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LOST LANDSCAPE
Why do I remember a strange village
Like a secret I knew long ago,
Where a crowded flock of branded sheep
Filled the lane, now forever gone?
Why do I watch them so in memory today?
Recreate every movement, proven in a dream?
Time was passing. They strayed into the ignorance of time,
And, suddenly breaking rank, disappeared past the bend.
Why do I feel within a choked, divine weeping
That I will never hear the wind murmur in those fields,
Never see the distant dawn fill with light,
The shrubs littered with the lost wool of the sheep.
~ Boleslaw Leśmian, tr. Oriana
Leśmian grew up in Kiev, and I assume the sheep in the poem are Ukrainian (in term of locality, and not, of course, nationality) — but they could as well be French or Estonian, Hungarian or Lithuanian. The village, the sheep, the fields — it’s all universal. We are the refugees of time, with inaccurate memory as our inner poet, recreating a lost paradise.
No doubt in reality the paradise was marred with mud and puddles, a village drunk howling an obscene song, skinny children fed mostly potatoes. That doesn’t matter to the inner poet. It was paradise with bees and honeysuckle. The sheep were the color of angels.
photo: David WhyteIn the opening poem of the blog, and your comments, I feel a deep sadness, a poignancy we all feel as we are all truly "refugees of time." The past can never be recaptured, it is all changed and gone, only relics left behind...a few sticks and stones, the traces of an old road, our faulty, precious memories. This was brought home to me recently by some pictures of where my old home of 35 years once stood, now burnt down and all the remains removed...now no more than a hole in the ground. What made me particularly sad was to see they had removed the huge tulip poplar that grew near the house, probably because they had to in order to do the demolition. I loved that tree.
Oriana:
During my two trips to Poland, it was interesting to see the new and unexpected. But what I treasured is what I remembered: the historical parts of the city, chestnuts in bloom, simply seeing people in the streets and squares.
Attachment is such a potent force that it has affected some heavy decisions. In the middle of Warsaw stands the Palace of Culture, a Soviet-style wedding-cake skyscraper, admittedly no jewel of architecture. Some have demanded that it be demolished. But people of my generation begged for its preservation because of their attachment to it. As I understand, it’s been decide that the giant building will stand until the post-war generation is gone.
The Catholic church showed no such compassionate understanding with its Vatican II reforms that uglified and “Protestantized” the churches — never mind those who grew up with the beauty of the Latin liturgy and lots of icons and statues. Then the Latin mass was allowed again, in some churches, “for those who want to maintain an emotional tie with childhood.”
Life is naturally full of losses, we don’t need to make it any worse.
*
“I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays.
Poetry’s poetry.
It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.”
~ Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams and Anna Magnani*
FAULKNER AND JIM CROW SOUTH
~ There’s a moment in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) that keeps coming back to me on the hot days of this long hard summer. A passing stranger has found a body in a burning house just outside the imaginary town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the body of a white woman named Joanna Burden, her throat cut, and with the gash so deep that her head is almost off.
But that’s not what I go back to: not her murder, nor the murderer’s identity, nor even the fact that she’d spent her life in the town where her “carpet bagger” relatives were killed for trying to get black people the vote. What sticks with me is the first step that the local sheriff takes in running his investigation: “Get me a nigger.” That’s what he tells his deputy, and that last word falls like a blow precisely because the thought is so utterly casual, so inevitable in a world in which its violence comes as a matter of course.
The sheriff doesn’t care which black man his deputy finds. Anyone will do, because he assumes that any black man in the neighborhood will know about the crime, or at least can be made to know. Maybe the murderer was living in that little cabin down back of the house? The man the deputy hauls up claims, at first, to know nothing at all, his voice “a little sullen, quite alert, covertly alert.” He watches the sheriff, wary of a blow, and doesn’t pay attention to the white men standing behind and surrounding him. Then he feels the snap and sear of a leather belt across his back. “I reckon you aint tried hard enough to remember,” the sheriff says, and the belt falls again, its buckle rasping across the victim’s flesh, a physical violence as automatic as that racial epithet itself.
Being black makes that man as liable to attack as if he had committed a crime. It’s dangerous, not telling the sheriff what he wants to know, and yet it might also be dangerous to speak. Two white men have been living in that cabin, bootleggers; or at least two men who look to be white. Should that nameless black man give up their names, should he trust his state’s constituted authorities? Will the police protect him if talking gets him in trouble? Anyone who reads Light in August will understand his caution, knowing as the belt falls that this isn’t an isolated bit of brutality. It’s standard police work in that Jim Crow world, and looking it over again helps this white reader understand the long history behind the deep suspicion of law enforcement that so many Americans feel.
There is a deep congruity between the movements of Faulkner’s mind, with its sense of an inescapable family trauma, and the history and culture of his region, so deep that it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. So many of the ills he describes are with us still. There’s the voter suppression that sparks the murder of those “carpetbaggers” in Light in August; or his suggestion in The Hamlet (1940) that the black landowners in one rural district have all been driven out, with violence functioning as a primitive form of redlining. He was born into an understanding of the way white supremacy works, and a part of him never stopped believing in the racial hierarchy that shaped his boyhood, even as the writer grew increasingly critical of it.
Time in Faulkner’s world both creeps forward and stands still, like the mule-drawn wagon in the opening scene of Light in August, “moving forever and without progress.” So, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the Canadian Shreve McCannon describes his Mississippi-born Harvard roommate, Quentin Compson, as having grown up in a world of “defeated grandfathers,” a world that can’t stop reminding him “to never forget.” Faulkner’s characters can’t put anything behind them, and indeed many of them don’t want to, the white ones anyway. They prefer to live in the moment of loss, as though they were their own ancestors’ ghosts, refusing to let the past become past.
Faulkner didn’t enjoy much local popularity when he was alive, not even after he won the Nobel Prize. He told too many inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.” Yet, by now, he’s a tourist draw. His own statue in bronze sits on a bench in front of city hall, and that Confederate memorial in the square is so persistent a point of reference in his pages as to seem a feature of the natural landscape, rather than the product of human choice. Certainly, it’s what the visitor expects to find: the marble man looming up before the courthouse clock, looking as if he’s always been there and always will.
That statue appears throughout Faulkner’s work, but it plays a special part at the end of The Sound and the Fury (1929). On Easter Sunday, 1928, a black teenager called Luster takes the mentally disabled and nonverbal Benjy Compson for his weekly visit to the cemetery. It’s the first time Luster has been put in charge of the Compson’s horse-drawn buggy, and as he approaches the square, the eyes of the statue upon him, Luster makes a mistake. He takes the carriage to the left of that memorial, hoping to show off to any friends in the square. But Benjy needs routine, he needs repetition. With him, the carriage has always gone to the right, and now he begins to wail, to bellow in “astonishment… horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless, just sound.”
Then Luster is thrown from his seat, and a fist crashes down on his head. Benjy’s malignant brother, Jason, has appeared, “jumping across the square and onto the step” of the carriage; he grabs the reins from Luster, threatens to kill him, and then slews the buggy around to the right. Soon enough, Benjy grows quiet, with everything moving once more “in its ordered place” around him.
Meanwhile, the marble man stands sentry in the courthouse square over the re-subdued black body. Jason’s fist; the deputy’s belt; the rope that figures in some of Faulkner’s other stories, too. The Sound and the Fury links such Confederate memorials to the legitimized violence of the white society that built them, and, in doing so, stands for me as a monument of another sort, a witness to the injustice of a world from which, as Toni Morrison once said, he would not allow himself to look away. ~
The world Faulkner describes has a particularly damaging relationship with the past, in that it refuses to let it go, and so perpetuates its injustices and brutality into the present. Part of the heritage of our slave-owning past is that insistence on things remaining the same, no matter how wrong they are. It is at once a romanticization and falsification of the horrors of the past, and a method of maintaining those horrors, that order of white supremacy that still poisons so much of the present. This refusal to move forward may be seen most obviously in the South, but is essential in Trump's MAGA hat-wearing base, who long for the pre-desegregation days of the 50's and Jim Crow eras. In this sense the past is not past at all — we are still struggling, some to remain there, or as close as they can get, others to resolve that long struggle with injustice and make the future possible.
Oriana:
It’s amazing how the past still lives on. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that progress has been made: we’ve had a black president, a popular black general, a Secretary of State, and so on. But we are still awfully aware how exceptional that is. It will take a few more decades before it’s simply normal.
*
TC Walker mural in Gloucester, Virginia. Thomas Calhoun Walker, teacher, first Black lawyer in Virginia, and government official, was born into slavery on June 16, 1862 in a small cabin at Spring Hill in Gloucester County. He was totally dedicated to the welfare of the African American population of Gloucester County. He died at the age of 91.
POLITICS JUNKIES VERSUS THE INDIFFERENT — THE REAL DIVIDE?
~ The common view of American politics today is of a clamorous divide between Democrats and Republicans, an unyielding, inevitable clash of harsh partisan polarization.
But that focus obscures another, enormous gulf — the gap between those who follow politics closely and those who don’t. Call it the “attention divide.”
What we found is that most Americans — upward of 80 percent to 85 percent — follow politics casually or not at all. Just 15 percent to 20 percent follow it closely (the people we call “deeply involved”): the group of people who monitor everything from covfefe to the politics of “Cuties.”
At the start of the year (i.e., pre-pandemic), we asked people to name the two most important issues facing the country. As expected, we found some clear partisan divides: For example, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to cite illegal immigration as an important issue.
But on a number of other issues, we found that Americans fall much less neatly into partisan camps. For example, Democrats and Republicans who don’t follow politics closely believe that low hourly wages are one of the most important problems facing the country. But for hard partisans, the issue barely registers.
Partisan Republicans were most likely to say drug abuse was the most important problem facing the country. But less-attentive Republicans ranked it second to last, and they were also concerned about the deficit and divisions between Democrats and Republicans.
Among Democrats, the political junkies think the influence of wealthy donors and interest groups is an urgent problems. But less-attentive Democrats are 25 percentage points more likely to name moral decline as an important problem facing the country — a problem partisan Democrats never even mention.
These gaps extend beyond issues to feelings about the other party. Hard partisans are twice as likely as people who pay less attention to politics to say that they would be unhappy if their child married someone of the opposing party.
Hard partisans are also more likely to speak out about these political likes and dislikes. Almost 45 percent of people who are deeply involved say they frequently share their views on social media — in some cases, daily. It’s only 11 percent for those without a politics habit. To put this in perspective, a Pew study finds that 10 percent of Twitter users are responsible for 97 percent of all tweets about politics.
This gap between the politically indifferent and hard, loud partisans exacerbates the perception of a hopeless division in American politics because it is the partisans who define what it means to engage in politics. When a Democrat imagines a Republican, she is not imagining a co-worker who mostly posts cat pictures and happens to vote differently; she is more likely imagining a co-worker she had to mute on Facebook because the Trump posts became too hard to bear.
We see this effect in a study we did with three other political scientists, James Druckman, Samara Klar and Matthew Levendusky. We asked a group of over 3,000 Americans to describe either themselves or members of the other party. Only 27 percent of these people said that they discuss politics frequently; a majority consider themselves moderates. But nearly 70 percent of these people believe that a typical member of the other party talks about politics incessantly and is definitely not moderate.
For partisans, politics is a morality play, a struggle of good versus evil. But most Americans just see two angry groups of people bickering over issues that may not always seem pressing or important.
How can politics better match the opinions of a majority of Americans? The fact is, it’s not an easy problem to solve. We can try to give the hardened partisans less voice in the news.
Featuring people who exemplify partisan conflict and extremist ideas elevates their presence in politics (though of course by definition, it is the partisans who are most closely watching the news who are also most likely to give their opinions). This is particularly true of social media: What a vocal minority shares on social media is not the opinion of the public. Yet such political tweets, as the political communication scholar Shannon McGregor finds, are increasingly making their way into news coverage as stand-ins for public opinion.
There might be an advantage for politicians who focus less on the demands of partisans and more on tangible issues. Yes, hard partisans are more likely to reward ideological victories, but they are also a minority of the electorate.
Each day, partisan Democrats wonder whether that day’s “outrage” will finally change how people feel about President Trump. Partisan Republicans wonder the same thing about Joe Biden. But most “regular” voters are not paying that much attention to the daily onslaught. It turns them off.
And the major scandals that do break through? Well, to many of them, that is “just politics.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-politics-americans.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
This seems strangely relevant today, with the poor voting to make the rich richer: “A thread from everyone, and the naked will have a shirt." There is no beggar but has his thread of cotton, and he will not grudge it to a naked man — no, nor even to a fully dressed one; but will bestow it on the first comer. The poor, who want to forget their poverty, are very ready with their threads. Moreover, they prefer to give them to the rich, rather than to a fellow-tramp. To load the rich with benefits, must not one be very rich indeed?” ~ Lev Shestov
*
ARE SKYSCRAPERS OBSOLETE?
~ If no one ever built a skyscraper ever again, anywhere, who would truly miss them? I ask, because the engineer Tim Snelson, of the design consultancy Arup, has just blown a hole in any claim they might have had to be environmentally sustainable. Writing in this month’s issue of the architecture magazine Domus, he points out that a typical skyscraper will have at least double the carbon footprint of a 10-story building of the same floor area.
He is talking about the resources that go into building it, what is called its “embodied” energy. Tall buildings are more structurally demanding than lower ones – it takes a lot of effort, for example, to stop them swaying – and so require more steel and concrete. In London, which is mostly built on clay as opposed to Manhattan’s rock, they require ample foundations.
Snelson also mentions “in-use” energy consumption and carbon emissions – what is needed to cool and heat and run lifts, which he says are typically 20% more for tall than medium-height buildings.
If all this might seem pretty obvious, it’s good to have calculations to attach to a hunch. And tall buildings are still sold on the basis that they are good for the environment. Mostly the argument is about density – if you pile a lot of homes or workplaces high on one spot, it is said, then you can use land and public transport more efficiently. There’s some truth in this, but you can also achieve high levels of density without going above 10 or 12 stories.
Every now and again you get a one-off skyscraper design that makes play of its environmental features. The Gherkin, where cooling air was to flow through spiraling internal atria, was an early example. Strata SE1, the south London tower with three wind turbines at its top was another. Often these don’t perform as promised. Even when they do, they’re fighting to overcome the self-inflicted environmental handicap of being tall buildings in the first place.
They have got away with it in part because embodied energy hasn’t until recently been paid as much attention as energy in use. It has been deemed acceptable – by the building regulations, by architects, by the professional media – to rip untold tonnes of matter from the earth and to pump similar tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, in order to produce magical architectural devices that might, if all their wizardry were to function as promised, pay back some of their carbon debt some time in the next century. By then it might be too late.
There’s another meaning to “environment”, which describes personal rather than global surroundings. In this respect, it’s a bit of mystery why towers are thought desirable: you typically progress from a windy and inhospitable plaza to a soulless lobby, to a long lift ride, to another lobby, to a flat that has to be fortified and sealed against strong winds, to a balcony (if you’re lucky) with a similarly embattled relationship to nature. Good design can mitigate at least some of these deficiencies, but good design is weirdly hard to find in new tall buildings.
Skyscraper apartments are sold on the view, with prices rising the higher you go up a building, which can indeed be spectacular. But this visual buzz goes with a range of sub-optimal physical experiences, which have been made that much less attractive by the spread of a virus that seems to thrive in air-conditioned and enclosed spaces. Architecture is not just about things you can see.
Meanwhile, towers continue to be built. An annual survey by the independent organization New London Architecture has found that in the capital 525 buildings of 20 stories or more are in the pipeline – either under construction, approved or going through the processes of planning applications. Other British cities, including Manchester, Liverpool and Bristol, have succumbed to the belief that there is something glamorous about this well-worn and old-fashioned building type.
In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a concrete stump stands in the desert that may or may not turn into the world’s first kilometer-high building, its progress having been stalled by the arrest on corruption charges of its patron, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in 2017. If it is ever completed, it will not be a sign of economic dynamism, as might have been said of the 20th century’s skyscrapers in New York and Chicago, but of the ability of a few members of an authoritarian society to accrue vast wealth for themselves.
In Britain, tall buildings are signs of failed planning, which finds it hard to discover the space for more sustainable and humane ways of building homes. In Gulf states (and indeed in Britain, to the extent that dirty money often goes into tower projects), skyscrapers often indicate corruption. What they are not are markers of progress.
Tim Snelson puts it well: “While the collective progression of civilizations over centuries is still largely measured by the ability to build bigger, faster and taller, we have come to the point where we must put the limits on ourselves and apply our forces to the challenge of building sustainably, above all else, or risk destroying the very future that will hold our legacy.” Quite so. And why, really and truly, would you want to live in one of these things? ~
London's Financial DistrictOriana:
It’s fascinating how we’ve been moving away from “think big” toward the appreciation of the beauty and advantages of smallness. “Down-sizing” is the new trend. But it’s still radical to suggest that we should no longer build skyscrapers. Once symbols of modernity, skyscrapers will be increasingly perceived as obsolete dinosaurs.
I think the pandemic showed us that places where a lot of people are packed together in an enclosed space are not desirable. Classrooms, army barracks, prisons, nursing homes — all those become incubators for pathogens.
And before the pandemic, there have been instances of fire breaking out in high-rise buildings — the nightmare scenario of the “towering inferno.”
There is also a problem with the wind created by skyscrapers:
~ Accelerated winds near skyscrapers are caused by the "downdraught effect", says Nada Piradeepan, an expert on wind properties at engineering consultancy firm Wintech. This happens where the air hits a building and, with nowhere else to go, is pushed up, down and around the sides. The air forced downwards increases wind speed at street level.
There is also an acceleration of wind around the side of the buildings if it has completely square corners.
And, if several towers stand near each other, there is an effect known as "channeling", a wind acceleration created by air having to be squeezed through a narrow space. This is a form of the Venturi effect, named after the 18th-19th Century Italian scientist Giovanni Battista Venturi.
As the air at higher altitudes is colder, it can create chillier micro-climates when downdraught from skyscrapers reaches street level. This can be welcome during hot spells, but less so in winter. And, as buildings go higher, the speed of air hitting them rises, increasing ground winds below. ~
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33426889
Oriana:
Note the recent trend toward rounded surfaces. That helps. But maybe we should simply stop building skyscrapers?
Shanghai Tower
Mary:
Skyscrapers remind me of Ozymandias — that kind of "look at me" pride. But they are not designed for comfort or as a good place for living. Yes, there are both expensive apartments (the privileged gotta have that view) and Hi-rises built to house the poor, but most are filled with offices, not living space. Cities' downtowns are filled with clusters of these towers, making the ground level, the streets, cold, windy, and dark. They obscure a lot of the sky, and create those shearing winds as described.
And they are counter intuitive...all those windows that don't open, all the energy expended to keep them upright and reduce sway, and, aside from the issues of pathogens like legionella in water systems, think of the plumbing itself…all that flushing and pumping to be done!! Skyscrapers may very well become architectural dinosaurs, not worth the cost of that huge carbon footprint.
Oriana:
I love your comparison to dinosaurs! I think the future is beginning to look different than what we were conditioned to expect: not an ever-larger population, but a gradual shrinking, and not skyscrapers, but buildings more “on the human scale.”
The article singled out the energy needed to run the elevators. You pointed out having to pump water that high for flush toilets. We take so many luxuries for granted! It can’t continue. Dinosaurs will have to go.
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HOW NORWEGIAN COMMANDO SKIERS DELAYED NAZI GERMANY’S WORK ON THE NUCLEAR BOMB
~ After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s memory for a hundred years.”
These commandos did know, however, that an earlier attempt at the same mission by British soldiers had been a complete failure. Two gliders transporting the men had both crashed while en route to their target. The survivors were quickly captured by German soldiers, tortured and executed. If similarly captured, these Norwegians could expect the same fate as their British counterparts, hence the suicide pills.
What Colonel Tronstad, himself a prewar chemistry professor, was able to tell his men was that the Vemork chemical plant made “heavy water,” an important ingredient for the Germans’ weapons research. Beyond that, the Norwegian troops knew nothing of atomic bombs or how the heavy water was used.
“Heavy water” is just that: water with a molecular weight of 20 rather than the normal 18 atomic mass units, or amu. It’s heavier than normal because each of the two hydrogen atoms in heavy H2O weighs two rather than one amu. (The one oxygen atom in H2O weighs 16 amu.) While the nucleus of a normal hydrogen atom has a single subatomic particle called a proton, the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms in heavy water have both a proton and a neutron – another type of subatomic particle that weighs the same as a proton. Water molecules with heavy hydrogen atoms are extremely rare in nature (less than one in a billion natural water molecules are heavy), so the Germans had to artificially produce all the heavy water that they needed.
There is something heavy water does that normal water can’t. When fast neutrons released by the splitting of atoms (that is, nuclear fission) pass through heavy water, interactions with the heavy water molecules cause those neutrons to slow down, or moderate. This is important because slowly moving neutrons are more efficient at splitting uranium atoms than fast moving neutrons. Since neutrons traveling through heavy water split atoms more efficiently, less uranium should be needed to achieve a critical mass; that’s the minimum amount of uranium required to start a spontaneous chain reaction of atoms splitting in rapid succession. It is this chain reaction, within the critical mass, that releases the explosive energy of the bomb. That’s why the Germans needed the heavy water; their strategy for producing an atomic explosion depended upon it.
Tthe U.S. approach, using enriched uranium rather than ordinary uranium, did not rely on having to synthesize the extremely scarce heavy water. Its rarity made heavy water the Achilles’ heel of the German nuclear bomb program.
Rather than repeating the British strategy of sending dozens of men in gliders, flying with heavy weapons and equipment (including bicycles!) to traverse the snow-covered roads, and making a direct assault at the plant’s front gates, the Norwegians would rely on an alternate strategy. They’d parachute a small group of expert skiers into the wilderness that surrounded the plant. The lightly armed skiers would then quickly ski their way to the plant, and use stealth rather than force to gain entry to the heavy water production room in order to destroy it with explosives.
Six Norwegian soldiers were dropped in to meet up with four others already on location. (The four had parachuted in weeks earlier to set up a lighted runway on a lake for the British gliders that never arrived.) On the ground, they were joined by a Norwegian spy. The 11-man group was initially slowed by severe weather conditions, but once the weather finally cleared, the men made rapid progress toward their target across the snow-covered countryside.
The Vemork plant clung to a steep hillside. Upon arriving at the ravine that served as a kind of protective moat, the soldiers could see that attempting to cross the heavily guarded bridge would be futile. So under the cover of darkness they descended to the bottom of the ravine, crossed the frozen stream, and climbed up the steep cliffs to the plant, thus completely bypassing the bridge. The Germans had thought the ravine impassable, so hadn’t guarded against such an approach.
The Norwegians were then able to sneak past sentries and find their way to the heavy water production room, relying on maps of the plant provided by Norwegian resistance workers. Upon entering the heavy water room, they quickly set their timed explosives and left. They escaped the scene during the chaotic aftermath of the explosion. No lives were lost, and not a single shot was fired by either side.
The winter sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant in Telemark County of Nazi-occupied Norway was one of the most dramatic and important military missions of World War II. It put the German nuclear scientists months behind and allowed the United States to overtake the Germans in the quest to produce the first atomic bomb.
The U.S. atomic bomb arrived weeks too late for use against Germany. Nevertheless, had the Germans developed their own bomb just a few months earlier, the outcome of the war in Europe might have been completely different. The months of setback caused by the Norwegians’ sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant may very well have prevented a German victory. ~
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-sneak-attack-by-norways-skiing-soldiers-deprived-nazis-atomic-bomb-180968278/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR0WCxoes1_n8_-2BT4DnzALTd7lRd6MXeHCNGTAH69kBdr6WSD8ISTD7x4
Oriana:
At first I wasn’t planning to use this article. Only when I had a “heavy water” dream obviously related to it, did I realize how shaken up I was by the fact that the Nazis were so close to having nuclear weapons — which they certainly would not have hesitated to use. I also remembered the huge impression than P.K. Dick’s “The Man in the White Castle” made on me. The novel imagines the world after a Nazi victory.
Let us give silent, posthumous thanks to the brave Norwegians who took part in the Vemork operation. They deserve to be better known.
Today it’s climate change rather than nuclear warfare that appears to be the chief threat to humanity’s survival (though an old biology professor of mine put his bet on a pandemic, decades ahead of his time). We keep coming close to catastrophe. So far, we’ve managed to make it through near-escapes. Eventually we may not be so lucky.
from a movie recreation of the Vemork mission
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CAN MINI-FORESTS HELP FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE?
~ Tiny, dense forests are springing up around Europe as part of a movement aimed at restoring biodiversity and fighting the climate crisis.
Often sited in schoolyards or alongside roads, the forests can be as small as a tennis court. They are based on the work of the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who has planted more than 1,000 such forests in Japan, Malaysia and elsewhere.
Advocates for the method say the miniature forests grow 10 times faster and become 30 times denser and 100 times more biodiverse than those planted by conventional methods. This result is achieved by planting saplings close together, three per square meter, using native varieties adapted to local conditions. A wide variety of species – ideally 30 or more – are planted to recreate the layers of a natural forest.
Scientists say such ecosystems are key to meeting climate goals, estimating that natural forests can store 40 times more carbon than single-species plantations. The Miyawaki forests are designed to regenerate land in far less time than the 70-plus years it takes a forest to recover on its own.
“This is a great thing to do,” said Eric Dinerstein, a wildlife scientist who co-authored a recent paper calling for half of the Earth’s surface to be protected or managed for nature conservation to avoid catastrophic climate change. “So this could be another aspect for suburban and urban areas, to create wildlife corridors through contiguous ribbons of mini-forest.”
The mini-forests could attract migratory songbirds, Dinerstein said. “Songbirds eat caterpillars and adult insects, and even small pockets of forests, if planted with native species, could become a nutritious fast-food fly-in site for hungry birds.”
In 2017, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands monitored newly planted mini-forests and concluded that they “increase the biodiversity compared to the nearby forest. Both the number of species groups and the number of individuals is generally higher than in the reference forests.”
The higher biodiversity is due partly to the forests’ young age and openness, explained Fabrice Ottburg, an animal ecologist who led the Wageningen study. This allows more sunlight to reach flowering plants that attract pollinators. Diversity is also boosted by planting multiple species, which “provide more variety in food and shelter for a higher diversity of animals like insects, snails, butterflies, amphibians, bugs, grasshoppers”, Ottburg said.
In the Netherlands, the conservation group IVN Nature Education has helped cities and households to plant 100 Miyawaki-style forests since 2015. It is on track to more than double that number by 2022 and is working on similar efforts in a dozen other countries. Assorted groups in Belgium and France have recently created at least 40 mini-forests.
The first in France was planted in March 2018 beside a busy four-lane road on the edge of Paris. The dense thicket was intended to reduce noise and filter air for the adjacent neighborhood. On the day of planting, 40 people gathered with 31 species of saplings to bring new life to ground that had been prepared with compost from local horse stables.
Two years earlier, Enrico Fusto and Damien Saraceni had applied for funding from Paris’s participatory budget, a scheme that asks residents for ideas about how to spend 5% of the city’s funds. The pair proposed mini-forests, saying they could help increase the level of tree cover in the city, which is currently less than 10%, much lower than many other major cities. “Each community can be the protagonist of its own restoration story,” said Fusto.
In Toulouse, a mini-forest group planted 1,200 saplings on a 400 sq meter patch in March.
Nicolas de Brabandère, a Belgian naturalist and founder of Urban Forests, began planting Miyawaki-style forests in 2016, organizing volunteers and local authorities to plant 300 saplings on a grassy strip of land near a road. Now his first forest is 3 meters tall, its floor a thick layer of humus.
De Brabandère believes the participatory nature and speed of a mini-forest is what appeals to people, and he predicts a bright future for the movement. “Every time I tell the story, everybody likes it,” he said. “So I have a good feeling the trend will continue.”
Mary:
Oh the restorative powers of those mini-forests!! What a marvelous idea, and so simple, so easily done. Imagine replacing dead-space lawns, roadside wastes and berms with vital, dense, diverse plants that renew the soil and sustain wildlife! Like that simple, low tech and vitally effective mission of the Norwegian skiers, this could make a huge difference in our chances at survival.
Oriana:
We need mini-forests everywhere we can put them. But that would require a different mentality — really wanting to take care of the earth, seeing it as a garden for us to cultivate.
Hopefully the small steps here and there will add up. And just the tree planting could create lots of jobs, though we might have to start with volunteer labor.
*
THE “AHA” MOMENT ABOUT BLACK HOLES
~ On a crisp September day in 1964, Roger Penrose had a visit from an old friend. The British cosmologist Ivor Robinson was back in England from Dallas, Texas, where he lived and worked. Whenever the two met up, they never lacked for conversation, and their talk on this occasion was non-stop and wide ranging.
As the pair walked near Penrose’s office at Birkbeck College in London, they paused briefly on the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic. The momentary halt in their stroll coincided with a lull in conversation and they fell into silence as they crossed the road.
In that moment, Penrose’s mind drifted. It travelled 2.5 billion light years through the vacuum of outer space to the seething mass of a whirling quasar. He imagined how gravitational collapse was taking over, pulling an entire galaxy in deeper and closer to the centre. Like a twirling figure skater pulling their arms in close to their body, the mass would spin more and more quickly as it contracted.
This brief mental flicker led to a revelation – one that 56 years later would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Like many relativists — theoretical physicists working to test, explore and extend Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity — Penrose had spent the early 1960s studying a strange, but particularly knotty contradiction known as “the singularity problem”.
Einstein published his General Theory in 1915, revolutionizing scientists’ understanding of space, time, gravity, matter and energy. By the 1950s, Einstein’s theory was wildly successful, but many of its predictions were still regarded as improbable and untestable. His equations showed, for instance, that it was theoretically possible for gravitational collapse to force enough matter into a sufficiently small region that it would become infinitely dense, forming a “singularity” from which not even light could escape. These became known as black holes.
But within such a singularity, the known laws of physics — including Einstein’s own theory of relativity that predicted it — would no longer apply.
Singularities were fascinating to mathematical relativists for this very reason. Most physicists, however, agreed our Universe was too orderly to actually contain such regions. And even if singularities did exist, there would be no way to observe them.
“There was huge scepticism for a long time,” says Penrose. “People expected there to be a bounce: that an object would collapse and swirl around in some complicated way, and come swishing back out again.”
In the late 1950s, observations from the emerging field of radio astronomy threw these ideas into turmoil. Radio astronomers detected new cosmic objects that appeared to be very bright, very distant and very small. First known as “quasi-stellar objects” – later shortened to “quasars” – these objects appeared to exhibit too much energy in too small a space. While it seemed impossible, every new observation pointed toward the idea that quasars were ancient galaxies in the process of collapsing into singularities.
Scientists were forced to ask themselves whether singularities were not as unlikely as everyone thought? Was this prediction of relativity more than just a mathematical flight of fancy?
In Austin, Princeton, and Moscow, at Cambridge and Oxford, in South Africa, New Zealand, India, and elsewhere, cosmologists, astronomers, and mathematicians scrambled to find a definitive theory that could explain the nature of quasars.
Most scientists approached the challenge by trying to identify highly specialized circumstances under which a singularity might form.
Penrose, then a reader at Birkbeck College in London, took a different approach. His natural instinct had always been to search for general solutions, underlying principles and essential mathematical structures. He spent long hours at Birkbeck, working at a large chalkboard covered in curves and twists of diagrams of his own design.
In 1963, a team of Russian theorists led by Isaac Khalatnikov published an acclaimed paper that confirmed what most scientists still believed – singularities were not a part of our physical Universe. In the Universe, they said, collapsing dust clouds or stars would indeed expand back out again long before they reached the point of singularity. There had to be some other explanation for quasars.
Penrose was skeptical.
“I had the strong feeling that with the methods they were using, it was unlikely they could have come to a firm conclusion about it,” he says. “It seemed to me the problem needed to be looked at in a more general way than they were doing, which was a somewhat limited focus.”
Still, while he rejected their arguments, he still could not develop a general solution for the singularity problem. That was until the visit by Robinson. Although Robinson too was researching the singularity problem, the pair didn’t discuss it during their conversation on that autumn day of 1964 in London.
During the brief quiet of that fateful street crossing, however, Penrose realized that the Russians were wrong.
All of that energy, movement and mass shrinking together would create a heat so intense that radiation would blast out on every wavelength in every direction. The smaller and faster it got, the brighter it would glow.
He mentally mapped his chalkboard drawings and journal sketches onto that distant object, searching his mind for the point the Russians’ predicted, where this cloud would explode back out again.
No such point existed. In his mind’s eye, Penrose at last saw how the collapse would continue unimpeded. Outside the densifying centre, the object would shine with more light than all the stars in our galaxy. And deep within, light would bend at dramatic angles, spacetime warping until every direction converged on every other.
There would come a point of no return. Light, space and time would all come to a full stop. A black hole.
At that moment, Penrose knew a singularity didn’t require any special circumstances. In our Universe, singularities weren’t impossible. They were inevitable.
Back on the other side of the street, he picked up his conversation with Robinson, and immediately forgot what he had been thinking about. They bid farewell, and Penrose returned to the chalk clouds and stacks of paper in his office.
The rest of the afternoon went as normal, except Penrose found himself in an inordinately good mood. He could not figure out why. He began reviewing his day, investigating what might be powering his euphoria.
His mind returned to that moment of silence crossing the street. And it all came flooding back. He had solved the singularity problem.
He began writing down equations, testing, editing, rearranging. The argument was still rough, but it all worked. A gravitational collapse required only some very general, easy-to-meet energy conditions, to collapse into infinite density. Penrose knew at that moment there had to be billions of singularities littering the cosmos.
It was an idea that would upend our understanding of the Universe and shape what we now know about it today.
Within two months, Penrose had begun giving talks on the theorem. In mid-December, he submitted a paper to the academic journal Physical Review Letters, which was published on 18 January 1965 – just four months after he crossed the street with Ivor Robinson.
The response was not quite what he hoped. The Penrose Singularity Theorem was debated. Refuted. Contradicted.
The debate came to a head at the International Congress on General Relativity and Gravity in London later that year.
“It was not very friendly. The Russians were pretty annoyed, and people were reluctant to admit they were mistaken,” says Penrose. The conference ended with the debate unresolved.
But not long after, it came out that the Russian paper had errors in its calculations – the mathematics was fatally flawed, their thesis no longer tenable.
By late 1965, the Penrose Singularity Theorem was gaining traction all over the world. His singular flash of insight became a driving force in cosmology. He had done more than explain what a quasar was – he had revealed a major truth about the underlying reality of our Universe. Whatever models of the Universe people came up with from then on had to include singularities, which meant including science that goes beyond relativity.
Singularities also began to seep into the public consciousness, thanks partly to their becoming known evocatively as “black holes”, a term first used publicly by American science journalist Ann Ewing.
Stephen Hawking famously built on Penrose’s theorem to upend theories about the origin of the Universe after the pair worked together on singularities. Singularities became central to every theory about the nature, history and future of the Universe. Experimentalists identified other singularities – including the one at the heart of the hypermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy discovered by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Penrose in 2020.
Penrose himself went on to develop an alternative to the Big Bang Theory known as Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, the evidence for which could come from the remnant signals from ancient black holes.
In 2013, engineer and computer scientist Katie Bouman led a team of researchers which developed an algorithm that they hoped would allow black holes to be photographed. In April 2019, the Event Horizons telescope used that algorithm to capture the first images of a black hole, providing dramatic visual confirmation of both Einstein’s and Penrose’s once controversial theories.
While Penrose, now 89 years old, is pleased to have been awarded the highest honor in physics, the Nobel Prize, but there is something else pressing on his mind.
“It feels weird. I’ve just been trying to adjust myself. It’s very flattering and a huge honor and much appreciated,” he tells me a few hours after receiving the news. “But on the other hand, I am trying to write three different (scientific) articles at the same time, and this makes it harder than it was before.” The phone, he explains, hasn’t stopped ringing with people congratulating him and journalists asking for interviews. And all that clamor is distracting him from focusing on his latest theories.
Penrose knows better than anyone the power of silence and the flash of insight it can deliver. ~
Mary:
Penrose's insight about black holes that came in a moment of "drifting" inattention reminds me of a kind of creative process many, both in the arts and sciences, are familiar with.
You are mulling over thoughts of a particular sort, but without true coherency or direction...then eventually, and seemingly suddenly, it comes together out of nowhere, when you don't expect it and aren't even thinking about it. Sometimes these solutions appear in a dream, sometimes in a kind of pause in conscious thought, like Penrose experienced.
Both parts of the process seem necessary: the period of rumination or consideration, ideas and questions floating around, and that moment of pause in the dominance of conscious thought, when your answer, your creative solution, rises to the surface as though coming from an ocean's deepest unlit space.
Oriana:
Most cognitive activity is unconscious — and then the sudden insight, the answer — “sudden” because we are not aware of the many stages of neural processing. Learning to trust my unconscious, not to fret because I didn’t instantly have the right word or ending, was one of the most pleasant discoveries in my life.
And in my case, when it comes to poems, it can take years! And yet it happens: the right words feel inevitable.
*
THE GREAT PERMIAN EXTINCTION
~ Life on Earth has a long, but also an extremely turbulent history. On more than one occasion, the majority of all species became extinct and an already highly developed biodiversity shrank to a minimum again, changing the course of evolution each time. The most extensive mass extinction took place about 252 million years ago. It marked the end of the Permian Epoch and the beginning of the Triassic Epoch. About three quarters of all land life and about 95 percent of life in the ocean disappeared within only a few thousand years.
Gigantic volcanic activities in today's Siberia and the release of large amounts of methane from the sea floor have been long debated as potential triggers of the Permian-Triassic extinction.
For their study, the BASE-LiNE Earth team used a previously often neglected environmental archive: the shells of fossil brachiopods. "These are clam-like organisms that have existed on Earth for more than 500 million years. We were able to use well-preserved brachiopod fossils from the Southern Alps for our analyses. These shells were deposited at the bottom of the shallow shelf seas of the Tethys Ocean 252 million years ago and recorded the environmental conditions shortly before and at the beginning of extinction," explains Dr. Hana Jurikova. She is first author of the study, which she conducted as part of the BASE-LiNE Earth project and her doctoral thesis at GEOMAR.
By measuring different isotopes of the element boron in the fossil shells, the team was able to trace the development of the pH values in the ocean 252 million years ago. Since seawater pH is tightly coupled to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the reconstruction of the latter was also possible. For the analyses, the team used high-precision isotope analyses at GEOMAR as well as high-resolution microanalyses on the state-of-the-art large-geometry secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) at GFZ.
As a next step, the team fed their data from the boron and additional carbon isotope-based investigations into a computer-based geochemical model that simulated the Earth's processes at that time. Results showed that warming and ocean acidification associated with the immense volcanic CO2 injection to the atmosphere was already fatal and led to the extinction of marine calcifying organisms right at the onset of the extinction. However, the CO2 release also brought further consequences; with increased global temperatures caused by the greenhouse effect, chemical weathering on land also increased.
Over thousands of years, increasing amounts of nutrients reached the oceans via rivers and coasts, which then became over-fertilized. The result was a large-scale oxygen depletion and the alteration of entire elemental cycles. "This domino-like collapse of the inter-connected life-sustaining cycles and processes ultimately led to the observed catastrophic extent of mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary," summarizes Dr. Jurikova.
THE GREAT PUMPKIN EXPLAINS HOW FAITH WORKS
~ I enjoy watching Linus van Pelt perennially gushing about The Great Pumpkin, a fictitious being in whom apparently no one else believes except Linus. I’m not even sure who started the myth, but Linus is adamant about the Pumpkin’s existence no matter how scant the evidence to support his belief, nor how many years come and go without any presents appearing at all. Someone he trusted must have put him on the idea years ago, and now there’s no going back. He’s completely committed at this point no matter what the haters say.
What makes this little melodrama so instructive is the way that Linus has built up around his belief system a protective fortress made up entirely of excuses for why the Great Pumpkin never shows. Ultimately his thought processes tell us a lot about how we ourselves process our religious beliefs.
Why Linus’s Faith Can Never Die
First of all, Linus has completely internalized the responsibility for excusing the Great Pumpkin’s failures to appear.
It doesn’t matter that year after year Linus comes to this pumpkin patch to see him but never does. There is always a good excuse, and more often than not it’s the fault of the observer himself. This of course is the most effective way to keep the believer from deconstructing the belief: he’s too busy processing his own guilt to think clearly.
It’s the same way with real religions, in case you didn’t know. In the faith in which I was raised, any failure of God to keep his promises always boiled down to me doing something wrong: I didn’t believe hard enough, or I harbored nagging doubts, or maybe I had some unconfessed sin in my life, or maybe God just didn’t feel like doing it because the timing wasn’t right. The excuse itself wasn’t important, what mattered most was that all responsibility for the failure of the promise had to be taken off of God and placed onto anyone and anything else.
The Object of worship must be absolved from the matter.
Linus: If the Great Pumpkin comes, I’ll still put in a good word for you!
Good grief! I said ‘if’! I meant, ‘when’ he comes!
I’m doomed. One little slip like that could cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by.
As long as Linus always blames himself, the Great Pumpkin can never be at fault.
Second, conditions for the Great Pumpkin’s appearance are so exacting that he need never appear at all to confirm Linus’s belief.
Everything has to be perfect (including Linus) and if he even blinks, he may miss him. Linus has so constructed his own belief system that no real confirmation is ever needed for it to survive. His belief is immune to falsification. No matter what the apparent contradiction, there is some excuse for why the Great Pumpkin doesn’t appear (see number one above). That means Linus never has to see him at all—no presents ever have to come, and no one else ever has to corroborate his existence.
The belief is impervious to disconfirmation. This, too, feels familiar.
I was told to ask God to make certain things happen, but they never did happen at any rate greater than they would have if I had never asked him to do it. This went on for decades. And I don’t mean I asked for money or fame or an easier life. I asked for things the Bible told me to ask for, and when they didn’t happen I was told I was bad for expecting anything in the first place. Suddenly it was my fault, and I should be ashamed.
If that doesn’t set off a red flag in your head, then you’re not really trying very hard.
Some things I was told may not finally come to pass until after I die. Which being translated means: Don’t expect anything to confirm this. Your belief must be its own confirmation.
Finally, Linus’s unshakable faith caused him to see exactly what he wanted to see.
When Snoopy’s shadowy silhouette slowly rose out of the pumpkin patch, Linus was so convinced he was finally seeing the Great Pumpkin that he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he sincerely believed he had missed his chance. If Sally hadn’t have told him it wasn’t the Great Pumpkin, Linus would have gone to his grave believing that he really did “see” him once.
If a beagle could pass for a pumpkin, then anything could. And that’s the point: When a person wants to believe something badly enough, he will find a way to confirm his belief no matter how difficult the mental gymnastics to make it seem true. Reality is no match for the determined believer.
And that’s what makes Linus the perfect candidate for any religion. He’s a true believer, and no amount of disconfirmation could change his mind. He himself has already assumed all responsibility for both sides of the deal. It’s like a dysfunctional relationship in which one person keeps so busy covering both ends of the arrangement that the other side need never actually do a thing.
If that isn’t a perfect illustration of how faith works, then I don’t know what is.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/2018/10/31/what-the-great-pumpkin-teaches-us-about-faith/
ONE WAY A RELIGION BEGINS TO COLLAPSE
is when you learn about the existence of many other religions. This raises the question of whether your religion is the only “true religion.” 
*
HOW DO PANDEMICS END?
BUBONIC PLAGUE — the devastating disease still with us
Three major outbreaks, the earliest recorded in 541 AD.
Back in the Dark Ages, about 60 generations ago, our relatives lived through a series of outbreaks of the bubonic plague.
The disease, caused by bacteria transmitted by fleas on rats and via respiratory droplets from infected people, was devastating.
The bacteria yersinia pestis circulates within certain populations of rodents.
It killed hundreds of millions of people over a period of 2,000 years.
The Black Death of 1346-1353 is considered the deadliest outbreak of all.
The plague has killed millions, but few die today.
It is believed the disease, which causes swollen and infected lymph nodes, called buboes, was finally brought under control by strict quarantining and improved sanitation, among other things.
But none of this could have happened without an understanding of how transmission occurred, says Steven Riley, professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London. This is something that still applies today.
"Once you have the knowledge, and you share the knowledge, then you are able to take measures to push transmission much lower," he says.
Yet cases of the plague still occur - for example, in Inner Mongolia in July this year. Numbers are low though, and the disease can now be successfully treated with antibiotics.
*
SMALLPOX — the virus wiped out by science
Various major outbreaks, the earliest recorded in 1520.
Hundreds of years later, our ancestors faced the spectre of smallpox.
The disease, caused by the virus variola minor, is one of the deadliest known to humans.
It caused fluid-filled pustules to develop all over the body and at its height, about three out of every 10 people with the disease died.
It could be spread via droplets from an infected person's nose or mouth or via their sores.
The virus variola minor has no animal host.
Like the plague, smallpox killed hundreds of millions of people - 300 million in the 20th Century alone.
Smallpox killed at least 350 million — no-one dies today.
Thanks to a vaccine developed in 1796 by British doctor Edward Jenner and the efforts of the scientific community, the disease has been completely erased - although it took nearly two centuries to do so.
Smallpox remains the only human disease to have been eradicated this way. Prof Riley regards this feat as one of the greatest achievements of mankind - rivalling the Moon landings.
"It could be seen as the greatest return on a public investment ever," he says, referencing the annual savings the world has enjoyed thanks to the absence of the disease.
Because of this achievement of science, we are no longer at risk.
*
CHOLERA — the disease endemic in low-income countries
Various outbreaks to present day, major pandemic in 1817
Then, just eight generations ago, our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents faced the threat of cholera.
The disease, caused by contaminated food or drinking water, has killed millions of people in seven pandemics, according to the World Health Organization.
The bacteria vibrio cholerae is found in contaminated water or food.
But while improved hygiene and sanitation in the West has removed the threat of the disease, it remains endemic - or common - in many low-income countries and kills between 100,000 and 140,000 people every year, according to the WHO.
Cholera has killed millions [estimated 40 million], and thousands still die.
"You plumb your way out of cholera," says Prof Riley. "If the plumbing goes wrong, it can spread very quickly."
Because of this, depending on where a person calls home, s/he could still be at risk of catching it and dying, despite the availability of a vaccine and the disease's easy treatment.
*
INFLUENZA — the seasonal threat
Various pandemics, 1800s - 2010
Our ancestors would also have lived through a number of flu pandemics. The biggest recorded was in the early 20th century.
The 1918 Influenza pandemic, sometimes referred to as the Spanish flu, was the most severe outbreak in recent history, killing 50-100 million people worldwide.
Much like with the new coronavirus today, isolation and quarantine slowed transmission.
The H1N1 virus caused the Spanish Flu pandemic.
After two waves between 1918 and 1920, that particular H1N1 strain of flu faded away to become a more benign version that still circulates every year.
Millions died from Spanish Flu — and seasonal flu still kills.
But other flu pandemics followed.
The Hong Kong flu of 1968 killed one million people and also still circulates as a seasonal flu.
As does Swine Flu - a version of the H1N1 virus - which infected about 21% of the world's population in 2009.
Flu continues to pose "a pandemic threat", says Prof Riley, and we remain at risk of experiencing another pandemic caused by such viruses.
We are also at risk of catching seasonal flu, which continues to kill hundreds of thousands every year.
HIV/Aids — the continuing epidemic
1981 - present
Then, about four decades ago, we lived through the spread of HIV/Aids — regarded by some as a pandemic but described as a "global epidemic" by the WHO.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) - transmitted through bodily fluids - has claimed more than 32 million lives across the globe so far.
HIV attacks the human immune system.
HIV could be regarded as an "worst case scenario virus", says Prof Riley, because of the length of time it takes to develop symptoms and its high fatality rate. It spreads fast because people don't necessarily know they have it.
However, advances in diagnostic techniques and global public health campaigns - which have changed sexual behavior and increased the availability of safe injections for drug users — have helped slow the growth in infections.
Despite this, an estimated 690,000 people died from Aids in 2019, according to WHO figures.
Overall deaths: 32 million.
*
SARS AND MERS — the more easily contained coronaviruses
2002 - 2003 and 2012 - present
Two and three decades later came the threat of Sars and Mers.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) — the first deadly epidemic caused by a coronavirus — killed more than 800 between 2002 and 2003, according to the WHO.
The Sars coronavirus (known as Sars-Cov) was identified in 2003.
But by late July 2003, no new cases were being reported, and the WHO declared the global outbreak to be over.
A little later came Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), also a coronavirus, which has killed 912 people. Most cases have occurred in the Arabian Peninsula.
While the risk of contracting the virus, known as Mers-CoV, in the UK, for example, is regarded as very low, it remains higher in the Middle East - with humans usually infected by camels.
*
COVID-19 - the unprecedented coronavirus
2019 - present
Now we are facing the specter of the new Sars coronavirus, which triggers the respiratory disease Covid-19.
Sars-Cov-2, as it is known, is an evolved version of the 2003 Sars virus and is regarded by disease specialists as unique, thanks to its range of symptoms - from none to deadly - and high levels of transmission by people without symptoms or before they develop them.
"Because of that, many populations have not been able to control it," says Prof Riley.
The virus Sars-Cov-2 is related to the 2003 Sars virus
More than a million people have died with the virus so far - but the overall toll is likely to become much higher.
While the hunt for a vaccine and effective treatments continues, the risk remains real for the vast majority of the global population.
Increased knowledge about transmission, public health campaigns, new treatments and vaccines have all played their part in bringing previous crises to an end.
The end-game for the current pandemic is also likely to come from a combination of similar measures.
Although a "safe, highly-effective" vaccine could bring about its conclusion, says Prof Riley, finding one is "by no means a given".
Instead, we may have to get better at living with it while developing a level of resistance to the disease.
"Definitely by five years, hopefully much sooner, we'll either have a really good vaccine that is being used throughout the world or we'll have muddled on long enough that we've accumulated enough immunity and learned how to live with small resurgent outbreaks," he says.
And as the eradication of smallpox proved, when the world's scientific community comes together, great things are possible.
Although the new coronavirus is a much trickier challenge, because of its high levels of asymptomatic transmission, Prof Riley is optimistic the "incredible" global quest for a solution will win through.
"The world has never had a shared project like this before," he says. "Hopefully it becomes a shared success at some point."
However, it may serve us well to remember that most of the pathogens that rampaged through societies in pandemics in the past are still around. While the crises ended, the viruses and bacteria — and their resulting infections — remain.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-876f42ae-5e44-41c0-ba2d-d6fd537aadfe
ending on beauty:
. . . pound for pound, eagle feathers are stronger
than an airplane wing. And even one letter, one
vote can make the difference for every bright thing.
~ Aimee Nezhukumatathil, One Vote (after reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution)
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