Restoring Nature's Backbone

Restoring Nature's Backbone

A herd of bison has just made an extraordinary migration. The distance these animals travelled was huge—nearly 5,000 miles—and their means of transport was highly unorthodox: they fl ew. The cargo plane took some thirty of these hulking mammals from Elk Island National Park of Canada across Alaskan airspace, over the Bering Strait, and into the Republic of Yakutia. Their ultimate destination: t...

The Natures of Nonconfigurationality

Population, development, and human natures

At the dawn of this new millennium, the human enterprise is quickly becoming a globally unified one. Yet numerous obstacles and pitfalls remain in the path of a full and fair unification. A substantial fraction of the world’s population is well-off and increasingly connected through trade and communications systems. But an even larger fraction is struggling to make ends meet and is only sketchi...

Natures and Perspectives

“Nature” and “Perspective” have similar meaning for Eclipse developers and for personnel in a software product line organization. The nature of product line work differs from one part of the organization to another. A developer using Eclipse switches among perspectives to have ready access to the specific tools needed for the nature of the current work such as testing, modeling, or plug-in deve...

Biomimicry : New Natures , New Enclosures

Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. As part of a broader trend towards the conceptualization and development of a ‘bioeconomy’, we argue here that biomimicry produc...