Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

News

Recognizing Terry Collins and Dale Langford

With maximum appreciation for their contributions, we have included Terry Collins and Dale Langford in our list of PHE alumni and external affiliates.

Dale Langford has edited almost every publication of Jesse’s since the 1985 National Academy of Engineering Program Report. Dale edited many reports and books of the National Academies, many papers and reports of the Program for the Human Environment, and many reports of the Census of Marine Life, Deep Carbon Observatory, and other programs in which Jesse has played a role.

As reported in our 2013 blog here, Jesse began working with environment and science communications specialist Terry Collins in 2003. Since then, their joint efforts have grown from 38 collaborations to more than 60, as chronicled in Terry’s Jesse Ausubel Archive. The archive is a wonderful scientific biography of our interests, spanning marine biodiversity, DNA barcoding and eDNA, the Encyclopedia of Life, deep carbon, and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Dale and Terry have improved and multiplied the value of our work.

Play about the murder of Moritz Schlick

A pair of excellent books about the Vienna Circle of philosophers have recently appeared: Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science by Karl Sigmund (2017) and The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle by David Edmonds (2020).

As an undergraduate, I took several philosophy courses and was especially taken with  Wittgenstein.  In the spring of 1972, a multi-talented astronomy graduate student, Joseph Timko, also keenly interested in philosophy, and I wrote and performed a short play about the murder of Moritz Schlick, The Best Picture.  Performing the role of Schlick, I was murdered each evening.  The play was performed again in 1975 in New York and on a few other occasions.

Working in Vienna during 1979-1982 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, I was eager to learn more about the Vienna Circle.  Much curiosity then pertained to Vienna 1900 but little to Vienna between the wars. I attended the Kirchberg Wittgenstein symposium in 1981, where one felt stirrings of the revival now mature in the Sigmund and Edmonds books.  In honor of the Schlick revival, find posted a slightly revised 1980 version of The Best Picture, a melodrama in which Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Investigator, made his stage debut in solving the Case of the Posthmous Positivist.

Jesse

Eos article on Measuring Ambient Ocean Sound During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Measuring Ambient Ocean Sound During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An expanded nonmilitary hydrophone network provides new opportunities to understand the variability and trends of ocean sound and the effects of sound on marine organisms by Peter L. Tyack, Jennifer Miksis-Olds, Jesse Ausubel, and Edward R. Urban Jr. appears in Eos magazine. Let’s learn from the COVID-19 pause to help achieve safer operations for shipping industries, offshore energy operators, navies, and other users of the ocean.

A slighly abbreviated version appeared in Maritime Executive as COVID-19 Downturn Creates an Opportunity to Study a Quieter Ocean.

Joshua Lederberg biography published

Genes, Germs and Medicine: The Life of Joshua Lederberg  by U. of Toronto historian of science Jan Sapp has just been published.  The book provides an engaging, balanced, and perceptive view of the multifaceted life and mind of Dr. Lederberg, who passed away in 2008.

For Jesse’s particular remembrances, see

Joshua Lederberg (In memoriam, 2008)
Joshua Lederberg (A Tribute to the Foresight of Joshua Lederberg, 2009)

Crowning achievement of Deep Carbon Observatory

The media have much coverage of the new paper Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time and its marvelous visualization of a billion years of movement of the Earth’s continents and tectonic plates in 40 seconds.  The paper generously acknowledges the Deep Carbon Observatory as well as Sloan and Lounsbery foundation grants arranged by Jesse.  Congratulations to the brilliant leader of the EarthByte Group, Sabin Zahirovic, lead author Andrew Merdith, and the rest of their team.  The paper will become a citation classic and earn them many prizes. For history of the Deep Carbon Observatory, see Jesse’s Foreword to Simon Mitton’s new From Crust to Core (A Chronicle of Deep Carbon Science)

Precision agriculture in Wall Street Journal

Robert Paarlberg’s article “The Environmental Upside of Modern Farming” cites our work about land-sparing. Rob has just published a new book Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat.

We continue to follow the achievements of farmers. Corn yields have gone insane.  Average USA yields have continued the gradual climb to about 170 bushels/acre or 12 tons/ha. Peak yields have soared.  The National Corn Yield contest in the conventional category  was 476 bpa or 32 tph in 2020. In 2019 however, David Hula and Randy Dowdy, doing some unconventional things, got to ~600 bpa or more than 40 tph.

At yields this high, the question is what to do with the product – vast surpluses and low prices are not good for farmers.  The amounts are so immense that they must become hamburgers and ethanol, but if we wanted polenta, we could release enormous amounts of land for Nature. The incentive to lift yields further is probably going to be weak the next few decades.  It would not surprise us to find corn farmers stay on a plateau now for a couple of decades until humans figure out what to do with all the product.  This may not be true of some other crops.

The Dutch greenhouses are another important story, another big step toward what in the 1980s we started calling Landless Agriculture. This National Geographic story 2017 shows the importance of greenhouses.  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/ .

The potential for land-sparing, for E O Wilson’s Half Earth strategy remains very real.