| Brain Plasticity | |
Plastic Brain |
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| Soul | Soil |
Society | What is missing? |
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| Book cover: The Story of San Michele |
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| The Bay of Naples - Vesuvius from San Michele 4 Sept 2013 |
In his first book since the acclaimed The Running Sky Tim Dee tells the story of four green fields. Four fields spread around the world: their grasses, their hedges, their birds, their skies, and their natural and human histories. Four real fields - walkable, mappable, man-made, mowable and knowable, but also secretive, mysterious, wild, contested and changing. Four fields - the oldest and simplest and truest measure of what a man needs in life - looked at, thought about, worked in, lived with, written.Dee's four fields, which he has known for more than twenty years, are the fen field at the bottom of his Cambridgeshire garden, a field in southern Zambia, a prairie field in Little Bighorn, Montana, USA, and a grass meadow in the exclusion zone at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Meditating on these four fields, Dee makes us look anew at where we live and how. He argues that we must attend to what we have made of the wild, to look at and think about the way we have messed things up but also to notice how we have kept going alongside nature, to listen to the conversation we have had with grass and fields.
Four Fields is a profound, lyrical book by one of Britain's very best writers about nature.
| anxiety, mood, anger, frustration, coping abilities, vulnerability, personal communication - masks, poor sleep, helplessness, apathy, personal memory, personal ethics | 'Blaze season' - June to September, Smog - duration?, geography, fires, public health, asthma, respiration, bronchitis, conjunctivitis, vision, eye care, cardiovascular system, weather, create rain, environment, daily physical activities of living, ecosystem impact, elderly, young, measures, monitoring, pollution standard index: 400 1100hrs, stay indoors, building workers, Loss of Habitat |
| public opinion, quality of life, media, social media, public perception, communication - advice to population, (public anger in China over that country's appalling environmental record) | Illegal forest fires, Indonesia, Singapore, Politics, Commerce, Globalization, Governments, Governance, Diplomacy, Corporations, Regulation, Law, Enforcement, Tourism, Employment, Economic impact, Health Care System Burden, Political Tension, Accountability, Trust, Companies involved? Ecocide (not in Europe) |
In reviewing some literature recently I came across the phrase 'semantic reef'. In forwarding a copy of the paper Dr Trina Myers described the semantic reef as: an architecture created to automatically infer phenomenon or alerts about coral reefs using Semantic technologies (aka. Linked Data). The Semantic Reef Knowledge Representation system is an eco-informatics application designed to assist in the integration of remotely sensed data streams and historic data sets supporting flexible hypothesis design and knowledge extraction. The system is an ontology-based architecture built to allow researchers to combine disjoint data sets into a single Knowledge Base for modelling the impact of climate change on coral reef ecosystems. p.16.I've written previously of the conceptual role that the axes of Hodges' model can play. How they act as a distinct, idealised boundary between the disciplines. Most evident is the MECHANISTIC-HUMANISTIC divide between the hard sciences and the humanities. Academics, researchers, health practitioners can become trapped in a disciplinary silo. Reefs are often a Great Barrier. Mariners have to find navigable waters to find a way through. Safe passage is recorded.
The last thing anyone wants is a shipwreck; whether in the ecosphere, designing software or health care.
