Scientific American: food, fracking, and the first Americans

I loved every article in the November issue of the Scientific American (subscription required.)

It will be so wonderful to merely have this issue alone as reading material in an upper-division general education class and discuss with students the science, politics, economics, and philosophy explicitly and implicitly addressed in the articles.  But, such a course does not exist ... ergo, I blog!

The editorial, and an article, present a compelling argument on the need to slow down our gung-ho approach to fracking--the fracturing of the shale layer in order to release the natural gas from down below.  The editorial points out that the "states are flying blind."  It was encouraging to read that Governor Chris Christie--my choice for the 2016 presidential elections--"vetoed a bill that would permanently ban fracking, then approved a one-year moratorium so his state could consider the results of the federal studies."  I tell you, this guy makes sense way more than other people do.

Now that we have reached that attention-grabbing seven billion number, we naturally start worrying again whether we can feed them all, especially when we know we will easily add another two billion-plus in less fifty years.  The essay here is not any doomsday Malthusian, unlike this one by Lester Brown in an issue a couple of years ago, but it lays out a few important variables that we need to consider, and offers five solutions too.Improving yields in Africa, Central America, and Eastern Europe is a key part of the puzzle.  This article, too, points out how much we can increase food availability if only we didn't use grains to fatten up livestock.  We can even have world peace before this can be accomplished! 

It was neat to read about the revolution in the understanding of when and how the earliest humans reached the Americas.  "They were literally strangers in a strange land. ... they exemplify the spirit of survival and adventure that represents the very nest of humanity."

I sometimes worry that we have lost that adventure spirit.  Everywhere I look, it is more often than not only wimps like me.  Whatever happened to the adventurous and wandering gene in us?  Don't we anymore want to go where no man has never gone before?  Have we become a bunch of self-satisfied creatures content to sit stupefied in front of big screen TV sets?  I hope not--that will be the end of humanity.

BTW, a funny juxtapostion on page 26: The headline screams "Meet your newest ancestor" and the bottom of the page--at the end of the short piece--is an image of Rick Perry and one of his anti-science statements.  You think this was intentional? A dig? I hope so :)