Roman Climate Awareness in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-282
Author(s):  
Jane Millar
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Agricultural Labor ◽  
Agricultural Communities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Untapped Resource

This article examines the past and potential contributions of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (NH) on the subject of Roman perceptions and experiences of environmental change. It asks in particular how classicists, archaeologists, and environmental historians can responsibly use the NH as a source on ancient climate. First, it briefly reviews relevant topics in the paleoclimatology of the Roman world, a rapidly advancing discipline enabling the identification of ancient climate changes with increasing precision and confidence (I). The article then turns to the reliability of Pliny as an authority on ancient climate by examining his accuracy, objectivity, and use of source material in literary and historical context, including his rhetorical goals, which have gone understudied until quite recently (II). A close reading of passages on environmental and climate change follows, highlighting areas in which Pliny’s observations are at odds with his source material. The examples discussed demonstrate the importance of phenology (III) and meteorology (IV) in Pliny’s encyclopedic account of the natural world, one characterized by anthropocentrism, pragmatism, and an emphasis on local knowledge. The evidence for ancient climate change is plentiful but not conclusive on the details and timing, and further studies will continue to refine local records. Rather than presenting a synthetic reconstruction based on Pliny’s observations, I argue that his encyclopedia offers an untapped resource on ancient climate and weather, not only by providing evidence of climate change, but also by recommending increased attention to seasonality, agricultural communities, and the lived experience of agricultural labor in order to better understand the effects of climate change on ancient populations.

NATURAL HISTORIES: LEARNING FROM ANIMALS IN T.H. WHITE'S ARTHURIAN SEQUENCE

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Debbie Sly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Human Limitation ◽  
Ideological Construction

AbstractThis paper examines the changes T.H. White made to The Sword in the Stone between its first publication in 1938 and subsequent appearance as the first part of the Once and Future King in 1958. These changes are related to the immediate historical context of World War II, and also to the wider context of children's literature dealing with the relationship between the child and the ''natural world''. Rather than seeing White's texts as reflecting a post-Enlightenment idealisation, placing both child and nature beyond the bounds of culture and human limitation, the essay argues that even in the first version White's medieval worldview is constructed from a sophisticated and deliberately anachronistic medley of discourses including medieval codes of hunting and chivalry, Renaissance tragedy and Victorian natural history. These combine to create an exclusively male world, which is analysed as part of the ideological construction of a masculine relationship to the environment based on a ''natural'' nstinct to hunt and kill. White's growing pacifism leads to the insertion in the later version of episodes replacing this relationship with models of cooperative animal behaviour, and even introducing a female mentor for the hero.

scholarly journals Announcing Big-Bee: An initiative to promote understanding of bees through image and trait digitization

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Seltmann ◽  
Julie Allen ◽  
Brian Brown ◽  
Adrian Carper ◽  
Michael Engel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Data Science ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Biotic Interactions ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Cultivated Plants ◽  
Climate Change Scenarios ◽  
Species Association ◽  
Image Datasets

While bees are critical to sustaining a large proportion of global food production, as well as pollinating both wild and cultivated plants, they are decreasing in both numbers and diversity. Our understanding of the factors driving these declines is limited, in part, because we lack sufficient data on the distribution of bee species to predict changes in their geographic range under climate change scenarios. Additionally lacking is adequate data on the behavioral and anatomical traits that may make bees either vulnerable or resilient to human-induced environmental changes, such as habitat loss and climate change. Fortunately, a wealth of associated attributes can be extracted from the specimens deposited in natural history collections for over 100 years. Extending Anthophila Research Through Image and Trait Digitization (Big-Bee) is a newly funded US National Science Foundation Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections project. Over the course of three years, we will create over one million high-resolution 2D and 3D images of bee specimens (Fig. 1), representing over 5,000 worldwide bee species, including most of the major pollinating species. We will also develop tools to measure bee traits from images and generate comprehensive bee trait and image datasets to measure changes through time. The Big-Bee network of participating institutions includes 13 US institutions (Fig. 2) and partnerships with US government agencies. We will develop novel mechanisms for sharing image datasets and datasets of bee traits that will be available through an open, Symbiota-Light (Gilbert et al. 2020) data portal called the Bee Library. In addition, biotic interaction and species association data will be shared via Global Biotic Interactions (Poelen et al. 2014). The Big-Bee project will engage the public in research through community science via crowdsourcing trait measurements and data transcription from images using Notes from Nature (Hill et al. 2012). Training and professional development for natural history collection staff, researchers, and university students in data science will be provided through the creation and implementation of workshops focusing on bee traits and species identification. We are also planning a short, artistic college radio segment called "the Buzz" to get people excited about bees, biodiversity, and the wonders of our natural world.

Contemporary Scottish Poetry and the Natural World

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal

Contemporary Scottish Writers and the Natural World examines the work of four Scottish poets – John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Robin Robertson and Kenneth White – in the light of philosophical considerations of the subject’s relation to the natural world and environmental thought. Drawing in particular on the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment and Martin Heidegger on dwelling, the study explores the organic intimate interrelation between the self and the world, including human and non-human relations. The poets’ work is discussed in the context of the main premises of the phenomenological tradition that address the self’s relation with the world, focusing in particular on the sense of place, the vegetal and animal worlds, and foregrounding the dialogue between poetics, the subject and the landscape. The study considers a chiasmic human-non-human animal intertwining as particularly important in the poetry because of its lived experience of the world. Proposing a theoretically-informed discussion, which includes various modes of ecocritical apprehension, it analyses the subject’s perception of intimacy with the materiality of the natural world and the role of language in the registration of perceptual experience as explored in contemporary Scottish poetry.

scholarly journals The Coral Is Not All Dead Yet

Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (4) ◽  
pp. 180-191
Author(s):  
Carolyn Kormann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Climate Change Science ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Societal Impacts ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Climate Crisis

Reportage and essays are the first and most immediate way that citizens learn about climate change science, its causes and consequences, and the impacts that industry and consumerism have on ecosystems. For fifteen years, I have been reporting and writing stories on these topics. Growing up, I was drawn to the environment because I was fascinated by the diversity, the endless variety, of life on Earth. But early in my career, in my first reporting job for a newspaper in the Caribbean, I also saw the disastrous toll that contemporary civilization was taking on the natural world – specifically on coral reefs. And yet, the climate crisis was not widely reported as such in those days. That experience, and the dearth of mainstream climate reporting at the time, led me to seek out some of the leading thinkers on the subject, and made climate one of the central subjects of my work. Most often, in the field of journalism, the phrase “bearing witness” refers to war journalism, while my work, for years, had often felt like science translation, connection, and storytelling. But more recently, as the ecological and societal impacts of a changing climate have grown more extreme, widespread, and apparent, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, climate journalism has, too, become a form of bearing witness.

scholarly journals Updates to the checklist of the wild bee fauna of Luxembourg as inferred from revised natural history collection data and fieldwork

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernanda Herrera Mesías ◽  
Alexander Weigand
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Conservation Strategies ◽  
Species List ◽  
Wild Bee ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Collection Data ◽  
Taxonomic Groups

Museums and other institutions curating natural history collections (NHCs) are fundamental entities to many scientific disciplines, as they house data and reference material for varied research projects. As such, biological specimens preserved in NHCs represent accessible physical records of the living world's history. They provide useful information regarding the presence and distribution of different taxonomic groups through space and time. Despite the importance of biological museum specimens, their potential to answer scientific questions, pertinent to the necessities of our current historical context, is often under-explored. The currently-known wild bee fauna of Luxembourg comprises 341 registered species distributed amongst 38 different genera. However, specimens stored in the archives of local NHCs represent an untapped resource to update taxonomic lists, including potentially overlooked findings relevant to the development of national conservation strategies. We re-investigated the wild bee collection of the Zoology Department of the National Museum of Natural History Luxembourg by using morphotaxonomy and DNA barcoding. The collection revision led to the discovery of four species so far not described for the country: Andrena lagopus (Latreille, 1809), Nomada furva (Panzer, 1798), Hoplitis papaveris (Latreille, 1799) and Sphecodes majalis (Pérez, 1903). Additionally, the presence of Nomada sexfasciata (Panzer, 1799), which inexplicably had been omitted by the most current species list, can be re-confirmed. Altogether, our findings increase the number of recorded wild bee species in Luxembourg to 346. Moreover, the results highlight the crucial role of NHCs as repositories of our knowledge of the natural world.

scholarly journals On species concepts, phylogenetics and the science of natural history—three current issues facing taxonomy

Megataxa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
MAARTEN J.M. CHRISTENHUSZ
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Risk Factor ◽  
Natural History ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Species Concepts ◽  
Impact Of Climate Change ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Changing World

Taxonomy faces some major challenges in the 21st Century (Godfray 2002). The threat to biodiversity comes largely from human overpopulation, but the impact of climate change is unprecedented (Pievani 2014) and increasingly a risk factor for many species. This makes it even more critical to rapidly catalogue our biodiversity to better protect it (Mace 2004). If you do not know what is there, it is impossible to know what we are losing, let alone protect something for which we have no name and cannot identify. Understanding diversity and the dynamics of evolution and speciation is important to discover the adaptability of species in a changing world dominated by humans (e.g. Harvey et al. 2014), but at the same time education about the natural world seems to have failed our children.Below I address three major questions or issues that are current in taxonomy, and natural history in the broader sense, related to species concepts, classification, communication and education. 

Geology and industrial consultancy: Sir William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929) and the Kent Coalfield

1991 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Tweedale
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Geological Science ◽  
Chief Interest ◽  
Proper Account

In Britain's development as the first industrial nation, the crucial importance of surveyors, mining engineers and geologists in prospecting and exploiting minerals and raw materials seems self-evident. Yet historians of geology have yet to take proper account of this aspect of geological science. Why is this ? One reason may simply be that the historiography of the subject itself is only relatively recent and many areas, besides industrial geology, await coverage. Or perhaps the nature of the source material is to blame. While scientific geologists filled museums with their fossils and notebooks, engaged in well-publicized controversies of the day, and wrote numerous books and articles, industrial geologists often left relatively few papers and sometimes never published their results. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the neglect of economic geology may be due to a rapidly developing bias in the subject itself. A recent study has highlighted the fact that the history of British geology, as seen through the eyes of historians at least, appears to comprise two different but closely interconnected strands. The first relates to natural history and looks toward the scientific or ‘pure’ front; the second connects with mining and the search for raw materials and is slanted towards the industrial or ‘applied’ horizon. In the same way that the scientific branch of geology brought fame and fortune in Victorian times, so the protagonists of ‘pure’ geology have so far been the chief interest of historians – so much so that the literature so far lacks detailed case studies of the careers and work of applied geologists.

Biographical Studies of G.I. Gurdjieff

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-35
Author(s):  
Joseph Azize
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Research ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Subject

The various published biographies and biographical notices of G.I. Gurdjieff (c.1865-1949) are of diverse style, quantity and content. While some have made considerable contributions to the subject, most attempts have reacted for or against Gurdjieff’s status as what might call an ‘Enlightened Master’. Little biographical writing on Gurdjieff has questioned the scope, reliability and prejudices of the sources. Further, possible resources have been neglected. The development in Gurdjieff’s ideas is often overlooked, his life is not sufficiently related to that development, and the lack of comparative research has failed to highlight Gurdjieff’s unique contributions. This article is structured in four parts. The first is an introduction, followed by an overview of existing biographical studies of Gurdjieff. The third part addresses bias in these studies, and this is followed by suggestions for future studies. It is concluded that fieldwork regarding the biography of Gurdjieff has been hampered by imperfect methodology. However, with better use of the source material, some of which has only recently been discovered, and a rigorous use of sources, a more balanced and nuanced picture of Gurdjieff’s life, and the development of his ideas and methods, should emerge.

التغير المناخي واثره في المقنن المائي لمحصول العنب في محافظة ديالى

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (34) ◽  
pp. 391-422
Author(s):  
اشواق حسن حميد صالح
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Wind Speed ◽  
Extreme Temperature ◽  
Solar Brightness ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Climate Station ◽  
The Times ◽  
High Level ◽  
Very High

Climate change and its impact on water resources is the problem of the times. Therefore, this study is concerned with the subject of climate change and its impact on the water ration of the grape harvest in Diyala Governorate. The study was based on the data of the Khanaqin climate station for the period 1973-2017, (1986-2017) due to lack of data at governorate level. The general trend of the elements of the climate and its effect on the water formula was extracted. The equation of change was extracted for the duration of the study. The statistical analysis was also used between the elements of the climate (actual brightness, normal temperature, micro and maximum degrees Celsius, wind speed m / s, relative humidity% The results of the statistical analysis confirm that the water ration for the study area is based mainly on the X7 evaporation / netting variable, which is affected by a set of independent variables X1 Solar Brightness X4 X5 Extreme Temperature Wind Speed ​​3X Minimal Temperature and Very High Level .

The Changing Perception of the Five Senses

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Sara Benninga
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scientific Instruments ◽  
Peter Paul Rubens ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
Southern Netherlands ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses

This article examines the changing approach towards the representation of the senses in 17th-century Flemish painting. These changes are related to the cultural politics and courtly culture of the Spanish sovereigns of the Southern Netherlands, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The 1617–18 painting-series of the Five Senses by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens as well as the pendant paintings on the subject are analyzed in relation to the iconography of the five senses, and in regard to Flemish genre themes. In this context, the excess of objects, paintings, scientific instruments, animals, and plants in the Five Senses are read as an expansion of the iconography of the senses as well as a reference to the courtly material culture of the Archdukes. Framing the senses as part of a cultural web of artifacts, Brueghel and Rubens refer both to elite lived experience and traditional iconography. The article examines the continuity between the iconography of the senses from 1600 onwards, as developed by Georg Pencz, Frans Floris, and Maerten de Vos, and the representation of the senses in the series. In addition, the article shows how certain elements in the paintings are influenced by genre paintings of the courtly company and collector’s cabinet, by Frans Francken, Lucas van Valckenborch and Louis de Caullery. Through the synthesis of these two traditions the subject of the five senses is reinvented in a courtly context

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