APPRECIATION

Appreciation

A Belated Farewell to a Pioneering Polar Bear Researcher

By Andrew C. Revkin
Linda Gormezano and her scat-sniffing dog, Quinoa, scanning the coast of Hudson Bay a decade ago.
American Museum of Natural History

Dot Earth often had the feel of an accelerating hamster wheel (see posts marked with the fire hose image). But it was a wheel of my own creation, given the broad question I chose to pursue starting back in October, 2007 – how do humans navigate this century with the fewest regrets?

Countless relevant developments and insights slipped by before I could note them, which is why Twitter and Facebook, in the end, became my real web log – my way of assessing, relating and sharing consequential nuggets crossing my screen. (I hope you’ll continue to follow me there; just click on the preceding links.)

Before this blogging adventure ends this weekend, there’s one sad development that I feel compelled to catch up with — the untimely death in August 2015 of Linda J. Gormezano — a tireless Arctic-focused field biologist from the American Museum of Natural History.

I first wrote about Gormezano’s innovative work studying coyote and polar bear populations with the help of her scat-sniffing Dutch shepherd, Quinoa, back in 2007. But I kept track of the important batch of studies she produced in subsequent years, and the healthy debate they had prompted. Her work showed that polar bears, while best known for their life at sea or on sea ice pursuing seals, have been able, at least in some circumstances, to gain significant nutrition on land as well, scarfing down geese and goose eggs, grasses and other fare when sea ice is in retreat.

There have been substantial, sometimes rancorous, debates among polar bear researchers about this predator’s prospects in a warming climate with less summer sea ice.

Robert F. Rockwell, a Museum of Natural History population biologist and ecologist who was one of Gormezano’s mentors since she started at the museum as a grad student, made no secret of his frustration with what he felt was agenda-driven resistance to publishing some of her findings.

After her death (from natural causes unrelated to her work), he persisted at finding a home for her final paper, co-written with him and colleagues Scott R. McWilliams and David T. Iles. The paper was published in September in the journal Conservation Physiology. You can read it here: “Costs of locomotion in polar bears: when do the costs outweigh the benefits of chasing down terrestrial prey?”

Rockwell has posted an inspiring written and pictorial tribute to Gormezano. I hope you’ll click and read and pass it around. He starts out describing her, as a spirited and talented student, as “every professor’s dream.”

In this excerpt, you can read how she quickly became much more than that, steering the museum’s research program in new directions:  Read more…

biology

Remembering a ‘Keystone’ Ecologist, Robert Paine

By Andrew C. Revkin
Marine ecologist Robert T. Paine points to the keystone block of an arch. He conceived of “keystone species” in ecosystems in 1969. Robert Steneck

A few scientists are great theorists. A few do remarkable fieldwork. A few are inspiring teachers.

Very, very few are all of these things. To learn about one who exceeded that triple standard, please read the following appreciation of Robert T. Paine, a pioneering marine ecologist at the University of Washington who died last month at age 83 (New York Times obituary). Paine is best known for patient, creative field studies along the Pacific Coast in the 1960s that revealed how certain starfish species were a “keystone” influence on the shape of the rich marine ecosystems around them. But that’s just a hint of what made him special.

The short essay on Paine comes from Peter Kareiva, who recently became the director of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kareiva is part a broad and deep lineage of conservation biologists and ecologists whose work and world views were deeply shaped by Paine. The lineage also includes Jane Lubchenco, who is best known as the former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration but also a much honored marine environmental scientist at Oregon State University.

Here’s Kareiva’s reflection:  Read more…

Appreciation

Too Soon Gone – Gary Braasch, Visual Chronicler of Climate Change

By Andrew C. Revkin
Gary Braasch, a photographer chronicling climate change, at work in Utah. He died on March 7 on the Great Barrier Reef. Lynne Cherry
Gary Braasch Lynne Cherry

Gary Braasch was a gifted photographer passionately devoted to chronicling climate change. I only met him a handful of times, and always, regrettably, in passing. On Monday, word rapidly spread through environmental circles that he had died at age 70 while snorkeling with a companion near Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The Australian Museum, which runs the Lizard Island Research Station, released a statement indicating that Braasch had been found floating face down and could not be resuscitated.

He was there, of course, to continue building the globe-spanning photographic record he had been creating since he latched onto global warming as his prime subject in the late 1990s. (Watch a 2008 presentation by Braasch and the climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider to get a feel for his work and views.) He mainly pointed his camera at ecosystems and human communities in harm’s way, but sometimes focused on the fossil fuel industry — most notably in capturing the first images of Shell’s (ultimately ill-fated) Arctic oil rig Kulluk as it prepared to drill an exploratory oil well in the Beaufort Sea in 2012.

Gary Braasch took the first photographs of the Shell oil rig Kulluk in the Beaufort Sea as it prepared to drill an exploratory well in October 2012. Gary Braasch

Two of Braasch’s longtime friends and collaborators sent reflections on his life and legacy. Below you can read an appreciation by Joshua Wolfe, a photographer who has developed a variety of media and online projects related to climate change and energy.

But first, here’s Lynne Cherry, an author, illustrator and filmmaker who collaborated many times with Braasch, particularly notably in my favorite book on climate change for younger readers, “How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate.” You can explore some of the book’s beautiful pages here. But of course I recommend you buy a copy.

Here’s Cherry’s eulogy to her friend:
Read more…

Appreciation

Too Soon Gone: Alberto Behar, Who Used Robots and Rubber Ducks to Probe Icy Secrets

By Andrew C. Revkin
Alberto Behar, an engineer who designed devices to probe polar ice, in July, 2012, on the Greenland ice sheet with one of his creations. Laurence C. Smith/UCLA

Updates below | Alberto Behar, a polar researcher who combined a scientist’s deep curiosity with an engineer’s audacious inventiveness, died on Friday when the plane he was flying crashed shortly after he took off from a small airport near his longtime workplace, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Behar, who also taught at Arizona State University and ran the school’s Extreme Environments Robotics and Instrumentation Laboratory, had a passion for creating autonomous craft, sensors or cameras that could probe places no human could ever go — one being down the great roaring watery drain pipes, or moulins, that pepper the Greenland ice sheet in summertime. I wrote about that work in 2008.

Another was the surface of Mars. He was also an investigation scientist for instruments on the Curiosity Rover and Mars Odyssey orbiter. Read more…

Dot Earth

With a Holiday Break, Seeking Issues and Opportunities to Explore in 2015

By Andrew C. Revkin
Andrew C. Revkin

Wherever you are, whatever season it might be there and whatever holidays you celebrate, I’d like to offer my best wishes for a fulfilling and healthy year ahead. I shot the image above shortly after dawn earlier this week just down the road in our new neighborhood. The flurry was brief and the snow is gone.

I am on a very tough deadline on an non-blog writing project, and we’re facing some home-front challenges, so posts here will be sporadic for the next week or two.

Andrew Revkin visited a Russian tourist camp on the sea ice near the North Pole in April, 2003, and met up with someone who claimed to be Father Christmas. Peter West/ NSF

Luckily, the knowledge network around issues I track — from global warming to disaster risk reduction to education innovation to conservation science — is rapidly expanding, offering learners, analysts and practitioners a rich array of go-to hubs for sharing and shaping ideas and expertise.

Even as traditional media outlets, including The New York Times, face disruptive change (we lost more than 100 newsroom employees this year), the “knowosphere” is alive and well.

Please forgive me if comment moderation is spotty.

Post here on issues and opportunities you’d like me to dig in on in 2015.

Appreciation

Gratitude, Woodworking and Music on the Home Front on Thanksgiving

By Andrew C. Revkin
A Hymn for the Hudson Highlands

I spend a lot of time analyzing global climate and energy trends, far-flung conservation efforts, work aimed at improving prospects for the world’s least fortunate and new technologies with promising future applications, the latest being a novel coating, described in Nature, that can in theory cool a building even on sunny days. Much of this screen and road time takes me away from my family, students and home.

So I’m grateful to be hunkered after the first snowfall since we moved into our old brick house in Nelsonville, N.Y., in the Hudson Highlands that I treasure (see my song above).

The components of a sideboard, including a field-sawn hickory plank from a fallen tree. Andrew C. Revkin

The kitchen is radiating turkey aromas, my younger son is sifting jazz offerings on Pandora, siblings and parents are en route for dinner, along with the writer and filmmaker Lynne Cherry.

I plan to spend some analog time Friday in my workshop, building a hickory sideboard to go with the dining table I built a few years ago out of field-sawn hickory planks salvaged from a neighbor’s barn.

As I urged on Twitter, I’m hoping folks will eschew Black Friday consumption mania in favor of making things, when possible:  Read more…

Pete Seeger is Gone, but His Circles of Song Ring On

By Andrew C. Revkin

Pete Seeger spent his life surrounded by circles of song with varying dimensions.

He often created them himself, putting a hand to his ear as a signal that he expected any audience encircling a stage to drown him out.

Beacon, N.Y., his longtime home town, is like the center of a swirling circular galaxy of music these days, most of it written and sung with a better world in mind and most of it inspired in some way by his example.

I was humbled to be among those who were able to pay Pete a visit over the last several days at New York-Presbyterian Hospital as his heart and body failed at age 94. (He died peacefully last night around 9:30 p.m., family members told me; His wife Toshi died last July.)

When I arrived on Monday afternoon, he was at the center of a healing circle of song once again. My friend Steve Stanne, an environmental educator and masterful musician, led in the singing of Bill Staines‘s “River” as the Hudson that Pete for so long worked to restore flowed by, icy and glinting, outside the windows: Read more…

Lester Lave – An Appreciation

By Andrew C. Revkin

David Keith, a University of Calgary researcher focused on carbon, climate and energy technology and policy, sent a note last week alerting me to the death of Lester B. Lave, an environmental economist at Carnegie Mellon University who had been a mentor, colleague and friend of his.

Lave had an extraordinary aptitude for letting data lead the way in considering risks and benefits of activities with impacts on the environment or health. Here’s Lave from 2008, describing the costs of persistent dependence on foreign oil:

I invited Keith to send an appreciation of Lave.  He ended up co-writing the resulting piece with Jay Apt, a colleague of Lave’s at Carnegie Mellon, and Joule Bergerson, who pursued her* doctorate under Lave and (along with Apt) collaborated with Lave on many papers and is now on the faculty at Calgary. Here’s their post, with individual reflections of  each of the three contributors set off in italics: Read more…