Columbia University Press

“To forestall these rapid planetary transformations from bringing civiliza­tion to the brink requires a solution to the impending climate and environ­mental crisis that transcends short-term fixes. It calls for a major paradigm shift.”—Vivien Gornitz

In the following excerpt from Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future, Vivien Gornitz argues that we are now in a new epoch in which human activity is having a profound impact on the environment:

Rising seas are just one symptom of a much larger unfolding environmental crisis—one manifestation of the multidimensional planetary changes now under way. We now live in the Anthropocene epoch—increasingly marked by the human touch. Ever since humanity first learned to control fire, peo­ple have transformed the Earth’s surface. The agricultural revolution further altered natural vegetation patterns. However, after the Industrial Revolu­tion of the late 18th century, and increasingly so after the mid-20th cen­tury, people have become major environmental and geologic agents. We are reshaping the planet by literally moving mountains, diverting water flows, denuding forests, eroding soils, altering biogeochemical cycles (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus overloading), acidifying the ocean, diminishing biodiver­sity, and changing the climate. Exponential population growth coupled with rapid economic and technological development drive this planetary trans­mutation, unparalleled in Earth’s history. As demand rises, growing scarci­ties of food, water, and mineral resources will increasingly stress our fragile environment.

Climate change brings additional stresses. Although some agricultural re­gions may benefit from a longer growing season resulting from additional warmth or extra rainfall, other regions stand to become drier or even turn into dust bowls. Crop yields may drop, unless more drought- resistant va­rieties can be developed in time. Elsewhere, soil fertility may decline due to erosion of topsoil. Groundwater mining may lower the water table enough to make pumping water for irrigation too costly (e.g., the Ogallala Aquifer in Oklahoma and Texas). Increasing saltwater encroachment due to sea level rise may render many fertile low-lying deltaic or coastal farmlands (e.g., the Sacramento–San Joaquin valley, California, the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, or the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, Bangladesh) increasingly unproductive.

(more…)

In the following excerpt from Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future, Vivien Gornitz examines how New York City is reacting to and planning for the possibility of flooding due to rising seas. (To read the excerpt in a full screen, click on the icon on the lower right-hand corner)

“Could future greenhouse gas-induced global warming push the Earth’s climate system into an unstable mode, triggering a catastrophic meltdown of the polar ice sheets?”—Vivien Gornitz

The follow post is from Vivien Gornitz, author of Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future.

Superstorm Sandy, although a rare and freakish event today, was a rough taste of what may await us as ocean levels continue to rise. New York City is no stranger to tropical cyclones, in spite of its northerly location. The surge from a hurricane in 1821 reached 13 feet in 1 hour and flooded parts of lower Manhattan as far north as Canal Street. In 1893, another hurricane submerged southern Brooklyn and Queens, erasing a small barrier island off the Rockaways. During the twentieth century, the “Long Island Express” (1938), hurricane Donna (1960), and the weaker hurricane Gloria (1985) created extensive damage on nearby Long Island and in New Jersey. Even winter nor’easters, such as one in December, 1992, flooded low-lying neighborhoods and seriously disrupted ground and air transportation. But the fury and destructiveness of Sandy topped these all, aided by the historic 1.4 foot rise in sea level since the mid-19th century.

At least eight times during the last million years, vast ice sheets blanketed much of the Northern Hemisphere and subsequently retreated. Both sea level and greenhouse gas concentrations fell during the ice ages and rose again as the ice sheets shrank. Sea level climbed 13 to 20 feet higher than present during the last warm interglacial period, 125,000 years ago, but then dropped 394 feet (120 meters) at the peak of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago. Once the ice sheets began their retreat, sea level rose rapidly and climbed still faster in several episodic spurts. After the ice melted, the sea reached nearly its present height by 7,000 to 6,000 years ago, fluctuating at most by a few feet since then.

Climate skeptics like to point to past wide variations in climate and global sea level as proof that we are merely experiencing yet another natural variation. Anthropogenic atmospheric greenhouse gases are heating the Earth. Carbon dioxide (394 parts per million in 2012, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/) approaches levels last experienced in the balmier Pliocene epoch, around 3 million years ago, when sea levels stood over 66 feet (20 meters) higher than present. Temperatures now reach 1.0 F (0.6 C) above the mid-twentieth century average, with the nine warmest years in the 132-year record occurring since 2000 (http://giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20130115/). The climatic effects are most pronounced near the poles and on lofty mountaintops.

(more…)

“When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman.”—Christopher Collins

The following is an interview with Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

Question: Let’s start with your title: what do you mean by “Paleopoetics”?

Christopher Collins: All my life I’ve been involved with thinking about, talking about, and writing about literature. But through all those years what most intrigued me were the feelings—the moods and emotions—and the mental images that words can invoke. My deepest responses to poems, dramas, novels—any artwork made up of words—always seemed to come from a level in me that somehow went far back into the past. I don’t mean past lifetimes or anything like that—just a very deep and ancient genetic past, some part of me that wasn’t derived from my personal experience. When we feel powerfully moved by what words do to us, I think it’s because we’ve entered into some deeper, older part of us, a place of wisdom and wholeness that is preverbal, even prehuman. In writing this book I’ve tried to find insight into these intuitions by studying what the sciences of the mind/brain have to say about memory, emotion, perception, and the simulation of perception, imagination.

Q: Is that how you arrived at your subtitle, “the evolution of the preliterate imagination?”

CC: Yes, but by imagination I don’t mean foresight or mental agility, but rather the simulation of perception, auditory, kinetic, and, above all, visual imagery. For me, mental imagery is the prelinguistic content that language was evolved to communicate and that writing was eventually invented to disseminate.

Q: How can anyone know how humans thought before they were able to write down their thoughts?

CC: That’s a fair question. We need to approach this from many angles, for example, primate social behavior, the evolving architecture of the brain from pre-human to human, its consequences for the perceptual systems of vision and hearing, the semiotics of gestures, eye–hand coordination and tool use, and the implication of these for fully human social behavior. We need to look for converging evidence from many disciplines—from paleontology, ethology, anthropology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and neuroscience. We need to ponder the implications of our reading, let us take us with it, and not be afraid to revise our basic assumptions. Then, if and when concepts seem to click into place, we need to be ready to draw inferences.

(more…)

This week our featured book is Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future, by Vivien Gornitz.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books and their editors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of Rising Seas: Past, Present, Future (Click here to read an excerpt.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply e-mail pl2164@columbia.edu with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 26th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

“When we open a book and turn its pages, our paleopoetic past is never very long ago or far away.”—Christopher Collins

The following essay is by Christopher Collins, author of Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination

In both biological and cultural evolution there is no turning back, no do-overs. As I began planning the project that would become the book, Paleopoetics, the principle of evolutionary biology that change is cumulative intrigued me the most. Steven Mithen had put it this way: “Evolution does not have the option of returning to the drawing board and beginning anew; it can only ever modify what has gone before. That is, of course, why we can only understand the modern mind by understanding the prehistory of the mind.” Culturally evolved skills, such as fire use, cooking, agriculture, writing, mathematics, and empirical science, like the genetically inherited traits upon which they are built, have been preserved and elaborated to generate further innovations, a progressive process that Michael Tomasello has called the “cultural ratchet.”

Then the idea struck me: there is no turning back because we carry within us our own biological past and nowhere is that past more systematically present than in our brain. It follows then that biological and cultural evolution form a continuum and, though the older functions of the brain are manifestly different from the newer functions, both sets are interdependent thanks to the plasticity of this organ. I subsequently became aware of “dual-systems theory,” a cognitive model that differentiates such opposites as impulse and planning, parallel and serial processing, nonverbal and verbal communication, and concrete and abstract thought. The primary goal of dual-systems theory is to explain illogical, maladaptive human behavior as the result of an unresolved conflict between the prehuman and the fully human brain.

While I find myself agreeing that conflict can arise when these opposite features compete for dominance, I can also see them as complementary functions. In Paleopoetics I explore the possibility that the arts, specifically the verbal arts, integrate these opposites, momentarily reconciling the old, long established modular centers with the more recently connected circuitry of the anatomically modern brain.

(more…)

“This strange happenstance of the DA 14 flyby and the Chelyabinsk explosion on the same day is a wake up call about how little we know actually know about space, even in our own region of the Solar System. What else is lurking around out there getting ready to give us a nasty surprise?”—Claude Piantadosi

Last week we featured Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration, by Claude Piantadosi. Of course, at the end of last week a meteor hit earth and underscored Piantadosi’s argument that we need to continue study space. In the following post, Piantadosi recounts his reactions to last week’s event and what it means for science:

I arrived at the laboratory rather early last Friday morning and bumped into my colleague Dr. Jim Logan, who told me that a large meteor had just burst in the air over Russia—injuring more than a thousand people with flying glass and other debris.

“Jim,” I said, a little taken aback, “I thought your old NASA buddies claimed that this thing was supposed to miss us by 17,000 miles.”

“This was not Asteroid 2012 DA14,” he shot back. “This rock came in on a totally different trajectory.”
“Really; now that’s quite a coincidence. Thank goodness for the atmosphere,” I told him. “And knock on wood, still no human in recorded history has ever been killed by a meteor.”

“True… but millions of dinosaurs can’t say the same thing,” he said. “In fact, you could argue that if it wasn’t for the massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago, there wouldn’t be any humans.”
And if we have a repeat of that episode, there won’t be any humans left either.

According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the so-called Chelyabinsk meteor was a rock 55 feet in diameter, weighing 10,000 tons, and traveling at some 40,000 mph when it hit our atmosphere and exploded. It was the largest air burst in a hundred years— since Tunguska in 1908. And the blast was estimated to be about 500 kilotons, the explosive force of 30 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

This strange happenstance of the DA 14 flyby and the Chelyabinsk explosion on the same day is a wake up call about how little we know actually know about space, even in our own region of the Solar System. What else is lurking around out there getting ready to give us a nasty surprise? Indeed, we are just beginning to catalog and track these objects, for instance, through the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program, which has been in existence only since 1998.

In one respect, ignorance is bliss; we simply do not have the technology to protect ourselves from collisions with such high-velocity celestial bodies. However, we do have the technology to detect, categorize, and track these projectiles, and when it comes to that, as it inevitably will, to move people out of harm’s way. We must be sure that this first step is put into play and that the collection of this vital information remains a permanent part of our commitment to a meaningful, long-term strategy for space exploration. Perhaps over the next hundred years, we’ll develop the technological means to nudge these objects out of Earth-crossing orbits. But this set of circumstances does make one thing very clear: we simply cannot afford the struthonian approach of burying our heads in the sand.

This week’s Book of the Week was Claude Piantadosi’s Mankind Beyond Earth. We gave you the opportunity to win a FREE copy of the book (you can still enter our Giveaway!), brought you an author Q&A and an interesting tidbit post on why 21st century manned space exploration matters, and even shared some of our favorite retro space exploration art on Pinterest. As a fitting conclusion to our feature, we bring you Claude Piantadosi’s perspective on humanity’s next step (or giant leap) into space exploration: sending people to Mars.

(To view in full screen, click on icon in bottom right-hand corner.)

Civilization is obliged to become spacefaring, not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable… staying alive.
– Carl Sagan

While Claude Piantadosi’s Mankind Beyond Earth exudes an obvious “romantic zeal” for space exploration, it is telling that the author chose the above quote as his epigraph. Like Sagan, Piantadosi has a talent for keeping his feet on the ground while he looks to the stars, and that includes a strong defense of exploratory science as a prolific source of what he calls “spinoff.” The steep learning curve associated with space exploration has indirectly led to vast improvements in many practical earth-side technologies, including:

• Air and Water Purification
• Aviation Efficiency and Safety
• Satellite Communication
• Small Size and High Resolution of Infrared Cameras
• Food Preservation Methods (for Soldiers and Refugees)
• Telemedicine
• Hazardous Gas Detectors
• Prosthetic Limbs
• Tools for Measuring Climate Change

We hope this tidbit will come in handy the next time you find yourself faced with a pragmatist who just can’t see the value in mankind’s stepping out into the cosmos. For more details, check out the book!

Claude Piantadosi’s Mankind Beyond Earth frames space exploration as humanity’s ultimate challenge to adapt to new and extremely hostile environments. However, while Piantadosi is quite frank about the physical and financial limits of human spacefaring, his book is also brimming with examples of its potential for human creativity. Inspired by this enthusiasm (and the book’s retro cover art) we’ve put together a Pinterest Board (see below) featuring some of our favorite illustrative imaginings about travel to the stars.

“As a lifelong investigator, I have a deep belief that maintaining our research leadership in all facets of science is critical to our nation’s continued success as a forward-thinking civilization. Despite its great costs and high risks, space exploration is still a wholly worthwhile investment for America.”—Claude Piantadosi

Our featured book this week is Mankind Beyond Earth by Claude Piantadosi (remember to enter our Book Giveaway for the chance to win a FREE copy!)

In the following interview, Piantadosi outlines his book and makes a compelling case for manned space exploration in the twenty-first century.

Q: How does your book approach human space exploration?

Claude A. Piantadosi: Mankind Beyond Earth uses space exploration as a model to help guide the reader to a deeper understanding of why we explore and how important exploration is to our species. Space exploration, like past explorations of the oceans and the continents, is ultimately about people and about our ability to adapt. Space is in many ways our most challenging frontier, because the resources we have to advance space exploration are very limited, and they must be put to good use both to develop new technologies and to explore such a uniquely hostile environment. This requires deep scientific knowledge and careful planning, as well as patience, particularly where peoples’ lives are at stake.

Q: Why should we keep sending people into space when robots will do?

CAP: This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by physical scientists, who understand that the cost of a human space mission is at least ten times that of a comparable unmanned mission. The capabilities of robotic probes are increasing dramatically and most of our greatest discoveries in space have come from robotic missions, such as the Mars Rovers. However, the man versus machine tug-of-war creates a false dichotomy. There are roles for both types of missions to space, as my examination of the history of our space program in the book illustrates.

The ability to set the horizons for human and robotic missions in proportion and in tandem is important to our future success in space. A forward-thinking hypothetical is the use of remote mining technology to dig an underground space habitat, say into a hillside or crater rim on Mars. In talking to a couple of professors at the Colorado School of Mines, they think (and I agree) it would be preferable to have the “remote miner” fairly close to the excavation site, perhaps on the moon Deimos or in Mars orbit, instead of 50 million miles away on Earth, where a radio signal takes about four minutes each way and would be accessible to the excavator less than half of the time due to the daily rotations of the two planets on their axes.

(more…)

This week our featured book is Mankind Beyond Earth: The History, Science, and Future of Human Space Exploration by Claude Piantadosi.

Throughout the week we will highlight aspects of Mankind Beyond Earth here on our blog, as well as our Twitter feed, Pinterest page, and Facebook page.

You can also win a FREE copy of the book by entering our Book Giveaway on GoodReads. Good luck, and spread the word!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Mankind Beyond Earth The History Science and Future of Human

by Claude A. Piantadosi

Giveaway ends February 28, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

We conclude our look at the history of Thanksgiving by considering one of the darker traditions of the holiday: overating. Sure, the food is delicious and plentiful but we should know better. Are there other factors that can explain why we stuff ourselves at Thanksgiving?

The following is an excerpt from Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters, by Gordon Shepherd. In the excerpt Shepherd begins by looking at fast food and then looks at some of the neurological reasons for why we overeat at Thanksgiving and other times of the year.

[F]ast food contains a variety of food types and flavors. This is called the supermarket, smorgasbord, or buffet effect. This idea actually originated with a blind French scientist named Jacque Le Magnen in Paris, who became a legend in research on feeding. In the 1950s he began detailed studies of laboratory rats fed different kinds of diets. He found that on daily lab chow they showed little weight gain, but if he offered them chow with different flavors they quickly began to gain weight. This effect was rediscovered in 1981 by Barbara Rolls and her colleagues at Oxford, who called it sensory-specific satiety, meaning that with one flavor the animal quickly becomes full and bored with eating more, whereas a new flavor stimulates renewed eating. This is the effect we all experience at Thanksgiving or buffets or banquets when we feel the urge to go on eating every new dish or course. It is an expression of the fact that the brain is always interested in something new or changing, a characteristic we have seen in all the sensory systems. Although the fast- food industry probably did not know of Le Magnen’s research, it designed its foods as if it did.

(more…)

Jonathan Kahn, author of Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age, is a frequent speaker at the Tarrytown meetings, an annual meeting of the Center for Genetics and Society in which scientists and others discuss the ways in which new human biotechnologies and related emerging technologies should support rather than undermine social justice, human rights, ecological integrity, democratic governance, and the common good.

In the following remarks from the 2010 meeting, Kahn discusses some of the troubling aspects our increasing faith in genetics as explanation for a variety of social and political problems in addition to scientific ones. He also expresses concern about how biotechnology is affecting academia by making the study of genetics and science research a cash cow for universities. Kahn’s talk, like his book, reveals the ways in which science is not necessarily a “value-neutral” pursuit but has many unanticipated consequences that need to be thought about carefully by society:

Last week, our authors of titles which combine science and food were featured in a couple of prominent locales on both sides of the Atlantic.

A recent story on the BBC, looks at how the role of science and molecular gastronomy found in high-end cuisine is making its way into the home kitchen. So if you are looking for a way to improve upon the delicious but somewhat mundane grilled cheese sandwich, Jennifer Kimmel explains how science can help create the perfect grilled cheese, an issue she discussed in our recent The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking.

The story also features Job Ubbink, one of the editors of The Kitchen as Laboratory, who argues that molecular gastronomy has been misunderstood in recent years. He suggests that it is not just a flashy style of cooking but rather it provides insights into cooking and food that will allow us to become better cooks and have a deeper understanding of both the gastronomical and nutritional value of food.

In addressing the notion that molecular gastronomy might not be as important as it once was, Herve This, one of the founders of the movement argues:

As gastronomy means knowledge, molecular gastronomy is the right word for a science which considers phenomena occurring during the preparation and consumption of dishes.

People like Heston Blumenthal and others were completely wrong when they said that molecular gastronomy does not exist any longer. They are confusing molecular gastronomy (science) and molecular cuisine… which still exists.

(more…)

“When science becomes the sole or even primary arbiter of such basic notions as personhood, it ceases to be mankind’s most useful servant and threatens, instead, to become its dictator.”—William Egginton

Due to Hurricane Sandy, we fell a bit behind with our blog posts, but we wanted to share with you a provocative and thoughtful essay by William Egginton, author of In Defense of Religious Moderation.

In Can Neuroscience Challenge Roe V. Wade?, a post on the New York Times Opinionator blog, William Egginton describes being called as an expert witness in an appellate case that some think could lead to the next Supreme Court test of Roe v. Wade.

More precisely, Egginton was asked to testify regarding the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” an Idaho statute that cites neuroscientific findings of pain sentience on the part of fetuses as a basis for prohibiting abortions even prior to viability. Though a humanities scholar and not a neuroscientist, Egginton was recognized as someone who has written about the hubris of scientific claims to knowledge that exceeds the boundaries of what the sciences in fact demonstrate.

As Egginton describes, he finds the recent laws and push to use neuroscientific findings to limit the choice of women, endorsed by Mitt Romney and other Republicans, fail to appreciate scientific and philosophical traditions regarding whether recognizing pain can be equated with personhood. Egginton writes:

For a fetus to be conscious in a sense that would establish it as a fully actualized human life, according both to current neuroscientific standards and to the philosophical tradition from which the concept stems, it would have to be capable of self-perception as well as simple perception of stimuli. And as philosophers of many stripes since Descartes have argued, self-perception is a reflexive state involving a concept of self in contrast with that of others — concepts it would be hard to imagine being meaningful for a fetus, even if fetuses could be shown to have access to concepts in the first place. By turning to consciousness in an attempt to push Roe’s line-in-the-sand back toward conception, in other words, abortion opponents would in effect be pushing it forward, toward the sort of self-differentiation that only occurs well after birth and the emergence of what the phenomenological tradition has called “world.”

(more…)

This week we are highlighting Daniel McCool’s River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers. Today we’d like to share an excerpt from the first chapter of River Republic. And remember that this week you can enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of River Republic.

River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers

This week we are highlighting Daniel McCool’s River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers. Today we’d like to share a guest post written by McCool on how seemingly natural disasters are actually caused by our mistreatment of rivers. And remember that this week you can enter our book giveaway for a chance to win a FREE copy of River Republic.

Here’s a sample of recent headlines:
“Worst Drought in 55 Years Devastates Corn Crop” (The Denver Post)
“Special Report: Water Supplies Pass the Tipping Point” (U-T San Diego)
“The Full Story Behind Simplot’s Two-headed Fish and Phosphate Mine” (Idaho Statesman)
“Electricity Generation ‘Burning’ Rivers of Drought-Scorched Southeast” (Scientific American)
“As Colorado River Dries Up, the West Feels the Pain” (NPR)
“Toxics from Everyday Life Reaching Columbia River” (Seattle Times)

Do we have a problem with how our rivers are managed? Could anyone read these headlines and conclude that everything is okay with our current water policies? I don’t think so. We are all familiar with concepts such as “child abuse” or “spouse abuse.” We need to start thinking in terms of “river abuse,” meaning the unwise, wasteful, and non-sustainable uses of rivers. Many traditional river policies may have made sense a long time ago when they were first formulated, but are now creating disasters. Keep in mind that the problems outlined in the headlines above are not “natural disasters,” but rather a result of short-sighted policies that benefited a few in the short run, but in the long run create enormous problems for our communities, our nation, and the planet.

In River Republic I propose that we fundamentally re-think our relationship to rivers. Today, nearly everyone wants clean, healthy rivers in their community. They want to recreate in or near rivers. They want the wildlife that can only live in the presence of living rivers. And they want their local economy buttressed with tourist dollars. But what we want is not what we got; instead, we diverted, polluted, dried up, or channelized nearly every river in America. In market terms, the demand for healthy rivers far outstrips the supply. If we want to meet current as well as future demand for intact rivers, we will need to restore a lot of rivers. If we fail in our efforts to end “river abuse,” we’ll see a lot more headlines like the ones above.

As part of the Euroscience Open Forum 2012, held recently in Dublin, Herve This, whose book The Science of the Oven is now out in paperback, was on a panel to discuss Science and the Future of Cuisine.

Herve This was joined by President Obama’s Executive Pastry Chef Bill Yosses, and Mark Post (Maastricht University) who has developed a process for growing meat in vitro. Here’s the video of the panel:

We conclude our week-long feature on The Beach Book: Science of the Shore with a post from Carl Hobbs from earlier this year commemorating Earth Day and Mother’s Day.

Earth Day and Mothers’ Day share at least one important characteristic: each is a one-day celebration of something we should honor throughout the year. We should not have to be reminded to acknowledge the Earth or our mothers (or our fathers); we should always be aware of what they do for us and we should thank them frequently. This is easy for me because as a geologist, I work with the Earth every day and think about what it is and why and how it changes. As a marine geologist with a career in the area of coastal geology and coastal geomorphology, I have the luxury of working where the land, the sea, and the atmosphere intersect. This has provided by with a wonderful view of the earth and with many opportunities to think about what I see. For me, every day is Earth Day.

Beaches, barrier islands, and salt marshes are beautiful and complex places. One of my goals is to get others to observe, to take really good looks at, their environments. Carefully looking at a beach and thinking about what is seen – Why does it have the shape it does? How and why has it changed since the last visit? Why is one side of a sand dune steeper than another? – teaches the observer a lot. I wrote The Beach Book to help people interpret the shore.

(more…)