By Dr. Robert Thorson College students are protesting again – sounding off about race, immigration, gender, sexual harassment and gun violence. Their cacophony triggers my memories of youthful protest during my college years (1969-1973) when the main issues were an illegal war, nuclear proliferation, a corrupt presidency and environmental degradation. The voices of both generations […]
Blog
U.S. Backs Big Oil Against Tiny Arctic Tribe
By Dr. Robert Thorson Two nations are waging a war of words against one another. The tiny nation includes the Neets’aii Gwich’in Athabascan people of Arctic Village, Alaska, a community inaccessible by road or boat. The superpower nation is the United States, centered within the urban beltways of Washington, D.C. My sympathies are with the […]
As We Go Global, We Lose Human Diversity
By Dr. Robert Thorson Two media buzzwords, “diversity” and “globalization,” are often conflated. This muddles our thinking about important issues such as nationalism, immigration, global trade, war and human rights. “History is moving relentlessly toward unity,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” an international best-seller on the reading lists of […]
Earth Blog #3 – The Anthropocene and the “Terrible-Day-Hypothesis”
Mass extinctions get portrayed as single events of death and destruction. Does this portrayal obscure the hallmarks of extinction that are kicking into overdrive during the Anthropocene? It has been over 30 years since the publication of Luis Alvarez’s groundbreaking paper in Science on the asteroid that impacted Earth 66 million years ago. Out of […]
Earth Blog #2 – What is Landscape?
What is landscape? Based on the original definition, it’s only the human modifications in the scene in the painting above, a detail from “Mantle of Winter,” 1921, Guy C. Wiggins, Oil on canvas, Louise Crombie Beach Collection, William Benton Museum of Art, UConn. Mark Twain once wrote. “The difference between the right word and almost […]
Earth Blog #1 – Painting the Blue Planet Blue
Note: This is the first of many posts for our new website designed to highlight the role of Earth Sciences within UConn Nation. The target audience consists of students, faculty, staff, and administrators interested in how the earth works, what its history has been, and why this matters. As our climates change, water is increasingly […]