional biologists should know so little about life outside their labs is rather shocking, when you think about it. But this process began in the 20th century. At universities, process began to trump product, and what was once an esteemed part of biology evolved into a dusty, fusty relict. The pendulum swung away from outdoor field studies toward indoors laboratory research on fundamental processes. Scientists who studied underlying processes of biology — evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, etc., — got bigger grants and better publications than those who studied the organisms themselves. Funding and grants for natural history evaporated, and with them, tenured faculty positions. Pyle recalls his own college experience: “The only young naturalist on the faculty, shortly after receiving the outstanding teaching award for his magnificent classes in field natural history, was denied tenure; the department wanted superstar lab candidates who published frequently in all the right journals. A few profs interested in complete organisms survived by being strong on theory.”
Experimental biology became too complex for generalists to succeed as scientists, while big bucks for biomedical research and genetics lured biologists from the field to the lab and pushed the focus away from complete organisms and onto cells, DNA and genes found in colorless liquids inside clear Eppendorf tubes.

“Academic naturalists” thus found themselves selected against in the cruel Darwinian tenure competition. The -ology classes they taught and their associated field trips vanished. The Departments of Zoology, Botany, etc. were replaced with Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, or Molecular and Cell Biology, or Genetics. Many universities got rid of their specimen collections, which are not only vital to studying evolution, but also, we now know, understanding and documenting global warming and climate change. Some were sent to join other collections; others were sent to the landfill.

You can see this in the graph on the left, below, from the same BioScience paper mentioned at the top of this post.

In the 1980s, more than 30 herbaria — repositories of plant and fungal specimens — were added per year. Now that number is fewer than two per year. The authors comment that the numbers are similar for similar repositories of other kinds of life. The disappearance of specimen collections makes it harder to engage local communities and submit local specimens, although it can make accessing specimens easier for biologists (everyone loves one-stop shopping).

Another consequence is that the proportion of biology PhDs with degrees in natural history-related fields has slipped steadily for 50 years, as you can see from the graph on the right (b). The unmarked line represents all biology PhD.s, the line with the solid black dot is natural-history related disciplines. Microbiology and molecular biology are the squares, biophysics and neurology the triangles, and genetics is the gray circles. As David Wilcove and Thomas Eisner (my old professor and an esteemed naturalist-entomologist-chemical ecologist) wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2000, “A knowledge of, or even an avowed interest in, natural history is no longer a prerequisite for admission to a graduate program in ecology or any other branch of biology.”

Further, exposure of students at all levels to natural history is diminishing. As we saw in the graph at the top of this post, all colleges and universities surveyed in the 1950s required at least some natural history courses for a biology degree – a median of 2.25. Today, most colleges have no natural history requirements for a biology degree, and the slim section devoted to natural history in the center of most textbooks has shrunk 40 percent and is usually skipped anyway, as I’m sure those of you with biology degrees earned in the last 20 years can attest.

As the classes vanished, so did the natural history training. Field trips and field classes disappeared, and without them, “these subjects are dead and the students who study them risk coming away with little but cold abstractions,” wrote biologist Reed Noss in a paper mourning the demise of natural history in 1996. Most biology students no longer learned to identify species, and few learned about taxonomy or systematics, much less about the diversity of life within particular groups. The vast majority would work only with a few species in their studies, “becoming specialists before they are generalists,” wrote mammalogist Michael Mares in 2002. “They are sublimely ignorant of the diversity and complexity of nature.”
The ultimate consequence was that jobs for systematists and taxonomists likewise vaporized; observing and describing became passé; “natural history” and “naturalist” perjorative. Lab research brought “prestige, glamour, and grant money — especially grant money”, Pyle says. Natural history brought quiet ridicule, or at least condescension — so much so that many young scientists would not even suggest they might be interested in organisms for their own sake. “All of us have met and heard students who, in explaining their work on some aspect of the biology of mammals, birds, or insects, say that they are not interested in mammals, birds, or insects as such but, instead, as models for studying principles,” wrote David Schmidley in a 2005 commentary. “They do not view themselves as mammalogists or herpetologists but as ecologists or evolutionary biologists — as if being a mammalogist were a badge of shame.”

A Picture of a Slug Is Not a Slug

Popular Natural History by Henry Scherren, Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, 1906. Public Domain. 

Anna Botsford Comstock reported that teachers even in her day lacked natural history training. But today, even if a child is lucky enough to get a teacher who has a biology degree, as we just saw, that is now no guarantee the teacher will know anything about nature or natural history. As we saw above, natural history is by and large no longer taught to biology majors, much less high school students

Comstock’s book stressed the importance of kid-on-critter time. But increasingly, in the classrooms and museum exhibits that I’ve seen or visited, still images or interactive games are considered adequate substitutes. They are no

A better approach, one that Wilcove and Eisner suggest, is introducing kids to an older form of technology: microscopes. Even a simple stereo or dissecting microscope offers access to a fascinating universe of mites, springtails, and nematodes easily viewable in a bit of compost or soil, they say, and is a far more engaging experience than mindlessly flipping through photos in an exhibit or randomly pushing buttons.

Judging by a recent article in The Atlantic and by Richard Louv’s 2008 book Last Child in the Woods, my wandering outside alone at a tender age was a common childhood experience a generation ago, but it has virtually disappeared today. Some parents never seem to let their kids out of their sight no matter how old they get — they are constantly supervised and never allowed time to explore on their own.
Public schools are often no longer located close to nature, and field trips here too have gone the way of the dodo thanks to cost-cutting and liability, and over-supervised kids with helicopter parents and electronic babysitters rarely venture outside alone (even if they want to) to explore what nature is left in their suburban-sprawled backyard.

In schools, “environmental education” has often replaced natural history, with its emphasis on general structures and concepts like food webs or trophic levels. But such vague ideas are often boring and abstract. It would be hard to think of a kid or a biologist with a passionate devotion to a food web, but how many can you think of with a passion for a particular bird or dinosaur? But this kind of education — and lack of exposure to life in the field — produces kids for whom “every evergreen is a pine; all brown birds are sparrows; and if a spring chorus is to be heard at all, a frog is a frog is a frog,” as Pyle writes. Actually, I bet you’d be hard pressed to find a kid today who knows sparrows are brown — and many would not know it was a bird.

On a recent fishing trip to southeast Oklahoma, our guide related that he’d had a client who wanted to know what all the trees on the hill were that still had their leaves on in winter. In shock, my guide realized this man had no idea what a pine tree was. When the guide discovered the man worked in real estate, his interest was piqued. How could a real estate agent not know what a pine tree is? One that works in *commercial* real estate, apparently. On my old blog, I related the experience I had right out of college when I worked in a plant nursery and a man came in looking for an ostrich fern. As I sorted through the five or six fern species we had, he remarked “I never knew there were so many kinds of fern!” There are 10,000 species of fern.

When kids do not grow up around natural history, they become adults who are not only ignorant of natural history, but who do not care about nature and view it as disposable and unimportant. “Ecological ignorance breeds indifference,” as Pyle put it. “What we know, we may choose to care for. What we fail to recognize, we certainly won’t.” Few reactions to climate change irritate me more than the “disposable Earth” attitude — surprisingly common among young adults — that if we ruin Earth (for our uses, at least), no biggie. We can just go terraform Mars or something (Not an exaggeration of this attitude. See prime example here, but I have heard it elsewhere too).

To that, I just want to shout “Are you insane??! Even if that were technically possible, have you seen what a good thing we’ve got going here? Have you SEEN Mars?” And I think a large part of this attitude stems from the fact many people — especially young people — have NOT seen what we’ve got going here. They haven’t spent hours in the woods quietly rambling around, listening, smelling, tasting, and observing. They swum above a coral reef. They haven’t experienced the grandeur of open grassland. They haven’t walked through a fog-filled forest and seen the lichens and algae glow. They haven’t seen the beauty of the desert in bloom. They haven’t even looked at the magic in a drop of wild pond water under a microscope. Because guess who else hasn’t done that yet? Me. And I even own a microscope.

To love Earth, you have to fall in love with Earth. And that can’t happen indoors, eyes glued to a screen. You have to watch the bee gathering nectar from the blue bonnet; you have to smell and touch the sap (and discover it is now impossible to remove from your fingers) weeping from the tree; you have to smell the citrussy cinnamonny gym-socky aroma of the matsutake fresh from the pine duff.

What on Earth would possess anyone to suggest that it would be nothing to simply throw this all away and start again on a red, lifeless rock? Perhaps a childhood drained of natural history experience or education.

How Natural History and Sari Cloth Can Thwart Cholera
But natural history loss and apathy isn’t just bad for academic naturalists and kids. Inthe same BioScience paper that produced the graphs in this post, lead author Joshua Tewksbury and colleagues point out that it can be bad — and extremely costly — for humanity in some very practical ways.

The waterborne illness cholera has killed millions over the centuries, famously killing some travelers on the Oregon Trail within hours of the first symptoms. What was not recognized or thought to be investigated until early 1990s was what cholera was up to in the environment when it wasn’t killing humans. Cholera doesn’t exist to afflict humans. It is a wild creature — a bacterium called Vibrio cholerae — which its own fascinating life history in nature. As it turns out cholera bacteria are actually native to the sea and commonly attach themselves to copepods and other zooplankton. Using this bit of natural history, scientists can now forecast cholera outbreaks in India using satellite images of phytoplankton blooms in the Indian Ocean.

What’s more, it also led to the insight that filtering untreated water meant for drinking with tightly woven sari cloth vastly decreases the chances of getting cholera by removing the zooplankton that most of them are attached to, a very practical intervention that women in impoverished Indian households eager to improve their family’s health can take.

“Washing Utensils And Vegetables” by Anwar Huq, University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The woman on the right is fitting a sari cloth filter to a water collecting jar. From Bradbury J: Beyond the Fire-Hazard Mentality of Medicine: The Ecology of Infectious Diseases. PLoS Biol 1/2/2003: e22.

Sometimes our ignorance of natural history has caused us to directly act in ways that result in costly, difficult-to-undo mistakes. In the Pacific Northwest, 20th century water managers removed large logs and stumps from rivers to improve navigability and to “assist salmon migration”. It was only after hundreds of streams were so cleared that officials realized that salmon actually *need* such large woody debris during their migration. Now we must spend millions to undo our damaging handiwork, sometimes going so far as to airlift logs into streams

Perhaps the biggest and most costly natural-history related blunder of all in the United States was the policy of suppressing forest fire in the western United States. It was concocted based on strategies that worked well for wet forests in Germany and the eastern United States. But little thought was given to the natural history of dry western forests and how they might differ in their relationship to fire. As Native Americans had long known, western forests thrive on frequent small fires.

Now, 100 years of fire suppression in the west has led to over-dense forests susceptible to intense mega-blazes covering hundreds of square miles. As a result of our ignorance and arrogance, the US fire management program now costs more than $1 billion annually, and we must carefully coddle endangered species made so by the long fire drought.

What Can We Do?

There are three points I feel are important to make when considering the future of natural history.

Natural history is an important science worthy of respect and research dollars. The scientific method and natural history are not mutually exclusive. Wilcove and Eisner believe that the abandonment of natural history by universities will prove to be one of the biggest scientific mistakes of our time.

Just because biology moved on did not mean the work of natural history was over. Much still remains to do. It’s honorable work and should be exciting — the work of the Age of Discovery. Many scientists assume that all the important descriptive work has been done during that Age, but in reality, many species and groups of organisms were neglected during the 18th and 19th century, and those that were may have been described poorly or incorrectly. New biology graduate students have tended to enter popular fields without checking to see whether old fields needed further work. Many have been pushed into work on a handful of model organisms while work on other species and groups has languished. We have probably even lost ground in the last 50 years. When scientists from the previous era specializing in certain groups of organisms have died, so too has a tremendous amount of hard-earned institutional knowledge of particular groups. As a result of all these forces, even supposedly well-studied groups of animals (like jellyfish, as biologist Lisa-Anne Gershwin discussed with SA blogger Bec Crew) still have surprising gaps in our basic knowledge of their diversity. For more obscure groups, God only knows what’s out there. We don’t.

Natural history education — and simply looking, observing and exploring nature — are the birthright of all children and biologists. Failing to teach natural history and spend time in nature has serious practical consequences for individuals and for society.

So what can we do? The natural history and biodiversity gap is a major reason I started this blog five years ago to spotlight groups of organisms and aspects of natural history that I found fascinating but felt no one else wrote about. But my blog is a drop in the ocean.

“Service intern Byron Hamstead helps identify stream insects (8026518273)” by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region

I’ve had other ideas — perhaps we could have microscope parties (safaris?) the way astronomers so effectively use star parties to lure the science curious public to their discipline. Or maybe Botany Cocktail Night. Or an Invertebrate Sushi Party (is that too disgusting?) The bounty of good field guides available today could be the inspiration for some other game or competitive activity (perhaps combined with exercise in some sort of competitive natural history photographic scavenger hunts?) that could teach people how to use them and instill a lifelong curiosity about nature. Perhaps 19th-century style Botany Walks will never again but popular, but if so, we need to find ways to connect people and real, live organisms in socially-inviting, engaging ways
Schmidley suggests some good could come of ceasing to think of “naturalist” and “scientist” as mutually exclusive, “the supposition that one must be either an old-fashioned “-ologist” or a builder of conceptual frameworks, but not both”. He suggests an alternative — “the scientific naturalist.” “a person with a deep and broad familiarity with one or more groups of organisms or ecological communities, who can draw on his or her knowledge of systematics, distribution, life histories, behavior, and perhaps physiology and morphology to inspire ideas, evaluate hypotheses, and intelligently design research with an awareness of organisms’ special peculiarities.” I have known a scientist or two like this, but we need more
Maybe non-profit conservation or natural history organizations could endow chairs for “scientific naturalists” in biology departments with the stipulation that these positions go to those who study specific, understudied groups of organisms. Or perhaps they could create grants for work on understudied groups of organisms to inspire and fundall biologists who might not have otherwise have considered (or been able to consider) natural history a part of their research but would like to include it as part of their research portfolio. If anyone at NSF (or foreign equivalents) is reading this, I know you guys are scraping the bottom of the barrel right now with regard to research dollars, but could you spare a little more funding love for natural history work if and when your cup ever refills?

I write this to everyone reading, but especially to my core audience of natural history lovers: it is up to us. Ask yourself: how can I share my passion for natural history with others? Who in my community is already doing this kind of thing? Could I teach a class through a college or local nature association? Give a public talk or talks? Take a class to further my education? Host a regular natural history salon/party in my house à la Ben Franklin and the Enlightenment scientists? Perhaps we could collectively relax a bit and let our children have more unstructured and unsupervised playtime in nature — often the very same kind of wild free play we ourselves were afforded?

How could I get science curious friends who aren’t already passionate about biology interested? Take my kids out for a nature walk — and grab a few neighborhood kids while I’m at it? Get involved in volunteer outreach at my local natural history museum? Find the time to take *myself* for a walk in nature, field guide, magnifying glass, and binoculars in hand? I feel screen suck too … but put down the phone and go outside.

If I’m a public school teacher, how can I incorporate more natural history — and especially field trips and kid-on-critter (and not just vertebrates) time — into my curriculum? If I’m a university faculty member, how can I increase or encourage the increase the teaching of natural history and field science and its requirement for a biology degree at my institution? Noss suggests that faculty and students donate time to schools parks, or other public agencies to help develop or improve educational programs in local natural history, and that lab or office-bound scientists get back out into the field themselves and make the effort to learn the organisms that live in their own backyards.

I know there are countless obstacles to all these ideas. But think about it.

A Final Plea for the Dignity of Natural History

In saying all this, I don’t mean to impugn the role of theory and process, cell biology and genetics. Theory and process are essential. Biology hinges on evolutionary theory; it helps us understand everything we see. Natural history without appreciation of fundamental biology principles is simply an assortment of interesting facts. But theory and process are not, and cannot be everything.

Ernest Rutherford famously said “all science is either physics or stamp collecting”. No science has perhaps been a bigger victim of this attitude than natural history. But is it a waste of time to visit and appreciate the paintings in the art museum? Is it stamp collecting to study and research the works of Vermeer, or Las Meninas?

How then can we have any less respect for the appreciation and study of natural works of art? We must have balance in biology between studying the process and the fascinating, oft-unexpected, and delightful products of those processes.

“A naturalist is the person who is inexhaustibly fascinated by biological diversity and who does not view organisms merely as models, or vehicles for theory, but rather as the thing itself that excites our admiration and our desire for knowledge, understanding, and preservation,” writes David Schmidley. That is who I am. And I’m sure I’m not alone. But natural history will dwindle — and humanity will suffer accordingly — unless society prioritizes natural history research and education, and we who feel this way share our passion with others.

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“The current push to connect every classroom in America to the Internet demonstrates how quickly elected leaders and the public can be galvanized to address what is rightly perceived to be a critical educational need. Meanwhile, the demise of natural history goes unnoticed, increasing the likelihood that future generations of schoolchildren will spend even more time indoors, clicking away on their plastic mice, happily viewing images of the very plants and animals they could be finding in the woods, streams, and meadows they no longer visit.” — David Wilcove and Thomas Eisner, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2000

“Scientific abstractions and fancy technologies are no substitutes for the wisdom that springs from knowing the world and its creatures in intimate, loving detail. We owe it to ourselves and our students to keep opportunities for acquiring this kind of knowledge alive.” — Reed Noss, Conservation Biology, 2001.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the paper by Tewksbury et al. was published in Current Biology. It was published in BioScience,and this post has been corrected accordingly.

References and Source

1. Mares, M.A. 2002. A Desert Calling: Life in a Forbidding Landscape. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
2. Noss, R.F. 1996. The Naturalists Are Dying Off, Conservation Biology 10: 1-3
3. Pyle, R.M. 2001. The Rise and Fall of Natural History. Orion, Autumn 2001: 16-23.
4. Schmidley, D.J. 2005. What It Means To Be a Naturalist and the Future of Natural History at American Universities, Journal of Mammology 86: 449-456.
5. Tewksbury J.J et al, T.A.2014. Natural History’s Place in Science and Society, BioScience, DOI:10.1093/biosci/biu032
6. Wilcove, D.S. and Eisner, T. 2000. The Impending Extinction of Natural History,Chronicle of Higher Education 47: B24.