Area of Research: Forests, Farms and Materials
Jesse interviewed at Energy Forum in Washington DC
Mark Mills’s new National Center for Energy Analytics launched publicly with an Energy Future Forum organized jointly with RealClearEnergy. The meeting included a half-hour interview with Jesse Ausubel conducted by Peter Bryant about what makes energy systems green.
Jesse quoted on new way to lift yields
Doomslayer, Marian Tupy’s newsletter at Human Progress, features polyploidy and Ohalo Genetics in its 26 May post, and includes a comment from Jesse Ausubel about the good prospects for crop yields.
St Andrews Prize for the Environment to Amazon forest protection
The St Andrews Prize for the Environment of the University of St Andrews recognizes and supports innovative and inspirational responses to environmental challenges. In 2023, Jesse Ausubel joined the jury, which awarded the $100,000 2023 prize to Alianza Ceibo for their Indigenous-led effort for protection of the Upper Amazon Rainforest.
eDNA biodiversity survey of Charles River & Boston Harbor
For a 50th Harvard College Reunion Seminar on EO Wilson’s proposal to conserve half Earth, Jesse Ausubel and Mark Stoeckle, assisted by Elizabeth Munnell, conducted a survey of vertebrates in three locations in the Charles River and two in Boston Harbor. The 14 slides on The Charles River and Boston Harbor Then and Now tell a story of remarkable ecological recovery.
Ensure forest-data integrity for climate change studies
Wernick essay on energy & materials scenarios for Asia in 2050 published in RealClear Energy
RealClear Energy posted an article by Iddo Wernick on consequences of nations choosing different energy trajectories in the Indo-Pacific region in the year 2050. See The Indo-Pacific in 2050: Alternative Energy Scenarios and Security
Passing of Cesare Marchetti
Cesare Marchetti passed away this morning in Tuscany just short of his 96th birthday. After meeting Cesare in 1978, Jesse Ausubel became fascinated with Cesare’s ideas about the importance and ubiquity of processes of growth and diffusion captured often in simple form by Lotka-Volterra equations and subsequently coded in our Loglet Lab software. In the early 1980s Jesse began assisting Cesare on some projects and subsequently worked together on subjects ranging from electricity to travel to human populations and empires (see below). And of course Leonardo Da Vinci.
Cesare is best known for Marchetti’s Constant that posits that the human time budget for travel is a little above one hour per day, since ever and everywhere, because anthropologically rooted in the dangers homo sapiens faces when outside a protected environment.
Cesare was one of the inventors of geoengineering. His most cited paper is On geoengineering and the CO2 problem (1977).
Around 1970 he was also one of the inventors of the hydrogen economy as described in this 1973 paper: Hydrogen and energy.
A bibliography with links to many of Cesare’s papers from 1952 to 2007 is here. A second list of publications is here.
Cesare’s explorations of Leonardo are here.
Our group at The Rockefeller University always greatly enjoyed hosting Cesare in New York City, and he reciprocated with marvelous hospitality in Monteloro.
Our joint efforts included:
C Marchetti, JH Ausubel. Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires [Color Booklet Version, 52 pages]. Adapted from Marchetti and Ausubel, International Journal of Anthropology 27(1-2):1-62, 2012. 2013
JH Ausubel, C Marchetti. Science, Conquering Child of the Church . 2003 Draft prepared for Next 1000 Years meeting, 9-10 October 2003
C Marchetti, JH Ausubel. The Next 1000 Years. 2003 Discussion paper for April 2003 Rockefeller U workshop
JH Ausubel, C Marchetti. The Evolution of Transport. The Industrial Physicist 7 (2): 20–24, 2001
JH Ausubel, C Marchetti, PS Meyer. Toward Green Mobility: The Evolution of Transport European Review 6 (2): 143–162, 1998
JH Ausubel, C Marchetti. Elektron: Electrical Systems in Retrospect and Prospect Pp. 110–134 in Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment, J.H. Ausubel and H.D. Langford, (eds.). Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1997 Also appeared in Daedalus 125(3):139-169, Summer 1996.
C Marchetti, PS Meyer, JH Ausubel. Human Population Dynamics Revisited with the Logistic Model: How Much Can Be Modeled and Predicted? Pp. 1–30 in Technological Forecasting and Social Change vol. 53, 1996.
Requiescat in pace.
Video of Jesse’s Nierenberg Prize lecture on “Peak Human?”
In this 54″ video made 13 October, 2022 Jesse Ausubel, awarded the 2022 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, discusses whether the human species can continue to improve—much like cars, computers, or other technology—or whether our species has reached its peak.
Our paper on eDNA as bioassay of Anthropocene published
The new journal based in China, The Innovation, has published the Thaler-Ausubel-Stoeckle paper on Human and domesticated animal environmental DNA as bioassays of the Anthropocene in their “Out of the Box” category, where we like to be. We also post the pdf.
We thank Song Sun and Ke Chen for editorial assistance.
Summary: Human and domesticated animal sequences, commonly detected in environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding studies, are routinely excluded from analysis. Here we suggest that reporting human and domesticated animal eDNA results might open new lines of investigation. For example, the relative abundance of human and domesticated animal eDNA as compared to that of wild vertebrate species might provide an index of human impact on local biota. Such an index could be applied to sites ranging from urban harbors to remote villages, and possibly to analyze historical samples. Various potential sources of contamination complicate the picture, but it should be possible to develop procedures that minimize risk of DNA introduction during collection and processing. Our near-term recommendation is to encourage inclusion of human and domesticated animal data in eDNA publications as an incentive for discovery, to lift quality controls, and to collectively contribute to new vistas that eDNA science might open.