A personal word: many years ago, when we were first developing the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum, we struggled with the issue of how to end the perma-nent exhibit. We had come up with an appropriate beginning that would serve thefunction of taking visitors off the National Mall, taking them back what was thenfifty years in time, moving them a continent away and introducing them to a Eu…
April 2020. It had begun as little more than a flicker on a news feed, a tiny spark in a media agenda that was already crackling with the electric charge of a world increasingly divided. But as the Covid-19 crisis began to take hold, with every new outbreak confirming its deadly horror, two opposing phenomena very quickly began to emerge. The first was a kind of global solidarity in…
The global Living Planet Index continues to decline. It shows anaverage 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016. A 94% decline in the LPI for the tropical subregions of the Americas is the largest fall observed in any part of the world. Why does this matter? It matters because biodiversity is fundamental to human life on Earth, and…
he nature of emotions was generally criticized in the Western tradition of philosophy. This criticism of the emotional part of human nature and experience is known to have its root in the mainstream Platonic tradition. In other words, it has championed rationality/reason against emotional-ity/emotion, especially from certain scholarly standpoints. The Western dualism of reaso…
Without more rigorous measurement of effectiveness and disciplined recording of our efforts, how will we know if we are progressing as rapidly as needed to achieve our conservation goals? How will we become more efficient? How will we learn from one another? And how will we be able to demonstrate our achievements and build the public and political will needed to expand our resources and meet th…
f you choose not to read this and move straight on to In Homage to Darwin, we will not be offended. The story, however, of how two scientific dinosaurs came to cooperate in writing about their shared world view, gleaned from a combined total of more than 150 years of independent study of biology, needs, we feel, some explanation.Any two biologists can b…
If you are ever in Brooklyn, that borough of superb sunsets and magnificent vistas of husband-propelled baby-carriages, it is to be hoped you may chance upon a quiet by-street where there is a very remarkable bookshop. This bookshop, which does business under the unusual name "Parnassus at Home," is housed in one of the comfortable old brown-stone dwellings which have been the joy of seve…