In case you aren’t willing to spend 12 hours this week watching pretty HD of National Parks in the United States while some John Muir impersonator tells you what a religious nut he really was, maybe you’ll take a minute to read over the NY Times’ collection of statements on parks today. The first episode last night was surprisingly even-handed (“Yosemite isn’t the name of the folks living there that were kicked out, it actually means ‘they kill people!’” — the soilent green of the early conservation movement), although spending thirty minutes on John Muir and not mentioning his violent racism was kind of a bummer. If somebody sends Brian a television, he promises to live blog the next four episodes.

Anyway, back to the Times. Since I read the Time’s interview of Mark Yudof last Friday, I can safely say this is the stupidest thing I’ve seen all week:

Natural resources are meant to be used; in fact, every generation has left future generations with more resources than existed when that generation arrived on the planet.

Did you know that we’d all become alchemists?

Craig Bennett and colleagues at UCSB have found something truly extraordinary: a dead fish that can read our minds. Bennett conducted an fMRI on the length of a dead salmon, while showing it pictures of different human emotions. It turns out that there are some very active parts of the dead fish when it sees certain types of emotions. Quite incredible. Here is the poster presenting their work.

baby boom.

• The 9th World Wilderness Congress will be held in November in Merida, Mexico.
• Nine thresholds for a safe planet (from Nature)
• Even the most dire predictions from the IPCC were optimistic. It’s already twice as hot as they thought it would be.
• Since it’s getting warmer, kudzu is creeping north to Canada. Hey Toronto, better sleep with your windows closed.

Maybe NSFW (in the parlance of our times)?

NY Times doesn’t seem to want to embed videos, but check out this great video on the new open season on wolves (thanks Piper, and as she points out, very relevant if you were in attendance last night / have seen Milking the Rhino).

Go bears.

Watch as Darwin’s work evolves through multiple edits. Someday we’ll be able to do this with the human genome.

Kind of gross, but then they cuddle.