Monday, May 2, 2016

2304. Dredging of Miami Port Badly Damaged Coral Reef, Study Finds

By Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times, May 1, 2016 
Coral killed by sediments from dredging of Miami port.
MIAMI — The large-scale dredging of Miami’s port to accommodate the newest generation of freighters, an undertaking that prompted a long-running battle with environmentalists, caused widespread damage to a portion of the area’s fragile and already distressed coral reef, according to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The report, based on a December survey undertaken by scientists for the agency’s National Marine Fisheries Service, found that as much as 81 percent of the reef near the dredging site was buried in sediment, and an Army Corps of Engineers contractor report from August shows up to 93 percent partial coral death because of sediment, despite a plan by the Corps to minimize the damage.

The damage is particularly alarming because the world is rapidly losing its reefs, partly because of global warming, experts say.

South Florida has the only coral reef in the continental United States and 80 to 90 percent of it has died or been badly harmed over the years, officials say. The causes include ocean temperatures that have dipped too low or risen too high, acidification, sewage and pollution. Several cycles of white plague disease, including one in 2014 that coincided with the dredge, have also badly hurt South Florida’s reef. White plague, a virus that bleaches and kills coral, has been destroying reefs around the world.

“This Florida reef is as important to our country as the sequoias of California, and we are losing it faster than we can figure out why,” said Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, a nonprofit environmental organization that has sued the Army Corps of Engineers over coral damage. “There are a lot of stressors that are impacting and killing coral reefs, but this is a hyper-local example of something we could easily have prevented.”

The agency’s analysis, obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a December report by the corps, which primarily blamed white plague for the coral damage on reef sections near the dredge. In the corps’s report, scientists said that white plague was responsible for 85 percent of the coral deaths in the upper and middle parts of the reef and in the control site, and for 18.3 percent of the deaths of coral closer to shore. The report failed to highlight that 93 percent of the corals closer to the dredge had partially died because of sediment, compared with 7 percent at sites farther away, Ms. Silverstein said.

Scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disagreed with the corps’s emphasis on white plague disease. Rather, they concluded that the majority of the reef, stretching beyond 3,000 feet, showed conclusive damage to corals by dredging sediment.

The agency’s survey of the extensive damage comes at a time when Fort Lauderdale is seeking final congressional approval for the dredging of its own port, Port Everglades, one of the largest in the country. The dredging project to deepen the port cleared a crucial Senate committee last week as part of a larger water bill and is headed for the Senate floor. Coral reefs are critical to South Florida because they help lessen the damage from hurricanes, are important to marine biodiversity and lure tourists.

Environmentalists have warned Congress and the state that the corps’s plan to lessen the damage to corals in that area is flawed because it does not take into account new information, much of it bolstered by state and county scientists, about the extent of the coral damage from the port of Miami’s dredge. Expansion of Port Everglades is expected to begin next year.

The corps is still working on a final assessment of the Miami dredge’s effects on the coral, said Susan J. Jackson, a spokeswoman for the agency. Scientists will conduct dives this summer and then analyze their findings in the fall, she added.

“The results of the assessment will aid us in determining whether any additional mitigation may be needed,” she said. As for Port Everglades, Ms. Jackson said in an email that “lessons learned from all dredging projects are important, and we’re taking them into consideration during this process.”

Ms. Jackson added that the corps’s plan to protect the coral near Port Everglades was already an improvement over the Miami strategy. The new plan includes planting 103,000 new nursery-raised corals across 18 acres of reef and relocating existing coral to another five acres.

“We are confident in the extensive work we have done,” Ms. Jackson said.
But environmentalists said the plan failed to take into account how much farther than anticipated the sediment spread from the dredge site in Miami, a crucial element. The sediment suffocates coral. They want to see the impact zone extended beyond about 3,000 feet from the site. The Port Everglades plan also relies on a six-year-old survey of staghorn coral, which is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The vast majority of staghorn near the Miami dredge site was never relocated by the corps. Either it was missed in 2010 by contractors during the initial survey of the area, or the staghorn reproduced later. The corps ultimately agreed to rescue the remaining staghorn after a legal fight with Miami Waterkeeper and other groups.

It also relocated 924 nonendangered corals. In addition, underwater monitors to measure the sediment failed to work, so the corps relied solely on divers to keep tabs on the coral.

This time around, the Waterkeeper group is trying to set up independent monitoring of the coral before dredging begins to keep close track of possible damage.

“The corps like to say they learned a lot of lessons, and they promise they won’t do this again in Port Everglades,” Ms. Silverstein said. “We would like to see less aspirational talk and more mandatory language protecting these reefs.”
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Sunday, May 1, 2016

2303. A Political Marxist: Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016

By Ken Hircschkop, Radical Philosophy, May-June 2016

I have a vivid memory – too vivid to be an accident – of the first time I read something written by Ellen Meiksins Wood. It was an article in New Left Review on the separation of the economic from the political; it was, of course, polemical. I didn’t know the context of the polemic or understand the significance of Ellen’s robust defence of ‘political Marxism’. But I knew this was something distinctive: a sophisticated argument, laid out in language that was lucid and direct and in a tone to which the term ‘uncompromising’ does faint justice. It was a vibrant but careful, ambitious yet historically nuanced kind of Marxism. 

When, a few years later, I met the author behind the fierce words I was, like many others, surprised and delighted. Could the extraordinarily charming, warm and chatty woman across from me on the Chesterfield-to-London train be reconciled with the take-no-prisoners author of such fierce polemic? This was the paradox of Ellen Meiksins Wood, or, rather, her achievement: a loving person who flourished in concert with others, and could do so even as she articulated, in person or in print, the sharpest of arguments. It was a blend that won her the loyal, adoring friendship of many people over a long and successful life. In her final years she boasted of the political double act she took on the road, in which she argued the cause of Marxism head-to-head against a leading social democrat: her loving and beloved husband Ed Broadbent.

Ellen was born in New York City in 1942. Her parents were Latvian Jews and active Bundists, who had left their home in dramatic circumstances in the late 1930s. After her parents’ divorce and the end of the war, she went to Germany with her mother, who, on assignment from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, was working with displaced persons. Her earliest experiences were thus coloured by both the leftist commitments of her family and the Left’s response to the tragedies wrought by fascism and the war. 

The young Ellen Meiksins then became, of all things, a Californian teenager. When her mother’s work was completed, they moved to Los Angeles, where Ellen attended Beverley Hills High School, returning occasionally to New York to visit her father and stepbrothers, Peter and Robert. Her first degree, in Slavic languages and literature, was taken at Berkeley and it was followed by postgraduate work in political theory at UCLA, where she met her first husband, Neal Wood. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘The Epistemological Foundations of Individualism’, was published in revised form as a book in 1972. 

In 1967 Ellen and Neal moved to Toronto to take up posts at York University, a relatively new institution, which, like its Robbins-inspired kin in the UK, was self-consciously modern in its structure and its commitments. It would be Ellen’s institutional home for her entire career, becoming, in her own words, ‘the most Marxist department in North America’. Her commitment to what she would later call ‘the social history of political thought’ would find an ideal home in the graduate program in Social and Political Thought that she and Neal helped found in 1973. There she would educate and inspire a generation of political theorists and critics. 

What being ‘a Marxist’ meant in this period was, however, a matter of intense dispute: the breakdown of Stalinism, the rise of Eurocommunism, the re-emergence of Trotskyist and Maoist parties and the gradual strengthening of the new social movements led to intense debate within Marxism over both core principles and political strategy. In this climate, Ellen seemed to feel the greatest affinity with the generation for whom the war and the struggle with fascism were political crucibles, the ‘Old New Left’, as it was latter dubbed, which had broken with Stalinism but still regarded the working class as the irreplaceable agent of revolutionary change. They had first organized around the New Reasoner – now they wrote for the Socialist Register, to which Ellen became a steady contributor.

The prominence of historians within this group (Edward Thompson and John Saville among others) was probably decisive. Ellen’s version of historical materialism would consistently tilt against those who interpreted Marxism as either a theoretical science (the Althusserians, with their talk of levels and structures) or Kulturphilosophie. For her it was first and foremost a historical account of the emergence and working of capitalism, articulating not immutable laws of historical development but the particular and in some sense contingent circumstances and processes that brought capitalism into being. In a revealing aside, she once claimed that there was no explicit theoretical account of her kind of Marxism available, but that ‘something like it is implicit in the works of certain Marxist historians’. These affinities and the personal friendships they fostered would eventually draw her into the orbit of the British New Left. In 1983 she joined the editorial board of New Left Review, on which she would serve until 1993, and in the 1980s she and Neal began spending roughly half their time in London, eventually settling in Primrose Hill a few doors down from their friends Ralph Miliband and Marion Kozak. 

While dividing her time between Canada and England, Ellen waged an intellectual campaign on two fronts. The first, which took shape in articles for The Socialist Register and New Left Review, and in a series of increasingly ambitious and influential books, was an argument for the centrality of Marxism in general and for her understanding of it in particular, polemically aimed at those who wanted to dissolve its analysis in the warm bath of post-Marxism and the new social movements. In books like The Retreat from Class (which won her an international following and the Isaac Deutscher Prize) and Democracy Against Capitalism Ellen insisted that the analysis of capitalism remained the central task of socialist intellectuals and that this analysis had to attend, above all, to the political struggles around property and the control of production that were central to the labour movement. Marxism lost its way when it split the political off from the economic, for then the economy became a system with an internal logic (which might, or might not, lead to crises) and political action assumed a culturalist and voluntarist character. The labour movement was the key to the revolutionary enterprise – if it couldn’t make the running, no one could. 

Compared to most of the left political theory of the time, this looked fairly orthodox. But Ellen had done more than make a fresh case for an established position. By insisting that political relationships, embodied in forms of property, were the central fact of capitalism, she illuminated the interdependence between the capitalist state and the market relations it had to enforce. More importantly, Ellen’s work broke the spell that captivated so much of the Left: the association of capitalism with ‘modernity’, with cities, with their bourgeois denizens and with industry. Capitalism was not originally the creature of cities, of expanding trade, or even wage-labour, she argued. It had depended first and foremost on the destruction of customary practices in peasant life, on the conversion of agricultural land into wholly private property, and on the forceful establishment of market dependency throughout the countryside of England. England, not France. And England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the England of the satanic mills. 

The second front of Ellen’s work was an ambitious ‘social history’ of European political thought, on which she worked at first with Neal and then continued solo after his death. With Neal she published A Trumpet of Sedition, which examined political theory in Britain in those two decisive centuries; later Citizens to Lords and Liberty and Property would cover, in one grand sweep, political thought from Greek antiquity to the Enlightenment. The narrative sweep was meant to highlight the moments of decisive transformation, when ‘parcellized sovereignty’ was replaced by the total, coercive power of the modern state and the web of feudal obligation was twisted into the tight, focused bond of private property. It was no accident that John Locke was the key figure for Ellen or that she thought of early modern political theory as her intellectual centre. For it was there that the decisive relationship between state power and capitalist property had been forged.

When the socialist Left lost sight of this relationship, or even abandoned it, the result was an unwitting naturalization of capitalism, which appeared as the simple, perhaps inevitable, outgrowth of modern urban life, or the expansion of trade, or technological advance. It was, Ellen insisted, none of these things. Focusing on that exceptional moment in the history of English society – the moment of peasant dispossession, enclosure and agricultural ‘improvement’ – would ensure we understood capitalism as the product of particular historical circumstances, a configuration of land, people and power that had violently remade England, and would violently remake other lands, European and colonial, in the centuries that followed. Its violent, catastrophic origins, summarized in her 2002 book The Origin of Capitalism, would be echoed in the political violence of world war and fascism in the twentieth century. At both moments, political Marxism stressed the historical specificity of capitalism and thus the possibility of its overcoming.

This illuminating vision and the lucid, engaging style in which it was articulated made Ellen an important figure internationally. Although her sympathies with, and similarities to, other intellectuals of the Left – Robert Brenner, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff in America; Edward Thompson and Ralph Miliband in England – were marked and important, in many ways she always seemed a one-off, a unique voice. That she was a woman in this male-dominated world was obviously a major factor. After Neal’s death in 2003 she continued to write. Her book Empire of Capital set contemporary imperialism in the kind of comparative historical context that had done so much to sharpen her account of political theory and capitalism’s origins. 

Six years before her death Ellen became close to Ed Broadbent, an iconic figure of the Canadian Left and the leader of the New Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s. They married in 2014. In January of this year Ellen succumbed to the cancer which she had fought against, with impressive calm, many years before. The Left has lost one of its most distinctive voices. Distinctive not just in what Ellen had to say, but in its impassioned calm, a seriousness that lacked all pretention and any trace of meanness.
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2302. Can the Climate Movement Break Free From the 'Jobs vs. Environment' Debate?

By Kate Aronoff, Common Dreams, April 30, 2016


For two weeks this May, organizers across 12 countries will participate in Break Free 2016, an open-source invitation to encourage “more action to keep fossil fuels in the ground and an acceleration in the just transition to 100 percent renewable energy.” Many of the month’s events — pulled together by 350.org and a slew of groups around the world — are set to take place within ongoing campaigns to shut down energy infrastructure, targeting “some of the most iconic and dangerous fossil fuel projects all over the world” with civil disobedience.

The Break Free site’s opening page invites viewers to “join a global wave of resistance to keep coal, oil and natural gas in the ground.” And that’s where some unions have taken issue.

The United Steelworkers, or USW, this week released a response. “Short-sighted and narrow-focused activities like 350.org’s ‘Break Free’ actions,” they write, “make it much more challenging to work together to create and envision a clean energy economy.” Three of the locations targeted — in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Washington — are USW-represented refineries. The union argues that, despite record growth in renewables, the economy will continue to be reliant on fossil fuels for some time. “Shutting down a handful of refineries in the United States,” they say, “would lead to massive job loss in refinery communities, increased imports of refined oil products, and ultimately no impact on global carbon emissions.” Rather, refineries and their workers should be brought into the clean energy economy.

The statement ends arguing that, “We can’t choose between good jobs or a healthy environment. If we don’t have both, we’ll have neither.” In more familiar terms, Breaking Free — for the USW — sounds like a case of jobs versus the environment.

While similar releases are standard fare for other unions, the 30,000-member USW is one of the country’s most progressive — even when it comes to environmental issues.

“People assume that because we’re an industrial union that our leadership doesn’t care about the environment,” Roxanne Brown told me. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Brown is the assistant legislative director at USW, and emphasized the union’s long history of work on environmental issues. The USW hosted a conference in support of air pollutant regulations in the late 1960s, early on rejecting the kind of weaponized jobs versus environment rhetoric that has cropped up around the Keystone XL pipeline and other extraction fights.

In 1967, former president I.W. Abel said that, “We refuse to be the buffer between positive pollution control activity by the community and resistance by industry,” and advocated for unions to play a strong role in determining environmental regulations.

“If you do not participate, the standards may well be determined not by the breathers of air in the community, but by those who have a vested interest in the industrial facilities,” he added.

Just last spring, the USW enlisted the support of green groups in their six-week, nationwide strike, each arguing that unsafe refineries posed a threat to workers and communities alike. “The workers are like canaries in the mine,” USW spokeswoman Lynn Hancock told me last year. “They can see what’s going on and what happens before something tragic happens.” Groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Communities for a Better Environment and even Divest London turned out to support on both sides of the Atlantic.

Where unions and greens coalesced around confronting rampant workplace safety issues in refineries — the kind that caused disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010 — the former see cutting off fossil fuel supplies as an existential threat. Brown didn’t have any illusions about the fact that coal, oil and natural gas would be phased out eventually. Unlike Break Free groups, though, she thinks the government should provide incentives and investments in R&D to make sure they’re used in “the cleanest and most efficient ways possible.”

As recent studies find that some 82 percent of fossil fuels must remain buried to avert catastrophic global warming, keeping them in the ground doesn’t sound like such a radical demand. To meet the dangerously modest 2 degree Celsius goal outlined in the Paris Agreement signed last week, it’s a bare minimum. The issue, in this case, may not be that Break Free is too ambitious in its anti-extraction plans. It may not be ambitious enough — either in the scale at which it plans to shut down the industry or how it plans to transition over to an economy not fueled by coal, oil and natural gas.

Of course, there’s no mandate on any one initiative to arrive at a fully-formed program for a just transition off fossil fuels. But organizers may do well to see bringing unions like the USW to the table as a strategic boon, not by giving up on calls to keep fossil fuels in the ground, but by working with unions on fleshed-out plans for phasing them out entirely.

“The just transition message loses a lot of its strength if you’re not thinking about how to make those jobs on the other end high-road and high-wage,” Brown said. The vast majority of the renewables and manufacturing jobs are non-unionized, and the patchwork, “boom and bust” nature of incentives offered to solar and wind turbine companies means that jobs in the industry can leave nearly as quickly as they come.

In 2013, the USW worked with the governor’s office in Pennsylvania to attract Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa to the state, on the grounds that the facility would employ steelworkers. The steel being used to make the blades produced at the Fairless Hills site, moreover, came from USW shops in Illinois and Indiana.

“It was so beautiful to see this whole supply chain come together to make this final product by the clean energy sector made by steelworkers,” Brown told me. But once a federal tax incentive for wind power (the Production Tax Credit) expired, the company left the state and put over a thousand union workers out of a job.

The USW and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers have each attempted to organize the renewables sector, but faced pushback from companies. There have been, according to Brown, “Very real attempts to deter organizing campaigns. They engage in the same practices that traditional manufacturing facilities engage in. They hire the same anti-union consultants to come in and keep the union out.”

Organized labor, on the defensive in the United States after 40-plus years of neoliberal assault, is understandably shy about saying no to any projects which could provide jobs for their members; just over 11 percent of U.S. workers are represented by unions. But as oil markets face an uncertain future, “the end of oil as we know it” will hit fossil fuel workers — not executives — first. With the fossil fuel industry and union density each crumbling, convincing labor to let go of a largely unionized industry will be an uphill battle.

Still, labor is no monolith. There are sharp divides among unions over the climate and the future of fossil fuels. There are also plenty of potential allies. Some unions, mainly in the building trades, have poured money and staff time into stopping green group’s efforts. Others have waded more cautiously, signing onto events like the 2014 People’s Climate March on the strict condition that it not take a stand on infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL. Unions like National Nurses United and the Communications Workers of America, on the other hand, have been outspoken about their support for the climate fight. And projects like the Labor Network for Sustainability and Trade Unions for Energy Democracy — a coalition of international unions — outline and argue for a holistic transition away from fossil fuels.

A unionized renewables sector is just one piece of building a just and low-carbon economy, to be complemented by retraining programs and a bolstered public sphere with funding for such things as public housing and universal childcare. Proposals like the Leap Manifesto in Canada, Britain’s One Million Climate Jobs campaign and National People’s Action’s “Long-Term Agenda to the New Economy” here in the states all present promising models, both for a transition plan and cross-movement organizing efforts with buy-in from unions and environmentalists alike.

A growing, green industry born of the United States’ hostile labor climate is unlikely to produce steady and well-paying jobs without a fight — not to mention a cross-movement plan beyond shutting down individual infrastructure projects. Breaking Free from fossil fuels can also mean breaking into a more sustainable economy.

 Kate Aronoff is an organizer and freelance journalist based in Philadelphia, PA. While in school, she worked extensively with the fossil fuel divestment movement on the local and national level, co-founding Swarthmore Mountain Justice and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network (DSN). She is currently working to build a student power network across Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @katearonoff
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2301. ‘Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?’ and ‘The Genius of Birds’

By Jon Mooallem, The New York Times, April 26, 2016
Effie, a western lowland gorilla in London in 2010, shortly after the death of a companion.Photo: Ruaridh Connellan/Barcroft Media — Getty Images

It used to happen every day at the London Zoo: Out came the dainty table and chairs, the china cups and saucers — ­afternoon tea, set out for the inhabitants of the ape enclosure to throw and smash. It was supposed to be amusing — a ­comic, reckless collision of beasts and high ­culture. But, as Frans de Waal explains in “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?,” apes are actually innovative, agile tool-users. For example — one of many examples — wild chimps in ­Gabon have been observed employing five different tools, in a methodical sequence, to break open beehives, pry the chambers apart, scoop out the honey and convey it to their mouths. Not surprisingly — to de Waal, at least — the apes in London quickly mastered the teacups and teapot too. They sat there civilly, having tea.

“When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be done,” de Waal writes. “The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food around, drink from the teapot’s spout,” and so on. The animals had to be taught to be as stupid as we assumed they were. But, of course, the fact that they could be taught to be stupid is only more perverse evidence of their intelligence.

For centuries, our understanding of animal intelligence has been obscured in just this kind of cloud of false assumptions and human egotism. De Waal, a primatologist and ethologist who has been examining the fuzzy boundary between our species and others for 30 years, painstakingly untangles the confusion, then walks us through research revealing what a wide range of animal species are actually capable of. Tool use, cooperation, awareness of individual identity, theory of mind, planning, metacognition and perceptions of time — we now know that all these archetypically human, cognitive feats are performed by some animals as well. And not just primates: By the middle of ­Chapter 6, we’re reading about cooperation among leopard coral trout. (The book’s main weakness is that de Waal has too much evidence, from too many corners of the animal kingdom, to convince us with; eventually, it feels a little repetitive — we’re not at all surprised that the bonobo knows to look in the stupid tube for the piece of food.)
Frankly, it all deals a pretty fierce wallop to our sense of specialness. And it can provoke some desperate resistance. De Waal quotes one American psychologist, insistently holding the line of our humanness at our ability, even as children, to work together toward a shared goal: “It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together,” the psychologist says. But then, 25 apes at a Dutch zoo prop a tree trunk against the wall of their enclosure, climb out and raid the restaurant. What is true, it becomes clear, is that you’ll never see animals doing such intelligent things if you smugly refuse to look for them, or — and this is de Waal’s real point — if you don’t know how to look.

De Waal argues that we should attempt to understand a species’ intelligence only within its own context, or umwelt: the animal’s “self-centered subjective world, which represents only a small tranche of all available worlds.” There are many different forms of intelligence; each should be valuated only relative to its environment. “It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to 10 if counting is not really what a squirrel’s life is about,” de Waal writes. (A squirrel’s life is about remembering where it stored its nuts; its intelligence is geospatial intelligence.) And yet, there’s apparently a long history of scientists ignoring this truth. For example, they’ve investigated chimpanzees’ ability to recognize faces by testing whether the chimps can recognize human faces, instead of faces of other chimps. (They do the former poorly and the latter quite well.) They’ve performed the ­famous mirror test — to gauge whether an animal recognizes the figure in a mirror as itself — on elephants using a too-small, human-size mirror. Such blind spots are, ultimately, a failure of empathy — a failure to imagine the experiment, or the form of intelligence it’s testing for, through the animal’s eyes. De Waal compares it to “throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool” and seeing who can swim.

We sometimes fall into what de Waal calls “neo-creationist” thinking: We accept evolution but assume “evolution stopped at the human head” — believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their own miraculous and discrete inventions. But cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; it exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into absolutely alien-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of “cognitive ripples”: We tend to notice intelligence in primates because it’s most conspicuous. It looks the most like our intelligence. But “after the apes break down the dam between the humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, the floodgates often open to include species after species.”

And that brings us to bird smarts, and the science journalist Jennifer Ackerman’s lovely, celebratory survey, “The ­Genius of Birds.”

Somehow, it’s hard to imagine these cognitive ripples rippling anywhere weirder than a bird. Look closely at one: how it chirps and twitches and flies. It’s chastening to imagine a comprehensible intelligence operating inside a body so different from ours. And then there’s the issue of scale: There are as many as 400 billion birds flitting around the planet; pondering their individual, perspicacious consciousnesses can be jaw-dropping, almost sublime. But, Ackerman writes, “One by one, the bellwether differences between birds and our closest primate relatives seem to be falling away.”

Ackerman writes about birds’ genius for wayfinding; their memories; the ­neuro-scientific overlap of bird song and human language; avian architecture (a bird called the long-tailed tit builds a nest out of “roughly 6,000 pieces”); their canny, sophisticated social intelligence, their social learning and the evidence of their empathy. She goes to New Caledonia, an island between Australia and Fiji, where “free from the burden of vigilance” — against predators — a race of crows can futz and experiment with the materials around them until they’ve fashioned all kinds of hooklike, food-procuring tools. They’re like Silicon Valley start-up ­founders, aimlessly tinkering and disrupting on a cushion of privilege.

Like de Waal, Ackerman wants us to “appreciate the complex cognitive abilities of birds in their own right and not because they look like some aspect of our own.” Scientists see innovation as a key measure of intelligence in the avian world: the sparrow that builds its nest in the tailpipe of an abandoned Toyota; the bullfinches in Barbados, which Ackerman discovers have learned to snatch the sugar packets from outdoor cafes as though snagging worms from dirt — these are small exertions of “genius,” Ackerman writes, a talent for “catching on” to your surroundings and exploiting them. And for all the belittling of “bird brains,” she shows them to be uniquely impressive machines within their own evolutionary contexts — unrecognizably so to science, at first, because, though they have equally high concentrations of neurons, they’re quite differently designed from our primate brains. (And, Ackerman explains, that’s because bird brains are dinosaur brains! Really!) Here’s one scientist’s Zen-like distillation: “There’s the mammal way. And there’s the bird way” — two distinct cognitive operating systems, honed through convergent evolution.

The science gets mind-bending. If you want sentences like “Not only could the pigeons pick out a new Monet or Picasso, they could also tell other Impressionists (Renoir, for instance) from other Cubists (such as Braque),” then this is the book for you. And it’s elevated by Ackerman’s prose — the joy she takes in thinking and noticing. She homes in on “the taut, quick vitality that seems almost too much for their tiny bodies to contain” and describes a flock of 400 birds changing direction midflight as “almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to be one living curtain of bird.”

Often, you feel her wonderment, faintly recognizing another, strange intelligence covertly operating in a world we presume to be ours: the one pecking at our muffin crumbs, the quick specks in the sky.
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2300. Summary and Index to the Last 99 Posts

By Kamran Nayeri, May 1, 2016
Assistant Editor, Latte.

The key topics covered in the last 99 posts were the Cuban revolution/Cuba (15 posts), global warming/climate change (14 posts), socialism, ecological socialism (including ecology and environmental issues discussed) (13 posts), and science (11 posts).  Other notable topics cover were food and water (7 posts), animals and animal welfare (6 posts), species extinction (4 posts). There were two poems posted.

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