by Stephen Mulkey, PhD “If looking into the sun may cause blindness, then human insights into nature entail a terrible price.” – Andrew Glickson, Australian National University, 2014 “If we don’t act soon, there will only be tiny remnants of wilderness around the planet, and this is a disaster for conservation, for climate change, and Read More
Consequences and Hope in the Environmental Century
NRCM is pleased to share this blog by Stephen Mulkey, Ph.D. Dr. Mulkey, a former NRCM board member, is a plant ecologist and educator and has studied ecological processes and planetary change for more than 35 years. This blog reflects his views about accelerating ecological change driven by human impacts on the biosphere and climate change.
Katahdin Woods & Waters, Climate Change, & the Public Trust
by Stephen Mulkey, PhD, for The Natural Resources Council of Maine On Wednesday, 24 August 2016, President Obama designated a large parcel of Maine’s North Woods as the nation’s newest federal parkland. Many environmental groups and environmentally inclined citizens have worked diligently for several years to create the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. These Read More
The Value of Carbon Capture and Sequestration as an Ecosystem Service
by Stephen Mulkey for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth’s lifecycle.” Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) speaking in the House on Earth Day 2009 “Essentially these communities of organisms are our life support system.” Hal Mooney, Achilles Professor of Environmental Biology, Stanford University, Read More
The Integrity of Ecosystems
by Stephen Mulkey for the Natural Resources Council of Maine “An essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Steward Pickett and P.S. White 1985 “We must focus our attention on the rates at which changes occur, understanding that certain changes are natural, desirable, and acceptable, while others are not.” Read More
What Qualifies as Scientific Authority?
“Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH) “…this 97% [of climate scientists accepting human-caused global warming], that doesn’t mean anything.” Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Stephen Colbert, satirist Recently I sat dumbfounded watching Marco Rubio tell South Floridians about all Read More
Higher Education in the Environmental Century
“….what we’re doing today with greenhouse gas emissions — which is just a moment when you look at the geophysical timescales — has consequences for decades, centuries, millennia.” —Ricarda Winkelmann, Climate Scientist, Potsdam Institute, 2016 “Mobilizing to save civilization means restructuring the economy, restoring its natural systems, eradicating poverty, stabilizing population and climate, and, above all, Read More
Carbon Capture and Sequestration the Old Fashioned Way
This week the mainstream media and many of the social media outlets have hailed the experiment in Iceland that has demonstrated the ability to capture CO2 from the air and turn it into rock. The Guardian proclaimed “CO2 turned into stone in Iceland in climate change breakthrough” and the journal Science headlined “Inject baby, inject!”. Read More
