Ecoknowledge

Ecoknowledge

Some thoughts on ecology, evolution and economics

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Halting biodiversity loss

The nature conservation treaty signed in 2022 called for a halt to biodiversity loss by 2030 and a restoration of some of the natural quality of the past by 2050. Pretty ambitious language! How will we know if we are making progress towards a world where humans share the planet with our fellow species (and… (read more)

What are the effects of pollution?

Pollution is a matter of life or death. In 2019, 9 million premature deaths were caused by pollution, an impact similar to tobacco products. Much of this was caused by air pollution, particularly by wood smoke in low and middle income countries. More than a million deaths were caused by water pollution. Ecotoxicology has a… (read more)

What is ecology good for?

Ecologists are known as alarmists. Dealing with things that are irrelevant to daily life and likely to have only long term consequences, we naturally deal in doomsday scenarios to get attention. This is tiresome, if not downright misleading. My last review of what ecology can tell us was 12 years ago. I propose to revisit… (read more)

Health care report card

Last year, I posed the question : “What new approaches will Canadian provinces bring to improving health care?”. Given the completion of 13 agreements between the federal government and the provinces and territories last spring, we now have information to answer that question. I worked from the strategies proposed by the Globe and Mail in… (read more)

Claiming the land, claiming a home

Some of the consistent themes arising from the reports of Canada’s National Advisory Council on Poverty include: Of these, I would like to focus on Indigenous poverty and affordable housing – two of the more complex and yet urgent aspects of poverty reduction. Prosperity in a post-colonial Canada The main recommendation of the Council regarding… (read more)

Is poverty on the decline in Canada?

In 2022, I was optimistic that poverty would be addressed in Canada because of the federal government’s 2018 poverty reduction strategy. They had set a new measure for poverty, where the price of a basket of basic food, clothes, housing and transport was set as the poverty line. This line is adjusted regionally and according… (read more)

Breakthroughs in Evolutionary Ecology

Robert MacArthur died at the age of 42, leaving a legacy of brilliant theory and cogent observation of nature. In his book on evolutionary ecology, Laurence Mueller credits MacArthur as being one of the founders of the field, an extraordinary achievement for such a short life. The book is part of a series on conceptual… (read more)

The History of Philosophy

The History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling is a book about authors – to be sure, they are virtually all dead, white men (Grayling offers all of 13 pages out of the 585 in this volume on feminist or African philosophers) . What stands out about these men is not that they thought deeply but… (read more)

World trade: four years later

I first started tracking the main flows of world trade in 2015. Following up in 2018, there were subtle changes in the export of goods from twenty of the largest economies. In today’s post, we will look at the initial effects of the trade deals and conflicts discussed in 2018 and the early impacts of… (read more)

Empathy is a state of mind

Previously, I introduced Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave and the sections of our brain associated with certain thought patterns. The brain is relevant in how we prosecute criminals, vote for politicians and feel empathy for others. Again, nothing that shows up on a brain scanner excuses or explains our actions in these contexts but it does… (read more)