Rockefeller University

Program for the Human Environment

News

Living Lab radio

WGBH’s Living Lab radio program hosted by Heather Goldstone interviewed Jesse Ausubel for 30 minutes about his views on the global environment.  The radio interview was stimulated by Jesse’s lecture on 13 July 2012 on “Earth at Seven Billion” at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.  Click here for a video of the hour-long lecture.

Jesse on the Indian Blackout

The Indian electricity blackouts of 30-31 July 2012 affected more than 600 million people. A National Public Radio story by correspondent Richard Harris quotes Jesse Ausubel on the increasing need for perfect power in the Internet era.

Barcoding Birds

A new paper on DNA barcoding of birds has been published as part of a landmark collection about DNA barcoding edited by W. John Kress and David L. Erickson, DNA Barcodes: Methods and Protocols. The volume includes DNA Barcoding Birds: From Field Collection to Data Analysis by Darío A. Lijtmaer, Kevin C. R. Kerr, Mark Y. Stoeckle, and Pablo L. Tubaro as well as a foreword by Jesse Ausubel (see 27 June 2011 What’s New entry).

Decarbonization

Car & Driver magazine’s July 2012 issue features our work about decarbonization on pp. 32-33 in a column touting the potential of natural gas to fuel vehicles.

St. Andrews

Jesse Ausubel was awarded an honorary degree from the University of St. Andrews in recognition of his major contribution to the science and diplomacy of sustainable development. The degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, was conferred to Ausubel on 21 June 2012 during the universitys 600th Anniversary celebration.  St. Andrews is Scotlands first university and the third oldest in the English-speaking world. As part of the ceremonies, Ausubel delivered a 600th Anniversary Lecture, Every Fish in the Sea: Findings of the First Census of Marine Life.

For over three decades Mr. Ausubel has pursued the vision of a large, prosperous society that emits little or nothing harmful and spares large amounts of land and sea for nature. His work has spanned energy and materials, forests and farms, marine life, human population, and climate as well as engineering, earth, life, and social sciences, says the Laureation Address. 

Laureation Address – Mr Jesse Huntley Ausubel

Dematerialization

Marian Tupy makes ingenious use of our work on Dematerialization:

Among our numerous papers on this theme are:

JH Ausubel, PE Waggoner. Dematerialization: variety, caution, and persistence [external link]. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 105(35): 12774-12779, 2008 10.1073/pnas.0806099105 D

IK Wernick, R Herman, S Govind, JH Ausubel. Materialization and dematerialization: Measures and trends. Pp 135-156 in Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment, JH Ausubel and HD Langford (eds) 1997

Empires

For several years Jesse Ausubel and Cesare Marchetti have been pondering the growth of human empires through the lens of biological models. The International Journal of Anthropology has now published their paper, Quantitative Dynamics of Human Empires. The paper reports that the driving forces of empire, leading to expansion and saturation at 14 days of travel from the capital, can be reduced to testosterone and progesterone.

The paper has been published in black-and-white. Thanks to the journal editors for accepting a paper from scholars outside the discipline of anthropology. We also have a posted an enriched powerpoint-style version of the text and figures with the many maps and images in color. We recommend the color version.

Abstract:
Quantitative modeling of social systems shows a large component of automatic drives in the behaviour of individual humans and human society. Studies of the formation and breakdown of twenty diverse empires operating over almost three thousand years describe these processes with utmost clarity and paradigmatic simplicity. Taking territorial expansion as the basic parameter, we show that it can be represented in time by a single logistic equation in spite of the complicated sequences of events usually reported by historians. The driving forces of empire, leading to expansion and saturation at 14 days of travel from the capital, can be reduced to testosterone and progesterone.

Urban Barcode

Jesse Ausubel (via Sloan) and Mark Stoeckle (via Rockefeller) encouraged the wonderful Urban Barcode Project of Cold Spring Harbor Lab.

We are delighted that Robyn Tse, mentored by Mark, won Honorable Mention for her project: DNA Barcoding Exotic Agricultural Pests Seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Jesse offered congratulations to all the teams in the prize ceremony on 6 June 2012 at the American Museum of Natural History, On the Success of the First New York City Urban Barcode Project.