Breathtaking Views of Earth From Above

Breathtaking Views of Earth From Above

Astronaut Reid Wiseman posted this photo to Twitter on Sept. 2, 2014 from the International Space Station with the caption, "My favorite views from #space just past #sunrise over the ocean." Reid Wiseman/NASA ..

Reflections on the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Wilderness Act

This past summer, during one of the hottest periods of the long heat wave, I escaped Boise for a weekend to the mountains outside McCall. A friend has a cabin there and she suggested that we leave our phones, computers, and cares behind and spend a few days in the woods.

I love the outdoors, whether it’s the managed and semi-manicured Kathryn Albertson Park (where I saw a doe and two fawns the last time I visited that urban oasis) or the wilder, more rugged Sawtooths. So, when my friend came knocking with the opportunity to immerse myself in the lovely Payette National Forest, I quickly opened the door and walked out of the city and into the wild.

One of our hikes took us through stands of towering Ponderosa Pines, whispering and swaying with a gentle breeze. The pine-pitch scent was intoxicating. After about 10 minutes, the forest thinned and we stepped into one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It was a broad meadow, lushly green with thick patches of yellow, white and purple flowers. A small, clear stream meandered through, sheltered by a few copses of trees and bridged by a fallen log here and there. My friend and I sat on one of these natural benches, gazing into the gold-flecked water and listening to the calls of birds and the lonely scree of an eagle soaring through the blue skies.

To those who have never experienced the Idaho wilderness, such language may sound hyperbolic. But for those of us who have been blessed with the chance to visit many such places in our beautiful state, my description likely seems understated. My friend and I spent several hours in the meadow, ambling across its verdant expanse, picking our way through the marshy verges of the stream and trying (though not always succeeding) to avoid stepping in the numerous piles of manure. Yes — cattle manure. The meadow was notactually in the wilderness, but it was on its edge.

The meadow is remote, high up in the mountains. But despite its location and abundance of wildlife (cattle excepted), the meadow cannot technically be called wilderness. That designation is reserved for areas “where the earth and its community are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” and where roads, motorized vehicles and other trappings of modern life are not allowed.

This definition of wilderness is remarkably new and hotly debated. It gained legal status on September 3, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, setting aside over nine million acres of the public domain and protecting it from mining, logging and agricultural use. In the 50 years since, America’s wild lands have increased to over 100 million acres — a stunning victory in the eyes of some, a terrible waste of resources in the view of others.

Disagreements over wilderness, and over how it should be defined and managed, have a long and storied past in America. Historian Roderick Nash analyzed the complicated relationship Americans have had with wild nature in his now-classic book,Wilderness and the American Mind (1967). There he traced the evolution of wilderness from a fearful, dangerous place in need of conquest to an Edenic, threatened remnant of pristine nature requiring protection.

Nash’s history begins in Europe, with what he called the Old World roots of the wilderness concept, imported to the North American continent by Puritan settlers who viewed nature as antithetical to civilization and human progress. Later generations characterized nature as a storehouse of resources ripe for harvest, abundant without end. Both of these perceptions led to over-exploitation of forests, soils, and wildlife populations.

By the early 19th century, Nash suggested, Americans began to question the efficacy and morality of such approaches to the non-human world. He pointed to iconic figures such as Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), John Muir (1838-1914) and Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) to illustrate new ideas of wilderness based on the notion that, even more important than the raw materials it embodies, nature acts as a spiritual and physical antidote to industrialized, over-civilized life.

These two competing views of wilderness — antithesis and antidote — are at the root of the Wilderness Act. The Act states:

In order to assure that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition, it is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress to secure for the American people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.

The Act’s language clearly aligns with the idea that wild nature provides both tangible and intangible benefits far beyond any material gains that might be had from harvesting its resources, even as it made special exceptions for certain uses contrary to its basic premise. Grazing, where it had already been established in National Forest areas, could continue in wilderness areas managed by the U.S. Forest Service under the oversight of the Secretary of Agriculture.

New and existing mining operations were allowed in wilderness areas through December 31, 1983, as long as they did not alter the “wilderness character” of the area. Motorboats and aircraft could be used in areas where they already were prior to September 3, 1964, and anywhere in the system if they were necessary to assess and combat threats from insects, fire, or diseases, “subject to such conditions as the Secretary deems desirable.” Where the intent of the Act presumes wilderness is an antidote, its exceptions reveal a continued tradition of seeing wild nature as an obstacle to civilization’s progress.

That it took nearly 10 years for wilderness protection to move from bill to Act reveals the deep-seated ambivalence Americans have toward nature. The bill, authored by Wilderness Society Executive Director Howard Zahniser, first came before Congress in 1956, but its origins go back another 20 years. Robert Marshall, a forester with the US Forest Service and founder of the Wilderness Society, began in the early 1930s a correspondence with Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes recommending that roads be prevented from carving up the undeveloped lands under Ickes’s management.

According to journalist Michael Frome, these messages “appear to be the first steps that ultimately led to the Wilderness Act.” Twenty years later, after the nation recovered from the Great Depression and the Second World War, Howard Zahniser took up Marshall’s call. He wrote several articles and opinion pieces on the need for wilderness protection beginning in 1951, but it was a speech he delivered in early 1955 calling for legal protection of wild areas that inspired the bill that became the Wilderness Act.

Democratic Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Republican Rep. John Saylor of Pennsylvania first introduced the bill in 1956, calling for the protection of wild areas already within the jurisdiction of several federal agencies, including areas within the national parks and monuments, national forests, national wildlife refuges, and on Indian reservations. In 1964,Idaho Sen. Frank Church was the floor sponsor of the bill that would finally become the Wilderness Act.

Congress conducted 18 hearings on the bill between mid 1957 and May 1964. Much of the opposition to its passage came from natural resources industries, not because they did not support the idea of wilderness, but because they considered the amount of lands proposed for designation as too extensive and in the wrong places. Initially the Forest and Park Services also opposed the bill because they believed they would lose autonomy in managing their lands in the ways they deemed best for their mandates. See Fome’s Battle for the Wilderrness.Eisenhower’s administration did not favor the bill, thus it took the election of John F. Kennedy, who made its passage part of his 1960 presidential campaign, to grease the legislative gears.

Nevertheless, it took another four years for the bill’s language to be agreed upon by both houses. Zahniser’s original text, which incorporated Marshall’s definition of wilderness, underwent important changes, including the extension for mining and a requirement that new wilderness areas be instituted through congressional authority rather than executive proclamation, but the basic premise remained.

In a remarkable show of bipartisanship, Congress passed the bill with a vote of 73-12 in the Senate and 373-1 in the House. Johnson signed the bill into law while sitting in the White House Rose Garden — not exactly a wilderness, but nevertheless symbolic of the nation’s affinity for and dedication to the preservation of nature.

Fifty years later, debate over the Act continues. Most opposition, again largely from industry, stems from concerns that the United States is needlessly limiting the development of resources that could enhance the nation’s economy and security. As in the Act’s infancy, those who disagree with the management and designation of wilderness areas aren’t uniformly against the idea of wilderness, but instead dislike the extent, location, and restrictions of it. However, some disapproval stems from unexpected places.

Twenty years ago, 30 years after passage of the Act, historian and environmentalist William Cronon suggested that there are few places on Earth that exist in a truly wild state and that wilderness as an idea has done more to stymie environmental progress than it has to promote it. Cronon was not arguing that nature does not exist, but that by separating ourselves from it, as the Wilderness Act explicitly does, we create a false dualism that in some ways allows us to abdicate our responsibilities toward the built and natural environments that surround us more immediately. By separating ourselves from wilderness – an ostensibly pure form of nature — we obscure, in Cronon’s words, “what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.” 

Cronon noted that wilderness has been used to dispossess indigenous peoples the world over, including Native Americans in the 19th century and Indian peasants in the 20th. He also argued that wilderness tends to promote the majestic over the humble, the iconic over the mundane, thus preserving landscapes deemed sublime and not those that appear less inspiring. Thoreau’s original is “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Wilderness is often mistakenly substituted for wild­ness, though in this case, it is intentional. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.” First published in Atlantic Monthly (June 1862). I appreciate Cronon’s warning and I try to live my life mindful of my impact on the places where I work and live, but in the end, I think he’s wrong. Wilderness is not a distracting illusion; it is, to slightly misquote Thoreau, “the preservation of the world,” quite literally. The existence of wilderness areas helps to mitigate biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and provides space for recreation, reflection and research. This is what the authors of the Wilderness Act recognized 50 years ago and what supporters of it continue to argue today. I am a fan of wilderness, not only for what it provides me as a physical entity — a place where I can escape my daily obligations and reset my mental clock — but I am also a fan of its legal protection, although I acknowledge that even as it provides important benefits, setting aside millions of acres of land has social and economic consequences.

I also understand that wilderness is as much a concept — a creation of the mind — as it is an identifiable place. Nevertheless, I believe, and I think history bears me out, that we need wilderness to remind us that life transcends the daily grind and that we, as individuals and as communities, are connected to something larger than ourselves. Whether we visit wild places, or have only the opportunity to enjoy pictures taken by those who have, wilderness’s existence encourages us to contemplate our amazing, beautiful planet and to consider that we are part of a whole, even when we feel quite apart from it all.

Being on the edge of wilderness is, in my opinion, better than having no wilderness at all.

Lisa Brady is professor of history at Boise State, chair of the Idaho Humanities Council, editor of Environmental History and author of War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes During the American Civil War. Brady graduated from the University of New Mexico, holds masters' from University of Sydney (Australia) and Montana State and a PhD in American and Environmental History from the University of Kansas.

The top leaders of China and India, two of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases

The top leaders of China and India, two of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases, aren't planning to attend this month's United Nations summit on climate change, according to a diplomat at the UN.

President Xi Jinping of China and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon they won't be at the day-long meeting of world leaders on Sept. 23, the person said, requesting not to be identified discussing the leaders' plans. That deals a blow to a gathering meant to lay the groundwork for a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide, which is blamed for global warming.

"The issue for us is really on the commitments that countries will bring and the secretary general expects member states to come with strong and bold commitments on climate change," Ban's spokesman Stephane Dujarric said today in New York. He said he has nothing to add when asked about the leaders' attendance.

China is the world's top greenhouse-gas emitter, and India is third, after the U.S., according to World Bank data. Together China and India account for nearly a third of total emissions, and their carbon footprint is growing while it remains flat in the U.S. and Europe.

This old supercluster: Scientists measure the (massive) place we call home

The next time someone asks you where you live, you can answer with a straight face: Laniakea – roughly translated as "spacious heaven."

That's the Hawaiian name a team of astronomers has given to the 521-million-light-year wide supercluster the Milky Way inhabits. The christening marks the first time astronomers have clearly defined the boundaries of a supercluster.

Superclusters are some of the largest structures in the cosmos, built from galaxies, which gather in local groups, which then form galaxy clusters. The Milky Way's local group, for instance, contains more than 54 galaxies, is about 10.1 million light-years across, and has an estimated mass about 1.3 trillion times the mass of the sun. Laniakea hosts roughly 100,000 galaxies that collectively tip the scales at 100 million billion solar masses.

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The effort to precisely map this large-scale structure could help astronomers better understand how events at the dawn of the universe gave rise to the structure we see today.

Subtle quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments of the Big Bang – the enormous release of energy that gave rise to the universe – are thought to have ultimately led to visible variations in the universe's density. Astronomers have detected these variations in the early universe as ripples in the cosmic microwave background – the afterglow of the Big Bang. Now, understanding the structure of superclusters better could allow scientists essentially to start working backward from what they see today to see how closely the picture dovetails with other observations on the evolution of structure.

The work was conducted by a team of astronomers from the US, Israel, and France led by University of Hawaii astronomer R. Brent Tully and is described in a paper set to appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The team did more than define Laniakea's boundaries. It also revealed another "important" measure, says Mauro Giavalisco, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst: "The gravitational pull that the supercluster has exerted on the surrounding matter during the cosmic eons."

"This allows characterization of the size, matter, and basically how the supercluster grew," says Dr. Giavalisco, who was not a member of Dr. Tully's team of cosmic surveyors.      

Originally, the team's goal was simply to improve the accuracy of distance measurements to galaxies in the local universe, notes Tully in an e-mail.

"Going in, we had no thought about bounding Laniakea," he writes. The boundary "just fell out of our analysis. We made progress because we had more and better distance data than had been available."

They also developed a highly sophisticated analysis approach for interpreting the data. It showed how galaxies were moving in relation to one another, revealing patterns and groupings. 

Observations with ground-and space-based telescopes yielded accurate distances to 8,161 galaxies in all regions of the sky, allowing the team to build a 3D map of their distribution. The distance measurements allowed the team to calculate the theoretical pace at which the galaxies should be receding with the expansion of the universe. But the data also provided the actual recession velocities, which were different from the theoretical calculations. The difference shows how a galaxy or cluster is being influenced by the gravitational tug from other relatively nearby galaxies or clusters. This is known as a galaxy's peculiar velocity.

The team used peculiar velocities to see where galaxies were headed. Based on those observations, they defined the supercluster's boundary as the region along which the motion of galaxies diverge. In principle, this is much like the Continental Divide, the boundary along the spine of the Rocky Mountains that determines whether water flowing down hill will head east or west. But the boundary between superclusters is not so sharply defined, because galaxies are far more diffuse at the supercluster's outer edges, says Giavalisco.

In Laniakea's case, the supercluster's galaxies and galaxy clusters are headed toward a region of enormous mass that has been dubbed The Great Attractor. Recent studies have shown that the attractor is a close pair of very dense clusters.

Intriguingly, within Laniakea, there are filaments and sheets of galaxies separated by voids – which mimics the structure of the universe on the largest scales. The researchers note that over time Laniakea, like other components of the cosmic web, will dissipate with the accelerated expansion of the universe from the influence of dark energy.

Meanwhile, Laniakea may be on a trip of her own.

"Laniakea appears to be moving toward an even bigger structure called the Shapley concentration. This feature is currently poorly understood. Are we part of something even bigger than Laniakea? This possibility remains to be explored," Tully writes.

As for the Milky Way's place in all this? It lies on the outskirts of Laniakea, on a galactic cul-de-sac the end of one peculiar-velocity roadway toward the Great Attractor.

While astronomers have long known about the existence of superclusters, a consistent definition has been elusive. Indeed, if the team's definition meets with general acceptance, some of the clutches of galaxies within Laniakea may wind up being demoted from superclusters to mere clusters.

Cave drawings show early humans’ creativity, archaeologists say

A series of lines scratched into rock in a cave in Europe could be proof that a type of early human called Neanderthals were more intelligent and creative than previously thought.

The X-shaped engravings inside Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar are the first known examples of Neanderthal rock art, according to a team of scientists. The find is important because it shows that modern humans and their extinct cousins shared the capacity for creative expression.

“We will never know the meaning the design held for the maker or the Neanderthals who inhabited the cave, but the fact that they were marking their territory in this way before modern humans arrived in the region has huge implications for debates about what it is to be human and the origin of art,” said Paul Tacon, an expert in rock art at Australia’s Griffith University.

Not all archaeologists are convinced that Neanderthals made the carvings. A recent study reported that Neanderthals and modern humans overlapped by several thousand years.

“Any discovery that helps improve the public image of Neanderthals is welcome,” said Clive Gamble, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in England. “We know they spoke, lived in large social groups, looked after the sick, buried their dead and were highly successful in the ice-age environments of northern latitudes. As a result ,rock engraving should be entirely within their grasp.”

“What is critical, however, is the dating,” Gamble said. “While I want Neanderthals to be painting, carving and engraving, I’m reserving judgment.”