CrashCourse

Joined May 19, 2006

Description
Tons of awesome courses in one awesome channel: Hank Green teaches you Anatomy & Physiology; Phil Plait teaches you Astronomy; Craig Benzine teaches you U.S. Government and Politics; Adriene Hill and Jacob Clifford teach you Economics.

Check out the playlists for past courses in World History, Biology, Literature, Ecology, Chemistry, Psychology, and US History.

Help support Crash Course at Patreon.com/CrashCourse.

Global Climate Change
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The evolution of Ilia Delio | National Catholic Reporter

Franciscan Sr. Ilia Delio delivers the keynote address Aug. 14, 2013, during the Leadership Conference of Women Religious assembly in Kissimmee, Fla. (CNS/Roberto Gonzalez)
Jamie Manson | Jul. 16, 2014

Washington

“We are dying — and that’s OK,” Ilia Delio told a gathering of 150 Sisters of St. Joseph in Brentwood, N.Y., in late June.

“It just means something new is emerging. We need to become young again.”

It was a bold statement, made all the more audacious by the fact that the average age of the assembled group was likely in the neighborhood of 72.

But Delio isn’t concerned with chronological age. She’s taking the long view: 13.8 billion years long, to be exact. The age of the universe. From her perspective, what may seem like upheaval and uncertainty in the future of religious life is just a natural stage in an unfolding evolutionary process.

“If we attend only to the breakdown,” Delio says, “we think we’re over. We see death. But that’s a closed-system way of thinking.”

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
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Haitian Revolutions: Crash Course World History #30

E120, e130

Dam nation: A geographic census of American dams and their large-scale hydrologic impacts – Graf – 1999 – Water Resources Research

• William L. Graf

• First published: April 1999
  
• DOI: 10.1029/1999WR900016
  

Newly available data indicate that dams fragment the fluvial system of the continental United States and that their impact on river discharge is several times greater than impacts deemed likely as a result of global climate change. The 75,000 dams in the continental United States are capable of storing a volume of water almost equaling one year’s mean runoff, but there is considerable geographic variation in potential surface water impacts. In some western mountain and plains regions, dams can store more than 3 year’s runoff, while in the Northeast and Northwest, storage is as little as 25% of the annual runoff. Dams partition watersheds; the drainage area per dam varies from 44 km2 (17 miles2) per dam in New England to 811 km2 (313 miles2) per dam in the Lower Colorado basin. Storage volumes, indicators of general hydrologic effects of dams, range from 26,200 m3 km−2 (55 acre-feet mile−2) in the Great Basin to 345,000 m3 km−2 (725 acre-feet mile−2) in the South Atlantic region. The greatest river flow impacts occur in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the arid Southwest, where storage is up to 3.8 times the mean annual runoff. The nation’s dams store 5000 m3 (4 acre-feet) of water per person. Water resource regions have experienced individualized histories of cumulative increases in reservoir storage (and thus of downstream hydrologic and ecologic impacts), but the most rapid increases in storage occurred between the late 1950s and the late 1970s. Since 1980, increases in storage have been relatively minor.

Global Climate Change
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Evolution – a Christian Perspective (Teilhard de Chardin)

ObjectiveBob

Published on May 24, 2012

A summary of some of Teilhard de Chardin’s views on evolution and its relation to humanity from a Christian perspective.
Lecture by Ilia Delio from Georgetown University

Global Climate Change
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Teilhard de Chardin: His Importance in the 21st Century

Georgetown University

Published on Jun 23, 2015

A panel discussion on Teilhard de Chardin, featuring John F. Haught, Ph.D., Kathleen Duffy, SSJ, Ph.D., John Grim, Ph.D. and Ilia Delio, OSF, Ph.D.

Global Climate Change
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Ilia Delio: “Teilhard de Chardin and World Religions”

Yale FORE

Published on May 20, 2016

American Teilhard Association Annual Meeting at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, NY on May 14, 2016. Ilia Delio lectures on “Teilhard de Chardin and World Religions: Ultra Catholic or Ultra Human?”

Audio recording produced by Frank Frost.

http://teilharddechardin.org/index.php

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

Robert Paine, Ecologist Who Found ‘Keystone Species,’ Dies at 83

By SAM ROBERTS  JUNE 17, 2016

Photo

Dr. Robert Paine spent much of his time on the coast of Washington State, studying his “keystone” species theory using starfish. Credit Anne Paine

Robert Paine, a groundbreaking, hands-on ecologist who found that removing what he called a “keystone species” from an environment could profoundly affect the fortunes of neighboring species, died on Monday in Seattle. He was 83.

The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, his daughter Anne Paine said.

Dr. Paine demonstrated in his field work that certain species exert a disproportionate impact on their ecosystems and that their elimination — as a result of climate change, pollution or some other natural or man-made factors — can produce unexpected and far-reaching consequences for the local environment.

A teacher and researcher at the University of Washington for 36 years, Dr. Paine propounded his keystone theory in 1966 after studying ochre starfish, or sea stars, as they preyed on the mussel population along the rocky shore of Makah Bay, on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

After he pried the starfish from rocks with a crowbar and hurled them into the sea, the mussels proliferated along the shore, displacing algae and limpets.

He found a similar chain reaction — or “trophic cascade,” as he called it — when sea otters vanished or were removed from an environment because of fur trading, pollution or marine predators. With the otters gone, sea urchins, which the otters had preyed upon, were now free to gobble up a larger share of kelp — food that would otherwise have sustained fish and crabs.

He identified the predator starfish and the otters as keystone species, taking the name from the wedge-shaped apex of an arch that keeps it from collapsing.

Dr. Paine, who had a passion for field work, conducted much of his own research on Tatoosh Island, an uninhabited rocky outcropping less than a mile off Cape Flattery, on the Olympic Peninsula. He discovered the spot in 1967 on a salmon-fishing trip.

…(read more).

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The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism: An Elaboration of Marxian Political Economy by John Bellamy Foster

Global Climate Change
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Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire: John Bellamy Foster, Robert D. McChesney

This volume gathers the work of leading left-wing analysts of imperialism to examine the burning question of our time—the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East.

Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Gowan, and others discuss the dynamics at work behind the “War on Terrorism.” Their analyses locate recent developments within a longer historical arc, and set out the central questions for research and debate: Is U.S. unilateralism and militarism a sign of the increasing strength of the world’s only remaining superpower? Or a desperate response to the erosion of the strategy it developed for ensuring its leadership over the advanced capitalist world during the Cold War? Essays by Barbara Epstein, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and others also examine the prospects for the resistance to imperialism in the United States and globally.

Pox Americana brings together a range of insights and perspectives that were originally presented at a conference in Burlington, Vermont, to honor Harry Magdoff on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. It is a fitting tribute to Magdoff’s pioneering analyses of U.S. imperialism and a testimony to the resilience and fruitfulness of the radical tradition.

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice