Lessons of Leonardo

Picture of Slave Castle in Cape Coast

This last Christmas I had an opportunity to visit my family currently living in Accra, Ghana. While there we had the sobering opportunity to visit a slave castle located in the city of Cape Coast. This year, 2019, marks 400 years since the first slaves were forcibly removed from Western Africa and transported to the United States of America. Coincidentally, this year also marks 500 years since the death of Leonardo Da Vinci. Now, I know that the events surrounding those two dates are not correlated in any way, but I started thinking about what messages did Da Vinci try to share in his lifetime that were not understood not only 100 years after his death but also 500 years after his death - today? 

Da Vinci was widely known for his intrepid experiments in engineering, but he also preached the need to create structures that complement the environment around us, as opposed to ones that impede the world. Also, as a true humanist, he desired the betterment of his fellow men and detested unnecessary suffering. In his painting, "The Last Supper" you see the emotion on the faces of each apostle, and their value as humans is communicated through the unique emotions.

East Coast of Atlantic Ocean 

There are still many in the world who do not understand what Da Vinci understood. Needless suffering, abuse, human trafficking, and slavery are still running rampant in the world. The need to protect the environment and work with the environment is lost on seemingly all governments. As I sat at the foot of the slave castle looking out into the Atlantic Ocean I saw mounds of garbage and plastic floating near the shore.

It struck me that one lesson was lost in this very spot several hundred years ago - the value of the human soul and that another important lesson is being lost - the value of the world we live in. If we each took the time to be just a little more learned about a few more things, could we leave a better world than we found?

Leonardo Da Vinci is the ultimate example of the "Renaissance Man". As more people seek a greater breadth of understanding of the world around us, as he did, we can all better embrace ideas that were realized by him more than 500 years ago. By doing so we can avoid mistakes both 400 years old, and those unique to our time.

Shooting Elephants and the Rhetoric of Climate Change

By: Peter Cable

When rhetoric pushes us into action on climate change, we can make the problem drastically worse 

In the 1950's Africa, land degradation was a huge problem. One ecologist, Alan Savory argued that elephants were trampling down the grass and destroying their own environment. His radical claims  led to the killing of 40,000 elephants. Of Course this did not heal the land, and he now calls this one of his "biggest blunders"(Sullivan).

Desertification in the Sahel

Because of the alarm at land degradation, and the urgency of Savory's arguments, the government acted on too little evidence and created a worse situation. Global warming, like desertification is currently a major problem.
The United Nations recently released a report on climate, warning of impending storms and major destruction. The problem is clear, but the solutions have not been studied enough. The fiery rhetoric around climate change leads to quick ineffective policies, instead of long-term solutions like nuclear power.

The History of Climate Science: As Old as Thought

It's human nature to consider the world around us. In ancient Greece, Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, conjectured that draining marshlands made those areas more susceptible to freezing, and that deforestation would result in those areas getting warmer. Vitruvius could be considered one of the first to draft an environmental impact report in the first century B.C. when he wrote about climate in relation to architecture and where to build new cities.

Glacial Ice

People's understanding of climate and the way it changes has been developing for years. In the Enlightenment era, people began to understand how ancient climate systems could have effected modern conditions, including the idea that glaciers could have existed previously where they currently didn't. Geologists discovered evidence of different geological ages, and evidence was accepted that there had been "Ice Ages".

In the late 19th century, around the time of industrialization, scientists began to suspect that human actions had some impact on the environment around them. Evidence accumulated for decades until finally, in the 1950's, better instrumentation allowed for more conclusive data that indicated that CO2 emissions were, in fact, causing an increase in the amount of infrared radiation reflected by the atmosphere. In other words, the world was getting warmer, and we were a factor in that.

This history is important to me. Climate science is not a new invention. It's not a scare tactic fabricated by scientists in order to get themselves more funding. It's a discipline that has been growing and evolving for literal centuries. Just as all science does, it has changed. The cutting edge and major concerns of the field have shifted. It's become more prominent as the discoveries and findings have become more dramatic, but the climate science we see today is just the latest version of an age old tradition.

Hot Spots in Ecology

• Invasive Species:

Burmese pythons are capable of reaching 23 ft.
in length and weighing up to 200lbs. Some of
them get to be as thick as telephone poles.

One of the hazards of living in a global community is the inadvertent exchange of organisms. Invasive species are not a new problem. They've been an issue since ships started sailing to new waters and bringing back foreign mussels. The fact remains, however, that allowing an organism to enter an environment where it doesn't have any natural predators upends the native ecosystem. This has been a problem for a long time in the Everglades with the Burmese python, but it looks like thing might be getting worse. No one knows how to stop them, and no one knows how much they'll affect the ecosystem. See: Giant hybrid pythons in Florida

• Conservation:

Photo by Michael LaRosa on Unsplash

Ecosystems all over the world have been disrupted by human development. Some of them irreparably so, but others can be salvaged. The mission of many ecologists is to preserve as much as possible and to restore what they can. "Rewilding" natural predators is a technique being used with marginal success in Yellowstone National park, where the reintroduction of the gray wolf has resulted in an ecological rebirth for the area. Adding large predators back into their native ecosystems has its problems- it causes tension with their human neighbors, and in most cases, the animals are unable to re-adapt to the wild. See: 'Rewilding' Missing Carnivores

• Climate Change:

Possibly the hottest topic of them all, climate change is hotly debated in this country, the split between believers and unbelievers often mimicking party lines. If our actions are effecting the environment, then we need to act fast and act now. If not, there's nothing to worry about. But there is something to worry about. The vast majority of ecologists and climate scientists agree that uncharacteristic changes are happening at alarming and unnatural rates, and we are the driving cause of that. If concern for the climate wasn't politicized, it would be so much easier to try to save a dying world. See: Trump's EPA chief on the Climate Report

This last one is the most concerning for me. All of the data that I have come across is clear, concise, and speaks for itself. Our world is suffering, and it is in our power to do something about it. The biggest problem is the way the data points are communicated. Their either put across as too threatening by those who agree, or too dismissively by those who dissent. There has to be a more moderate, less rhetorically and politically charged way to address this issue. I've got to believe that there is.

Python Photo Credit