Noteworthy

ILL FARES THE PLANET: A soil's eye view of civilization

By Ward Chesworth, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph, Canada
e-mail: wcheswor@uoguelph.ca

A course presented in the framework of the PhD Program "Medio Ambiente e Recursos Naturais" (awarded Quality Mention) of the Departamento de Edafoloxía e Química Agrícola, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 15-28 September, 2009.

Venue: Facultade de Bioloxía. Diane Fossey - Jane Goodall Room (Aula 6)
Date and time: Introductory Lecture, 15 September at 13:00; Subsequent Lectures at 12:00

Abstract

Opulent materialism can only be sustained for a small minority in society - the king and his court, the tyrant and his favourites, the president and his bagmen, that kind of thing. The eighteenth century radical, Tom Paine, believed that the prototype of them all was the thief and his gang. The rest of us aspire to the more modest version of opulence called affluence. The problem is that the most fortunate part of the human population, and that includes Gallegos, has now attained an affluence that approaches historical opulence. The affluence of a North American for example, is roughly the equivalent of 10 to 15 inhabitants of the third world, in terms of lifetime consumption of resources and of generation of waste. All 10 to 15 hope to enjoy our level of luxury someday, and indeed the influential (and deeply flawed) Brundtland report, Our Common Future, of 1987, states its goal to be exactly that. If achieved it would scar the biosphere with an ecological footprint so huge that the downfall of the civilization we currently enjoy would be more or less assured. Ten thousand years of trial and error, reaching back to the earliest civilizations in Southwest Asia, would simply be a failed experiment.

How did we get to this state, and can we avoid disaster? These are the themes of the course.

Outline and programe of lectures, e-materials coming soon!

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About the TOOLSCAPE

Everything is possible… your imagination is the limit. Vincent Massol answering about XWiki

The loss of digital information meaning also the loss of knowledge and maybe the loss of a part of our history will be one of the challenge in the future Pascal Voitot discussing about XWiki

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If we can interpret the present and read the past, we can accept the challenge of the future

Present environment can be considered as a dynamic system of emergent complexity, product of the many interactions -feedbacks, couplings, perturbations, inductions, metachronicities,… - stablished amongst its constituent parts -basically the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the biosphere; playing humans an increasing role among biota. So have to be considered past environments or palaeoenvironments. This complexity demands an integrated, interdisciplinary view of reasearch in both cases.

Present environment, although diverse, is a readily accessible continuum. Many of its properties can be assesed by scientific research obtaining a good idea of processes and products. The interpretation of past environments depends on a detailed knowledge of present environment (principle of uniformitarianism). The present shows us how to read the record of past environmental change.

Past environments are not directly accessible and their remains are discontinuous. To reconstruct them the object of analysis is the archive, a superficial formation (lake or ocean sediment, accumulation of peat, glacier ice, and others) that contains a record of environmental changes. The change itself leaves signals in the archive -structural, textural, mineralogical, biological, and chemical signals for example- which we attempt to interpret. In this sense, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction tries to make the intinerary from present observed properties of the archives to stablish the processes related to their genesis and from those to uncover the past environments that governed them.

Natural archives are thus the memory of the geosystem. Nevertheless, we have to be aware of the fact that progressive and regressive pathways are both likely to have ocurred, so information was sometimes stored and sometimes deleted from the archives. In fact, the further we go back in time the less information can be recovered. It is also important to remind that reconstruction is always partial, as it is impossible to obtain clues of all the complexities, and even some past environments may have had conditions which are not comparable to any present environment.

Even with these constrains, reconstructions provide a huge database of the evolution of the ecosystems. Under ideal circumstances the database of past environments would help us to know the range of different status showed by a given ecosystem through time and the factors, natural and/or anthropogenic, implicated in its changes. It is this background evolution the framework within which to evaluate present environment. The equation quotes to: the present shows us the processes and the products, the past shows us the evolution. Both knowledges have to be integrated for a proper understanding and to put present changes into perspective.

We keep moving the old wiki environment to this new XWiki system. Please, if your account is not accepted here or you don't find what you are looking, visit the former MediaWiki installation or contact Your EPEC Network ICT Team. Thanks!

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XWiki Newsletter

Read the newest information about XWiki company, products, services, activities? by subscribing to its newsletter (2009, in French).

Here you have it available on line:

http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/News/Newsletter

Wrapping up 2009 & Kicking off 2010

Directly from Slideshare!

We all hope you had a wonderful 2009 and wanted to make sure you hit the ground running in 2010. To help you out, we've compiled a list of SlideShare Must-Reads for 2010

Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be insanely great ...

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dies

By ANGELA DOLAND (from Associated Press at Yahoo! News)

PARIS ? Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100. ...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091103/ap_on_en_ot/eu_obit_france_levi_strauss ...

Writing semantic markup: Robots to the rescue!

Some very smart people think that the next big leap in web technology will be on the foundation of the Semantic Web. However, some other very smart people are raising concerns that this semantic utopia may be unattainable.

An old blog entry, posted January 2003!

Vote for XWiki!!!

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