Photos from the field: zooming in on Australia's hidden world of exquisite mites, snails and beetles

Environmental scientists see flora, fauna and phenomena the rest of us rarely do. In this series, we’ve invited them to share their unique photos from the field.

Which animals are quintessentially Australian? Koalas and kangaroos, emus, tiger snakes and green tree frogs, echidnas and eastern rosellas, perhaps. And let’s not forget common wombats.

Inevitably, most lists will be biased to the more conspicuous mammals and birds, hold fewer reptiles and frogs, and likely lack invertebrates — animals without a backbone or bony skeleton — altogether.

I’m an invertophile, fascinated by our rich terrestrial invertebrate fauna, so my list will be different. I’m enchanted by stunning dragon springtails, by cryptic little Tasmanitachoides beetles, and by the poorly known allothyrid mites, among thousands of others.

Australia’s terrestrial invertebrate multitude contains several hundred thousand uniquely Australian organisms. Most remain poorly known.

To preserve our biodiversity, we first must ask: “which species live where?”. For our invertebrates, we are a long way from knowing even this.

The Black Summer Toll

Last year, a team of scientists estimated that the Australian 2019-2020 bushfires killed, injured or displaced three billion animals. That was a lot. But it was also a woefully inadequate estimate, because it only accounted for mammals, reptiles, birds and frogs.

Hidden from view, many trillions more invertebrates burned or were displaced by the fires. And yes, invertebrates are animals too.

Admittedly, it’s hard to come to terms with invertebrates because they’re often hard to find and difficult to identify. Most species are inconspicuous, even if they belong to incredibly abundant groups, such as mites and springtails, which can occur in numbers exceeding 10,000 per square metre.

Most invertebrates are poorly known because there are so many species and so few people working on them. In fact, it’s likely only a quarter to one-third of Australia’s terrestrial invertebrate fauna is formally described (have a recognised scientific name).

One of the problems invertebrates have, in terms of attracting attention, is that many are not easily seen with the naked eye.

Macrophotography can magnify these wonders for a view into a world most of us are completely unfamiliar with. Even then, it often will be hard to know what we see. Everyone will recognise a kangaroo, but who can identify an allothyrid mite?

The photo below shows an undescribed species of mite from the family Allothyridae, from Mount Donna Buang in Victoria. The mite family Allothyridae has three described Australian species, and dozens more awaiting description.

This collage shows a selection of mites found in the forests of southeastern Australia. It’s likely many of the species shown here are unknown to science.

A Deeply Ancient Lineage

Animal ecologists, most of whom work on vertebrates, often joke that I “study the ‘food’, haha…”. They think they’re funny, but this reflects a deep seated bias — one extending from scientists to the wider public. This limits the development of a comprehensive understanding of biodiversity that has flow-on effects for conservation more broadly.

It’s true: invertebrates are food for larger animals. But their vital role in maintaining Australia’s ecosystems doesn’t end there.

Every species has an evolutionary history, a particular habitat, a set of behaviours reflecting that history, and a role to play in the ecosystem. And many terrestrial invertebrates belong to especially ancient lineages that record the deep history of Australia’s past.

The moss bug family Peloridiidae, for example, dates back more than 150 million years. For context, the kangaroo family (Macropodidae) is likely 15-25 million years old.

Their history is reflected in the breakup of the ancient supercontinent, Gondwana. In fact, Australian species of moss bugs are more closely related to South American species than to those from nearby New Zealand.

This is a common pattern in terrestrial invertebrate groups. It reflects how the New Zealand plate separated from the remainder of Gondwana about 80 million years ago, while the Australian plate remained connected to South America via Antarctica.

Similar stories can be told from across the invertebrate spectrum. The photo below shows a few examples of these relics from Gondwana.

Their Fascinating Evolution

Overprinting this deep history are the changes that occurred in Australia, especially the drying of the continent since the middle Miocene, about 12-16 million years ago.

This continent-wide drying fragmented wet forests that covered much of the continent, resulting in the restriction of many invertebrate groups to pockets of wetter habitat, especially along the Great Dividing Range and in southwestern Australia.

Read more: Trapdoor spider species that stay local put themselves at risk

A consequence of this was the evolution in isolation of many “short-range endemic” species.

A short-range endemic species means their geographic distribution is less than 10,000 square kilometres. A short-range endemic mammal you might be familiar with is Leadbeater’s possum, restricted to the wet forests of the Victorian Central Highlands.

But short-range endemism is much more common in invertebrates than other organisms. This is because many invertebrates are poor dispersers: they don’t move between habitat patches easily. They may also maintain viable populations in small areas of suitable habitat, and are frequently adapted to very specific habitats.

Take Tropidotrechus, pictured below, a genus of beetles mostly restricted to the same region as Leadbeater’s possum. They, however, divide the landscape at a much finer scale because they’re restricted to deep leaf litter in cool, wet, forest gullies.

As Australia dried, populations of Tropidotrechus became isolated in small patches of upland habitat, evolving into at least seven species across the ranges to the east of Melbourne.

Discoveries Waiting To Happen

The trouble with knowing so little about Australia’s extraordinary number of tiny, often locally unique invertebrates, is that we then massively underestimate how many of them are under threat, or have been badly hit by events like the 2019-2020 fires.

If we wish to conserve biodiversity widely, rather than only the larger charismatic wildlife, then enhancing our knowledge of our short-range species should be a high priority.

We’ve only just scratched the surface of Australia’s wonderful invertebrate fauna, so there are enough discoveries for everyone.

You can join iNaturalist, a citizen science initiative that lets you upload images and identify your discoveries. Perhaps you’ll discover something new — and a scientist just might name it after you.

Read more: Want to teach kids about nature? Insects can help 

Nick Porch, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Earth Science, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

75% of Australia's marine protected areas are given only 'partial' protection. Here's why that's a problem

A global coalition of more than 50 countries have this week pledged to protect over 30% of the planet’s lands and seas by the end of this decade. Their reasoning is clear: we need greater protection for nature, to prevent further extinctions and protect the life-sustaining ecosystems crucial to human survival.

The globally recognised tool to safeguard marine biodiversity is to designate a “marine protected area”. But not all protected areas are created equal.

The level of protection these areas provide depends on the activities permitted in their boundaries. For example, in “fully” protected areas, no plants or animals can be removed or harmed. Meanwhile, “partially” protected areas allow various extractive activities to occur, such as fishing and sometimes even mining.

Australia prides itself on having one of the largest marine protected area networks in the world, which includes iconic locations such as the Great Barrier Reef, Jervis Bay in New South Wales, Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria and Rottnest Island in Western Australia. But only one quarter of this network is fully protected.

The remaining three quarters are only partially protected, with vast areas allowing fishing, aquaculture and mining exploration. This is despite industrial-scale extraction of resources going against international guidelines for protected areas.

So why is this a problem? Our two recent research papers show partially protected areas don’t contribute much to wildlife conservation, yet take valuable conservation resources away from fully protected areas, which need them more.

The Gap Between Fully And Partially Protected Areas

Our landmark study, published today, looked at marine protected areas in southern Australia. We gathered social and ecological data, including conducting 439 interviews, across five states and 7,000 kilometres of coastline.

We found partially protected areas had no more fish, invertebrates or algae than unprotected areas. Fully protected areas, by comparison, had 30% more fish species and over twice the total weight of fish compared to unprotected areas.

Read more: Why marine protected areas are often not where they should be

We also found partially protected areas were no more of an attraction to locals and visitors than unprotected areas — they had similar numbers and mix of users, such as walkers, swimmers, fishers and divers.

On the other hand, fully protected areas were attractive to locals and visitors for their abundant wildlife and level of protection. They had twice as many divers and more than three times as many snorkelers compared to unprotected areas.

What’s more, swimmers, divers and snorkelers said they experience significantly more marine life in fully protected areas, but not partially protected areas.

Defying Public Expectations

The Australian marine protected area network has been moving further away from public expectations. In a 2020 social study, researchers found Australians are generally confused about what activities are permitted in these areas.

Survey respondents were presented with the full list of activities allowed within partially protected areas, and asked to indicate which activities they understood to be permitted or prohibited within marine protected areas in Australia.

Overwhelmingly, they believed marine protected areas offer strict protection to the marine environment, preventing all types of extractive uses, including recreational fishing.

The majority of Australia’s marine protected area network allow for commercial fishing, but few respondents were aware of this. Fewer still were aware large areas permit destructive activities, such as bottom trawling, which can destroy the seabed. The research team also documented many cases where protection has been downgraded, such as the Solitary Islands and Jervis Bay Marine Parks in NSW.

It’s clear Australians expect the marine protected area network to adequately safeguard our unique wildlife. Yet these findings show their views are in stark contrast to the reality of marine environmental protection.

A Matter Of Money

There are costs associated with partially protected areas - they consume conservation resources and occupy space that could otherwise be allocated to more effective protection. In fact, research from 2011 found areas with a mixture of partial and full protection are up to twice as expensive to manage than a simpler fully protected area.

Partially protected areas do have a role in our overall marine network, but they should be used for specific purposes such as enabling traditional management practices, protecting important breeding sites, or acting as buffer zones around fully protected areas.

Read more: Changes to Australia's marine reserves leave our oceans unprotected

The recent changes to Australia’s marine reserve network represent an extremely worrying trend, as fully protected areas such as in the Coral Sea and Batemans Bay have been opened up to fishing.

Given the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of partially protected areas globally, at a time when we face increasing challenges from climate change and loss of biodiversity, the findings of our two recent Australian studies indicate we should be aiming for more fully protected areas, not less.

If the world is to protect 30% of all lands and seas by the end of this decade, those protected areas need to be monitored closely to ensure they are delivering on their goals and expectations.

Read more: Worried about Earth's future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp 

John Turnbull, Postdoctoral research associate, UNSW; Carly Cook, Lecturer Head, Cook Research Group; School of Biological Sciences , Monash University; Emma Johnston, Professor and Dean of Science, UNSW; Graeme Clark, Senior Research Associate in Ecology, UNSW, and Kelsey Roberts, Post doctoral researcher at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Birds that play with others have the biggest brains - and the same may go for humans

Have you ever seen magpies play-fighting with one another, or rolling around in high spirits? Or an apostlebird running at full speed with a stick in its beak, chased by a troop of other apostlebirds? Well, such play behaviour may be associated with a larger brain and a longer life.

For the past 50 years, international animal cognition research has often related the use of tools such as rocks and sticks to cognitive abilities in animals. But my research on Australian native birds, published in Scientific Reports, casts doubt on long-held assumptions about the links between large brains and tool use.

My study found no significant association between tool use and brain mass. However, very clear differences in relative brain mass emerged when birds showing play behaviour were compared to those that didn’t play. In particular, birds that played with others (known as social play) had the largest brain mass, relative to body size, and even the longest lifespans.

The results suggest play behaviour may be an important driver in the evolution of large brains in a number of species, including humans.

Tool Use In Birds

Tool use has been studied in a wider range of species than play behaviour. Some internationally famous Australian examples include:

• the black-breasted buzzard releasing rocks from their beaks to crack emu eggs

• the black kite picking up burning embers and twigs and dropping them on dry grass areas to start a fire. The bird then feasts on fleeing or injured insects and vertebrates

• palm cockatoos that drum with a stick.

According to a classic theory known as the “technical intelligence hypothesis”, humans and other animals developed large brains because circumstances forced them into ever more sophisticated tool use.

Read more: Bird-brained and brilliant: Australia's avians are smarter than you think

So What Is Bird Play?

Play behaviour usually occurs in juveniles but in some species, such as little corellas or galahs, it extends into adulthood. Play behaviour occurs in species which tend to have long juvenile periods, long-term support from parents and which grow up in stable social groups.

Play behaviour is usually subdivided into three categories: solo play, object play and social play.

Solo play: this may involve a single bird running, skipping, jumping, ducking, rolling, hanging, swinging, dancing, sliding and snow-romping. Solo play is the most widespread form of play, common among honeyeaters, parrots, magpies, currawongs, butcherbirds, riflebirds and some pigeon species.

The best acrobat among the pigeons is probably the topknot pigeon, but rainbow lorikeets are also known to love swinging.

Object play: this involves objects of any kind, including sticks, stones and small household items. Object players might carry a stick or stone or even just a leaf around, drop it, then pick it up again and run with it.

Object players are not as numerous as solo players but still widespread across species. Click here to read a lovely description of a kookaburra absorbed in playing with a stone.

Social play: involves two or more individuals. Social play is so far the rarest category. It might involve one bird holding an object in its beak and the others chasing it. Published cases are largely limited to parrots and corvids, and are known in magpies and ravens.

Read more: What Australian birds can teach us about choosing a partner and making it last

White-winged choughs are known to play a game in which two youngsters simultaneously grab a small stick or a bunch of grass, then each tries to wrest it from the other.

It’s important to note that social players are also solo and object players, but solo or object players may not be social players. The latter is considered a more complex form of play.

It turns out these categories are meaningful when used to analyse a potential link to brain mass. Information on brain weight/mass in Australian birds has been available only since an important study in 2014. It identified brain volumes and body sizes of all Australian bird species, enabling researchers to link these biological data to behavioural data.

A Surprising Link

My study involved 77 native Australian bird species for which full data sets were available. The results were more than surprising. In the samples used, tool use seems to confer no advantage whatsoever in terms of brain size or life expectancy: no matter whether a species showed tool using or not, relative brain masses were not different. However the results showed, rather dramatically, that brain size and forms of play are associated.

Social players, versus other players and versus non-players showed significantly different average brain sizes in each category:

• non players have the lowest average brain size

• solo players had slightly larger brains than non-players

• object players had larger brains again

• social players had by far the largest average brain size relative to body weight.

These results are by no means confined to parrots, but are found in songbirds and other orders. Whether this holds for birds globally is not yet known. However, since parrots and songbirds first evolved in Australia, then spread to the rest of the world, the results may indeed hold for birds outside Australia. More research will be needed.

Read more: Magpies can form friendships with people – here's how

Which came first – play resulting in large brains or large brains triggering play behaviour – is not known. But whichever way one looks at it, playing socially or even just playing at all, is related to a bigger brain and a long life.

So what does all this mean for human brain evolution? It may be a long shot, but the stages of development in humans and birds seem to have some similarities and this may be significant.

Offspring in humans, as in great apes and other primates, also develop slowly, have protracted childhoods and play extensively as do a surprising number of Australian native birds. It may mean playing together offers more than just passing the time. It could be an evolutionary driver for intelligence, and even for a long life.

Gisela Kaplan, Emeritus Professor in Animal Behaviour, University of New England

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Australia can phase out coal power while maintaining energy security

The end of coal-fired generation in Australia is inevitable.

Zero marginal cost, zero emissions energy is now a reality. Wind and solar are cheaper sources of new electricity than coal in most cases, putting significant pressure on the profitability of the inflexible, ageing coal generators.

The only questions are when coal-fired power stations will close and how well Australia will manage that phasedown.

That’s why we need to talk about the role governments can play to ensure the transition is orderly, maintains energy security, avoids price spikes that have followed past closures, looks after affected workers and communities, and ensures Australia meets its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 26-28% below 2005 levels.

At least halving emissions from coal-fired power stations (which account for about 90% of electricity sector emissions) by 2030 is an obvious route to achieve Australia’s international commitments.

Given most state governments are already committed to forcing renewables into the grid at record pace, that could happen even without federal action.

But continuing down the current path will be unnecessarily costly, and pose significant risks to supply and prices as coal-fired generators exit on sporadic timelines based on their viability. These risks are part of the reason why Australia’s Energy Security Board is considering mechanisms that facilitate an orderly transition from coal-fired generation to renewables as one of four priority reform areas.

Read more: 'Unjustifiable': new report shows how the nation's gas expansion puts Australians in harm’s way

National leadership and careful policy design are needed to enable coal plant operators to bow out of the market gracefully, and in a manner that secures certainty for investors, consumers, workers and communities.

Learning From Past Closures

Past closures of South Australia’s Northern and Playford B power stations in Port Augusta (in 2016) and Victoria’s Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley (in 2017) illustrate this point.

Price spikes followed the closure of these plants. In the case of Hazelwood, majority owner Engie gave barely five months’ notice of its closure in March 2017. With Hazelwood, a brown-coal-fired generator accounting for 20% of Victoria’s electricity supply and 5% of national output, the supply ramifications were significant. Victoria’s average electricity prices increased from A$60 to A$100 per megawatt hour (MWh).

These offer a stark warning to policy makers. The market requires adequate notice of coal-fired generator exits. Greater certainty provides investors with the assurance they need to build enough capacity to replace retiring coal plants, and the infrastructure to connect them to the grid. A haphazard transformation is in no one’s interests.

A New Coal-Generation Phasedown Mechanism

We outline a market-based mechanism to achieve just that in a report published by the Blueprint Institute, an Australian think tank established last year to promote rational, pragmatic policy proposals.

The Coalition has generally claimed to oppose market-based mechanisms — such as emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes — to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the Abbott government in 2014 introduced an emissions trading scheme alongside its A$2.5 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, a mechanism the Morrison government rebadged in 2019 as the Climate Solutions Fund. A “Safeguard Mechanism” sets emissions caps for the country’s highest-emitting businesses, with emissions permits tradeable on the open market.

Read more: Australia's new cap on emissions is a trading scheme in all but name

To facilitate the orderly phasedown of coal-fired electricity generation, we propose a “Coal-Generation Phasedown Mechanism” (CPM), leveraging the Safeguard Mechanism to establish sector emissions targets — for 2026, 2028 and beyond 2030.

A key component of the CPM is the use of auctions to achieve withdrawals of coal generation from the electricity market. Auctions are commonplace in commercial and government contexts. The federal government has long used auctions to allocate telecommunications spectrum, for example, and the Emissions Reduction Fund uses reverse auctions to buy the most cost-effective emissions abatement.

The CPM would set emissions targets to phase down coal-fired generation to halve current emissions by 2030. Under a well-designed auction system, the least profitable coal generators would withdraw from the market first, ensuring emissions reductions occur at minimum cost.

One possible scenario is shown in the graph below. Example generators have been chosen based on their operating costs and approximate remaining life. Those with higher costs and a shorter remaining life have greater incentives to bid for earlier exits.

The CPM should also be designed to ensure financial support for affected workers. This could be in the form of redeployment, retraining opportunities or generous remuneration in the case of retrenchment.

Who Should Pay?

A phasedown of coal-fired generation will come at a cost to someone — either taxpayers or investors in coal-fired generation. This cost can be made larger or smaller. It can be hidden from view. But it cannot be avoided. The proper role for government is to minimise and fairly distribute those costs.

We can’t predict exactly how much the phasedown will cost, because that depends on information known only to the generators. But a market-based mechanism is sure to minimise those costs.

The CPM can be designed to ensure the least viable plants close first. How much money generators receive to close or pay to stay open is an entirely separate question. The CPM can be designed to accommodate any financial commitment by taxpayers.

At one extreme, the federal government could pay generators to close by fully compensating auction participants for the loss of future profits, as has been adopted in Germany. But this would likely require a federal funding commitment significantly larger than under the existing Emissions Reduction Fund, which might make it politically unpalatable.

At the other extreme, the government could charge operators for the right to stay open. One significant advantage of this option is it would raise revenue that could then be used to support directly affected communities. This could be modelled on Western Australia’s “Royalties for Regions” program, which allocates a quarter of the state’s mining and petroleum royalties to programs benefiting regional and rural areas.

A funding allocation between these two extremes is also possible, decided through government negotiation with the industry.

Ultimately, the question of who pays is a political decision. But political difficulties shouldn’t be used as an excuse for delay. The economic rationale for the CPM stacks up either way.

We must avoid another Hazelwood or Port Augusta, and coordinate an orderly grid transformation that provides certainty to communities, workers, investors, and consumers alike.

Daniel D'Hotman, DPhil Candidate, University of Oxford and Steven Hamilton, Visiting Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Asking people to prepare for fire is pointless if they can't afford to do it. It's time we subsidised fire prevention

Once again, Australia is on fire. This year it’s the turn of Western Australia and South Australia, where bushfires are threatening homes and lives. In the south of Tasmania, conditions are dry and the region is entering a period of peak fire danger.

In the lead up to every bushfire season, the mantra is the same each year: prepare, prepare, prepare. Remove the fuel load. Clean out the gutters. Mow lawns, tidy gardens, create a burnbreak between bushland and your house. Identify your strengths and weaknesses. Have a plan.

After 40 years studying the interaction between humans and fire, I have seen this mantra rolled out every year — and watched, every year, as it is comprehensively ignored by large numbers of people. Why? Because they are bad or lazy? No.

The fact is asking people to prepare for fire is pointless if they can’t afford to do it. If you don’t have time or money (or both), it doesn’t matter how many times authorities tell you to prepare. It’s not going to happen. What if we had a system, like Medicare, where the cost of these fire prevention measures was subsidised by the public system?

Read more: Friday essay: living with fire and facing our fears

We Know The Current System Doesn’t Work

Institutions such as local fire authorities, councils or governments can say “we have done our bit and we expect the community to do their part and manage their risk, their property, their bushfire plan”.

But it’s just passing the problem along to the next person, without considering whether they’re able to actually take up that advice.

For years, authorities have essentially handed people a very formidable and expensive checklist of things to do, right up to the level of retrofitting your house to be compliant with modern building standards. These are significant time and financial investments.

The cost of failing to prepare is huge. Bushfire often spreads by embers landing in a series of unprepared properties. If your neighbours don’t make their home defendable, chances are it may cause your house to burn down.

There are many reasons people don’t prepare, and a key one is affordability. If you’re not physically able to get up a ladder to clean your gutters or mow around your property and remove fuel load — and you can’t afford to pay someone to do it — what are you supposed to do?

You might think, “Well, if people choose to live in a bushfire prone area then that’s their problem. Why should they get subsidies?” But there are many reasons people might not be able to prepare, including poverty, old age, and health issues.

And if they don’t prepare, it won’t just affect them; it could create a vector for the fire to spread to other properties. Research suggests disasters, including fires, are more likely to occur in low socioeconomic areas.

It’s time to look at preventative fire measures the same way we look at preventative healthcare.

Our taxes fund Medicare and public health measures because Australian society recognises it’s cheaper in the long run. It’s cheaper than allowing low-level health problems to fester until they become so threatening they have to be dealt with in the mind-bogglingly expensive emergency department.

In the same way, subsidies for household bushfire preparation would help prevent the vast taxpayer expense incurred for emergency fire-fighting when fire strikes.

What Might The System Look Like?

The system could take many forms.

State governments already give vouchers to citizens to incentivise spending in one area. Think of the NSW government’s Active Kids or Creative Kids voucher systems, or its planned dining and entertainment voucher system.

So why not give vouchers you can use to pay someone to clear your gutters, mow your lawn or clear dry grass and other fuel loads?

Insurers could offer lower premiums to people who take action to reduce fire risk around their home by ember-proofing or installing gutter-guard, for example (in the same way there are insurance benefits if you make your house more resistant to being broken into).

Perhaps councils could offer lower rates for low-income people who, in exchange, pay for measures to reduce their fuel load.

Or we could have a bulk-billing system, where you can ask a service provider to assess your home’s risk and do basic fire load reduction, and it’s charged to a Medicare-style system.

To me, these ideas make a lot more sense than more punitive measures being considered in some places, where authorities could clear a fire risk around a house themselves and simply send the bill to the occupant or land owner.

The punitive system just puts more pressure on people who may not be able to afford to reduce their home’s fire risk, much less deal with going to court to dispute a bill they’ve been sent. It also means people are less likely to trust and cooperate with fire authorities.

That Sounds Expensive

Yes, I know these ideas are expensive. So is Medicare. So is the pension system. So is the public health response that helped Australia drive the COVID-19 epidemic into submission. But they’re worth it, aren’t they?

And do you know what else is expensive? Doing the same thing every year, even though it doesn’t work.

We have just been through an enormously expensive bushfire royal commission. And as fire expert Kevin Tolhurst points out here, we’ve had 57 formal public inquiries, reviews and royal commissions related to bushfires and fire management since 1939. A huge expense to taxpayers.

We know the cost of the Black Summer fires ran into the billions, with costs to the health system, individuals, businesses and emergency services.

Aerial fire suppression aircraft are expensive. Having 100-day firefighting campaign is an extraordinary drain on the public purse — and that’s before you even start counting the cost of economic disruption that comes with it.

Read more: As bushfire and holiday seasons converge, it may be time to say goodbye to the typical Australian summer holiday

It Sounds A Bit Radical

I know! But radical change is what’s needed — and it’s possible. In early 2020, I wrote it was time to re-arrange the Australian school calendar around fire seasons and people said this was crazy. But then a few months later we completely rearranged schooling around the pandemic — an idea that, in January, would have seemed completely unworkable.

It turns out radical change is possible when push comes to shove. And for climate change-related fire risk, push really has come to shove.

Our current system involves telling people to create “a defendable space” around your house. I’ve been on Google Earth to look to at how that’s played out in many bushland suburbs; you don’t need to be a genius to work out there they are not defendable spaces.

Climate change adaptation does feel radical, but it’s also necessary.

If we are sitting round going into a hotter, drier, more fire-prone world, what are we doing if we are not enabling people to adapt?

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.

David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Worried about Earth's future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

Anyone with even a passing interest in the global environment knows all is not well. But just how bad is the situation? Our new paper shows the outlook for life on Earth is more dire than is generally understood.

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world. We outline the likely future trends in biodiversity decline, mass extinction, climate disruption and planetary toxification. We clarify the gravity of the human predicament and provide a timely snapshot of the crises that must be addressed now.

The problems, all tied to human consumption and population growth, will almost certainly worsen over coming decades. The damage will be felt for centuries and threatens the survival of all species, including our own.

Our paper was authored by 17 leading scientists, including those from Flinders University, Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles. Our message might not be popular, and indeed is frightening. But scientists must be candid and accurate if humanity is to understand the enormity of the challenges we face.

Getting To Grips With The Problem

First, we reviewed the extent to which experts grasp the scale of the threats to the biosphere and its lifeforms, including humanity. Alarmingly, the research shows future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than experts currently believe.

This is largely because academics tend to specialise in one discipline, which means they’re in many cases unfamiliar with the complex system in which planetary-scale problems — and their potential solutions — exist.

What’s more, positive change can be impeded by governments rejecting or ignoring scientific advice, and ignorance of human behaviour by both technical experts and policymakers.

More broadly, the human optimism bias – thinking bad things are more likely to befall others than yourself – means many people underestimate the environmental crisis.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Our research also reviewed the current state of the global environment. While the problems are too numerous to cover in full here, they include:

• a halving of vegetation biomass since the agricultural revolution around 11,000 years ago. Overall, humans have altered almost two-thirds of Earth’s land surface

• about 1,300 documented species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more unrecorded. More broadly, population sizes of animal species have declined by more than two-thirds over the last 50 years, suggesting more extinctions are imminent

Read more: What is a 'mass extinction' and are we in one now?

• about one million plant and animal species globally threatened with extinction. The combined mass of wild mammals today is less than one-quarter the mass before humans started colonising the planet. Insects are also disappearing rapidly in many regions

• 85% of the global wetland area lost in 300 years, and more than 65% of the oceans compromised to some extent by humans

• a halving of live coral cover on reefs in less than 200 years and a decrease in seagrass extent by 10% per decade over the last century. About 40% of kelp forests have declined in abundance, and the number of large predatory fishes is fewer than 30% of that a century ago.

A Bad Situation Only Getting Worse

The human population has reached 7.8 billion – double what it was in 1970 – and is set to reach about 10 billion by 2050. More people equals more food insecurity, soil degradation, plastic pollution and biodiversity loss.

High population densities make pandemics more likely. They also drive overcrowding, unemployment, housing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure, and can spark conflicts leading to insurrections, terrorism, and war.

Read more: Climate explained: why we need to focus on increased consumption as much as population growth

Essentially, humans have created an ecological Ponzi scheme. Consumption, as a percentage of Earth’s capacity to regenerate itself, has grown from 73% in 1960 to more than 170% today.

High-consuming countries like Australia, Canada and the US use multiple units of fossil-fuel energy to produce one energy unit of food. Energy consumption will therefore increase in the near future, especially as the global middle class grows.

Then there’s climate change. Humanity has already exceeded global warming of 1°C this century, and will almost assuredly exceed 1.5 °C between 2030 and 2052. Even if all nations party to the Paris Agreement ratify their commitments, warming would still reach between 2.6°C and 3.1°C by 2100.

The Danger Of Political Impotence

Our paper found global policymaking falls far short of addressing these existential threats. Securing Earth’s future requires prudent, long-term decisions. However this is impeded by short-term interests, and an economic system that concentrates wealth among a few individuals.

Right-wing populist leaders with anti-environment agendas are on the rise, and in many countries, environmental protest groups have been labelled “terrorists”. Environmentalism has become weaponised as a political ideology, rather than properly viewed as a universal mode of self-preservation.

Financed disinformation campaigns, such as those against climate action and forest protection, protect short-term profits and claim meaningful environmental action is too costly – while ignoring the broader cost of not acting. By and large, it appears unlikely business investments will shift at sufficient scale to avoid environmental catastrophe.

Changing Course

Fundamental change is required to avoid this ghastly future. Specifically, we and many others suggest:

• abolishing the goal of perpetual economic growth

• revealing the true cost of products and activities by forcing those who damage the environment to pay for its restoration, such as through carbon pricing

• rapidly eliminating fossil fuels

• regulating markets by curtailing monopolisation and limiting undue corporate influence on policy

• reigning in corporate lobbying of political representatives

• educating and empowering women across the globe, including giving them control over family planning.

Don’t Look Away

Many organisations and individuals are devoted to achieving these aims. However their messages have not sufficiently penetrated the policy, economic, political and academic realms to make much difference.

Failing to acknowledge the magnitude of problems facing humanity is not just naïve, it’s dangerous. And science has a big role to play here.

Scientists must not sugarcoat the overwhelming challenges ahead. Instead, they should tell it like it is. Anything else is at best misleading, and at worst potentially lethal for the human enterprise.

Read more: Mass extinctions and climate change: why the speed of rising greenhouse gases matters 

Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University; Daniel T. Blumstein, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, and Paul Ehrlich, President, Center for Conservation Biology, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Enjoy them while you can? The ecotourism challenge facing Australia's favourite islands

I fell for Kangaroo Island from my first visit. I recall standing on a headland on the island’s southern coast, near Remarkable Rocks (a popular tourist site), and being awestruck by the Southern Ocean.

The island (Australia’s third-largest after Tasmania and Melville Island) is one of 16 designated National Landscapes and arguably South Australia’s greatest tourism treasure. Its protected areas (notably Flinders Chase National Park) are home to rare and endangered marsupials and birds.

A year ago, in Australia’s “Black Summer”, bushfires ravaged more than half the island (about 211,000 hectares). Those fires underscored the threat to this and other iconic island destinations.

Both directly and indirectly, humans are endangering these fragile ecosystems through unsustainable development and human-caused climate change.

The most ironic threat is from unsustainable tourism. These islands attract millions of visitors a year keen to experience their natural wonders. Yet often this very “ecotourism” is contributing to their degradation.

How to do better?

Last October I took part in a workshop at which Kangaroo Island’s tourism operators discussed how to do so. 2020 was a difficult year for them, first with the fires, then with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in that adversity they also saw the opportunity to reset “business as usual” and come back better, creating an industry not harming its core asset.

Read more: The end of global travel as we know it: an opportunity for sustainable tourism

A range of ideas came out of our talks applicable to all our island destinations. But there was one key point. Ecotourism should be more than fleeting feel-good experiences. It should not be a “value extraction” but a “values education”, inspiring visitors to go home and live more eco-consciously.

Macquarie Island

The paradox of ecotourism is perhaps best exemplified by Australia’s least visited island destination – Macquarie Island, about 1,500 km south-east of Hobart, halfway between New Zealand and the Antarctica.

Just 1,500 tourists a year, rather than hundreds of thousands, are permitted by the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service to visit. The island has no hotels, restaurants or souvenir shops. The only buildings are those of the Macquarie Island Station research base and a few isolated field huts for scientists.

Tourists must be content with coming ashore for the day from the 18 small cruise ships that ply these waters in summer. The only hospitality is the traditional station offering of tea and scones.

But what tourists do get is a unique experience. Macquarie is World Heritage listed as the only island made entirely from the earth’s mantle. It also teems with wildlife – multiple species of penguins and seals in their tens of thousands, and birds in their millions.

It’s about as pure an ecotourism experience you can have (if you can afford it). Even so, it still takes resources to get there, including the burning of fossil fuels, contributing to the global warming that is the greatest threat to the environmental integrity of Macquarie Island (and other island ecosystems).

However, the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service does at least expect cruise ship operators to “demonstrate their capacity to deliver desirable outcomes” on criteria including minimisation of environmental impacts and communicating to tourists “messages about the natural and cultural values of the island”, including the role they play in its preservation.

Read more: This could be the end of the line for cruise ships

K'gari (Fraser Island)

Communicating such messages is something that certainly needs improvement on another World Heritage listed island – K'gari (commonly known as Fraser island), the world’s largest sand island.

About 250 km north of Brisbane, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, the island draws many hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to its beaches, woodlands and rainforests. (There are no recent public statistics on island visitor numbers but in 2017-18 the Fraser Coast region attracted 1,515,000 visitors.)

Once the island’s resources were mined and logged. Tourism was meant to be much less exploitative. But a range of organisations including the International Union for Conservation of Nature have highlighted the pressure tourist numbers (along with their vehicles and infrastructure) are placing on K'gari’s landscapes and wildlife.

Communicating to all those visitors the role they play in the island’s preservation appears to be failing. The bushfires that burnt half the island (about 165,500 hectares) over nine weeks between October and December last year allegedly resulted from an illegal camp fire.

Headline-grabbing attacks by the island’s residents dingos – such as in April 2019 when a toddler was dragged from a campervan – have also been credited to rampant irresponsible tourist behaviour (feeding dingoes to get better photos, for example).

Indigenous elders, conservationists and scientists have all pointed to the problem of a mass-tourism model that doesn’t put enough emphasis on educating visitors about the environment and their responsibilities.

Read more: The K'gari-Fraser Island bushfire is causing catastrophic damage. What can we expect when it's all over?

Rottnest Island

One of our proposals for Kangaroo Island is to reduce the impact of motor vehicles through encouraging more extended walking and cycling experiences.

The value of sustainable transport as the foundation for ecotourism is demonstrated by Rottnest Island, 20 km off the coast of Perth.

The entire island is managed as an A-Class Nature Reserve. Apart from service vehicles and shuttle buses, it is car-free. You can hire a bike or bring your own to get around the island (11 km long and 4.5 km wide). Or simply walk.

The absence of traffic makes a Rottnest holiday a distinctly more relaxed experience. It’s a fair example of slow tourism; and, of course, it is also good for the island’s world famous quokkas, which co-exist with close to 800,000 visitors a year.

Read more: Before and after: 4 new graphics show the recovery from last summer's bushfire devastation

Before They Are Gone

Given a little space, nature is resilient.

After Kangaroo Island’s bushfires a year ago, for example, it was feared a number of endangered species had finally been driven to extinction.

But in two of 2020’s few good news stories, scientists found critically endangered Kangaroo Island dunnarts and little pygmy possums – the world’s smallest marsupial – had survived.

But we can’t take that resilience for granted if we keep putting pressure on these fragile ecosystems. We need a better approach to ensure ecotourism isn’t about enjoying these natural wonders before they are gone.

Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Christmas gifts that keep giving (your data away) — and how to prevent this

With the festive season having come to a close, consumers the world over will be playing with a variety of new tech toys.

In recent years, the most popular gadgets sold on Amazon have included a variety of smartphones, wearable tech, tablets, laptops and digital assistants such as Amazon’s Echo Dot.

And it’s likely our gifting habits over Christmas reflected this. But any device connected to the internet (including almost all of the above) exposes our personal data to a host of threats.

Few of us stop to consider how our new devices may impact our digital footprint, or whether they could build new channels between ourselves and cyber criminals.

With this in mind, here are some simple tips to help you lock down your digital footprint this year.

Use More Sophisticated Credentials

First, when it comes to setting up a new device and/or account, you should always use a unique password — every single time.

While this task may sound painful, it’s made much easier by password managers. Should your password for a particular account be stolen, at least the others will remain secure.

It’s also worth checking the Have I Been Pwned? website, which can reveal whether your online credentials have already been leaked.

Read more: A computer can guess more than 100,000,000,000 passwords per second. Still think yours is secure?

And even if you’re using more sophisticated biometric-based approaches on a device (such as face or fingerprint login), you can still leave yourself exposed by having a weak password that can allow hackers to bypass the biometric.

Also, if you ever have to enter a credit card number or other financial details to set up an account, you may want to remove them through the service provider’s site or app.

Some services require ongoing payments, but deleting stored payment details where they are no longer needed will help protect your finances. Most services will provide an option to do this, although others may require you to get in touch directly.

You Don’t Always Have To Be Transparent Online

We constantly provide our personal information online in exchange for access to accounts and services.

Often this includes date of birth (to validate your age), postcode (to offer regionally locked services) or details such as your mother’s maiden name (to help restrict unauthorised access to your account).

Consider having a fake identity. That way, if your details are stolen, your real data will be safe.

You may want to set up a sacrificial email account, or even a temporary address (also called a “burner email”) to sign onto services that are likely to spam you in the future.

Apple device users may want to explore the “Sign in with Apple” feature. This restricts the amount of personal data shared with a service is being used.

It can also hide the user’s actual email address when registering — instead creating a site-specific alias that can later be blocked if necessary.

Read more: Your personal data is the currency of the digital age

What Happens To Our Old Devices?

When new gadgets enter our lives, the old ones are often passed on to friends and family, sold to strangers, traded in, or simply recycled.

But before we discard our old devices into this growing technology mountain, we should make sure they’re clear of our data. Otherwise, selling an old phone may also mean inadvertently selling your private information.

Many modern devices, particularly smartphones and tablets, have a factory reset option that removes all user data.

For devices without a distinct wipe or reset option, you can consult with the user manual or manufacturer’s website (which will often have a copy of the user manual). If in doubt, there’s plenty of online advice on how to reset devices.

You may need to remove or unlink the old device from your online identities, such as your Apple ID.

It may also be necessary to delete cloud-based accounts — such as Dropbox or Google Drive — set up specifically for that device. And don’t forget about data stored on devices being returned to the seller (perhaps after Boxing Day sales).

A 2019 UK study examining second-hand phones on eBay found only 52% had been properly wiped or reset.

Moreover, 19% contained some form of personal information, ranging from active social media logins to bank account details.

Parental Responsibility

Children (especially those in primary school) who use devices should be educated on safe internet practices and cyber safety.

While younger people are becoming increasingly tech-savvy with time, they don’t necessarily know the risks associated with using internet-connected technologies.

It’s important for parents to first learn about appropriate safeguards, and then remind their children of them regularly.

Don’t Panic

The good news is you don’t need special cyber security training for each new tech purchase. The lessons above are transferable, so the key is simply to remember to use them.

There are plenty of sources for further learning, including UK Cyber Aware, the Get Safe Online initiative, and the Australian eSafety Commissioner’s website.

To quote from the film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “don’t panic”. Just think carefully about how you use (or get rid of) your devices from now on.

Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University and Steven Furnell, Professor of Cyber Security, University of Nottingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Look up! Your guide to some of the best meteor showers for 2021

The best meteor showers are a spectacular sight but, unfortunately, 2021 starts with a whimper. Moonlight this January will wash out the first of the big three — the Quadrantids (seen above in 2020).

After that, the year just gets better and better, with the Perseids (another of the big three along with the Geminids) a particular highlight for northern hemisphere observers in August.

Read more: Explainer: why meteors light up the night sky

In addition to the year’s other reliable performers we’ve included one wild card: the Aurigids, in late August. Most years, the Aurigids are a very, very minor shower, but they just might put on a show this year.

So here is our pick of the meteoric highlights for 2021.

For each meteor shower, we give you a finder chart showing the radiant (where the meteors appear to come from in the sky) and where best to look in the sky, the full period of activity and the forecast peak. Most meteor showers typically only yield their best rates for about a day around maximum, so the peak night is definitely the best to observe.

The Zenithal Hourly Rate ZHR is the maximum number of meteors you would expect to see under perfect observing conditions. The actual number you will see will likely be lower.

Most meteor showers can only really be observed from either the northern [N] or southern [S] hemisphere, but a few are visible from both [N/S].

Lyrids [N/S; N Favoured]

ACTIVE: APRIL 14–30

MAXIMUM: APRIL 22, 1PM UTC = 11PM AEST (QLD) = 7AM CST = 3AM HAWAII TIME

ZHR: 18

PARENT: COMET C/1861 G1 THATCHER

The Lyrids are one of the meteor showers with the longest and most storied histories, with recorded observations spanning millenia. In the past, they were one of the year’s most active showers, with a history of producing spectacular meteor storms.

Nowadays, the Lyrids are more sedate, putting on a reliable show without matching the year’s stronger showers. They still throw up occasional surprises such as an outburst in excess of 90 meteors per hour in 1982.

This year’s peak Lyrid rates coincide with the first quarter Moon, which will set around midnight, local time, for most locations. The best time to observe will come in the early hours of the morning, after moonset.

For observers in the northern hemisphere, the Lyrid radiant will already be at a useful altitude by the time the Moon is low in the sky, so some brighter meteors might be visible despite the moonlight in the late evening (after around 10:30pm, local time).

Once the Moon sets the sky will darken and make the shower much easier to observe, yielding markedly higher rates.

For observers in the southern hemisphere, the Lyrid radiant reaches a useful altitude in the early hours of the morning, when the Moon will have set. If you’re a keen meteor observer, it could be worth setting your alarm early to get out and watch the show for a few hours before dawn.

Lyrid meteors are fast and often quite bright so can be rewarding to observe, despite the relatively low rates (one every five or ten minutes, or so). Remember, this shower always has the potential to throw up an unexpected surprise.

Eta Aquariids [S]

ACTIVE: APRIL 19–MAY 28

MAXIMUM: MAY 6, 3AM UTC = 1PM AEST (QLD/NSW/ACT/VIC/TAS) = 11AM AWST (WA)

ZHR: 50+

PARENT: COMET 1P/HALLEY

The Eta Aquariids are an autumn treat for southern hemisphere observers. While not one of the big three, they stand clear as the best of the rest of the annual showers, yielding a fine display in the two or three hours before dawn.

The Eta Aquariids are fast meteors and are often bright, with smoky trains. They are fragments of the most famous comet, 1P/Halley, which has been laying down debris around its current orbit of the Sun for tens of thousands of years.

Earth passes through that debris twice a year, with the Eta Aquariids the best of the two meteor showers that result. The other is the Orionids, in October.

Where most meteor showers have a relatively short, sharp peak, the Eta Aquariids remain close to their best for a whole week, centred on the maximum. Good rates (ZHR > 30 per hour) should be visible before sunrise on each morning between May 3–10.

The Moon will be a waning crescent when the Eta Aquariids are at their best. Its glare should not interfere badly with the shower, washing out only the faintest members.

Observers who brave the pre-dawn hours to observe the Eta Aquariids will have the chance to lie beneath a spectacular sky. The Milky Way will be high overhead, with Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon high to the east and bright, fast meteors streaking across the sky from an origin near the eastern horizon.

Perseids [N]

ACTIVE: JULY 17–AUGUST 24

MAXIMUM: AUGUST 12, 7PM–10PM UTC = 8PM–11PM BST = AUGUST 13, 4AM–7AM JST

ZHR: 110

PARENT: COMET 109P/SWIFT-TUTTLE

The Perseids are the meteoric highlight of the northern summer and the most observed shower of the year. December’s Geminids offer better rates but the timing of the Perseid peak makes them an ideal holiday treat.

The Perseids are debris shed behind by comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which is the largest known object (diameter around 26km) whose orbit currently intersects that of Earth.

Perseid meteors are fast, crashing into Earth at a speed of about 216,000km/h, and often bright. While the shower is active, at low levels, for more than a month, the best rates are typically visible for at the three nights centred on the peak.

For observers at European latitudes, the Perseid radiant rises by mid-evening, so the shower can be easily observed from 10pm local time, and remains high all through the night. The later in the night you look, the higher the radiant will be and the more meteors you’re likely to see.

Aurigids [N Favoured]

ACTIVE: AUGUST 28–SEPTEMBER 5

MAXIMUM: POTENTIAL OUTBURST ON AUGUST 31, PEAKING BETWEEN 9:15PM–9:40PM UTC = 10:15PM–10:40PM BST = 11:15PM–11:40PM CEST = SEPTEMBER 1, 1:15AM–1:40AM GULF STANDARD TIME = SEPTEMBER 1, 5:15AM–5:40AM AWST (WA)

ZHR: 50–100 (?)

PARENT: COMET C/1911 N1 KIESS

Where the other showers are reliable and relatively predictable, offering good rates every year, the Aurigids are an entirely different beast.

In most years, the shower is barely visible. Even at its peak, rates rarely exceed just a couple of meteors seen per hour. But occasionally the Aurigids bring a surprise with short and unexpected outbursts of 30-50 meteors an hour seen in 1935, 1986, 1994 and 2019.

The parent comet of the Aurigids, C/1911 N1 Kiess, moves on an orbit with a period far longer than the parent of any other shower on our list.

It is thought the orbit takes between 1,800 and 2,000 years to complete, although our knowledge of it is very limited as it was only observed for a short period of time.

In late August every year, Earth passes through debris shed by the comet at a previous passage thousands of years into the past. In most years, the dust we encounter is very sparse.

But occasionally we intersect a denser, narrow stream of debris, material laid down at the comet’s previous passage. That dust has not yet had time to disperse so is more densely packed and hence gives enhanced rates: a meteor outburst.

Several independent research teams studying the past behaviour of the shower have all come to the same conclusion. On August 31, 2021, the Earth will once again intersect that narrow band of debris and an outburst may occur, with predictions it will peak around 21:17 UTC or 21:35 UTC.

Such an outburst would be short-lived. The dense core of the debris stream is so narrow it will take the Earth just ten or 20 minutes to traverse. So you’ll have to be lucky to see it.

The forecast outburst this year is timed such that observers in Eastern Europe and Asia will be the fortunate ones, with the radiant above the horizon. The waning Moon will light the sky when the radiant is above the horizon, washing out the fainter meteors from the shower.

The Aurigids tend to be fast and are often quite bright. Previous outbursts of the shower have featured large numbers of bright meteors. It may just be worth getting up and heading outside at the time of the predicted outburst, just in case the Aurigids give us a show to remember.

Geminids [N/S]

ACTIVE: DECEMBER 4–17

MAXIMUM: DECEMBER 14, 7AM UTC = 6PM AEDT (NSW/ACT/VIC/TAS) = 3PM AWST (WA) = 2AM EST

ZHR: 150

PARENT: ASTEROID 3200 PHAETHON

The Geminid meteor shower is truly a case of saving the best until last. By far the best of the annual meteor showers, it graces our skies every December, yielding good numbers of spectacular, bright meteors.

The shower is so good it is always worth observing, even in 2021, when the Moon will be almost full.

Over the decades, the Geminids have gradually become stronger and stronger. They took the crown of the year’s best shower from the Perseids in the 1990s, and have continued to improve ever since.

For observers in the northern hemisphere, the Geminids are visible from relatively early in the evening, with their radiant rising shortly after sunset, and remaining above the horizon for all of the hours of darkness.

As the night progresses, the radiant gets very high in the sky and the shower can put on a truly spectacular show.

For those in the southern hemisphere, the situation is not quite as ideal. The further south you live, the later the radiant will rise, and so the later the show will begin.

When the radiant reaches its highest point in the sky (around 2am–3am local time), it sits closer to the horizon the further south you are, so the best meteor rates you observe will be reduced compared to those seen from more northerly locations.

Despite these apparent drawbacks, the Geminids are still by far the best meteor shower of the year for observers in Australia, and are well worth a look, even on the moonlit nights of 2021.

Peak Geminid rates last for around 24 hours, centred on the official peak time, before falling away relatively rapidly thereafter. This means that observers around the globe can enjoy the display.

The best rates come when the radiant is highest in the sky (around 2–3am) but it is well worth looking up at any time after the radiant has risen above the horizon.

So wherever you are on the planet, if skies are clear for the peak of the Geminids, it is well worth going outside and looking up, to revel in the beauty of the greatest of the annual meteor showers.

Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland and Tanya Hill, Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why going for a swim in the ocean can be good for you, and for nature

Summer is the season when we like to cool off with a plunge into water. For some it’s in the local or backyard swimming pool, but others prefer the salt water of the ocean.

Sometimes referred to as “wild swimming”, it is happening at many of the beaches, coves, bays or estuaries in Australia.

Read more: Why should my child take swimming lessons? And what do they need to know?

But wild swimming is not only good for our health, it can also be good for ocean and beach ecologies too.

A Healthy Ocean Plunge

Annual competitive ocean swims, such as the Byron Bay Winter Whales and the Bondi to Bronte, are a mainstay of many Australian coastal towns and city suburbs. Daily and weekly recreational swimming groups are also well established at many of our beaches.

In European cultures, immersion in salt water has long been believed to be good for human health and seaside resorts there remain popular.

Ocean swimmers often wax lyrical about the health and wellbeing benefits they get from their regular ocean swims. And research from both the humanities and sciences backs up these claims.

It’s common to hear swimmers describe their troubles and anxieties washing away in the water. Like a daily cleansing, they emerge from their swim feeling energised, calm and ready to face their days.

Journalist and broadcaster Julia Baird has written about how her daily swims in Sydney inspire a sense of awe that shifts how she navigates other challenges in her life.

Other research talks about swimming as a process of “therapeutic accretion” whereby the pleasures of our regular short dips and longer swims in the ocean layer onto us and “build to develop a resilient wellbeing”.

In the UK, online movements such as #risefierce and Mental Health Swims promote regular swimming as a positive practice for our health and wellbeing.

Part of this is accepting that ocean conditions can change day to day. Some days are calm and clear, others are wild with waves and winds. If we want to swim, we have to learn to navigate the conditions we are dealt.

This capacity for decision-making in the face of challenge is helpful for a sense of confidence and resilience – something that has been clear during COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.

Encounters With The Wild

For swimmers, the water offers other rewards.

Swimming, like other ocean sports like surfing and diving, is a way of immersing us in ecologies and bringing us into contact with animals, plants, weather, waves and rocks in a way that we cannot control.

We may encounter fish, birds, rays, turtles, cephalopods and other animals. All are reported to help with a sense of wellbeing. This highlights how we are part of these ecologies too.

The recent film My Octopus Teacher resonated with many people who swim and who regularly encounter the same animals.

Some swimmers even relate the effect of swimming to animals that live in oceans. In a study on swimming in the UK, one swimmer explained how they “went in like a cranky sea lion and came out like a smiling dolphin”.

Care For The Oceans

Being part of an ecology means we have responsibilities too. In Australia, we need to take a lead from Indigenous Australian people to care for the sea country we swim in.

Ocean plastics, sewage and the antibiotics in agricultural run-off are a potential problem for our health as we swim in polluted oceans.

Our encounters with animals that live close to shore can impact their health too, so we need to remember to respect their space.

Many cultures are aware of the interconnections between people and the environments they live in. For example, Native Hawaiian and Māori researchers write about their links to oceans, and the Ama women in Japan connect with underwater soundscapes as they dive for abalone.

Read more: Swimming with whales: you must know the risks and when it's best to keep your distance

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are deeply aware of the connections between the health of people and the land, sea and sky countries they live on.

People cannot be healthy if Country is not healthy, nor can Country be healthy if people are not.

And that’s why wild swimming could be good for ocean and beach ecologies too. The more we learn about the health and wellbeing impacts of ocean and coastal ecologies, the more we should feel invested in taking care of them.

Let’s Swim Together

The lack of control we have over conditions in ocean waters can be frightening, and the same encounters that thrill some people are terrifying for others.

Even for experienced swimmers, drowning is a very real risk. Between July 2019 and June 2020, 248 people drowned in Australia, with 125 of those coastal drowning deaths.

Read more: Shark nets are destructive and don't keep you safe – let's invest in lifeguards

For others their fear of shark attacks and encounters is enough to keep them out of ocean water.

So if you want to give the ocean a try this summer, many people find comfort and safety by wild swimming with others. This is reflected in the growth of swimming groups.

Websites such as oceanswims.com and Swim Sisters list ocean swimming groups and competition swims around Australia. It’s easy to find information through your local community too.

Swimming in the sea can be as simple as taking that first plunge in knee-deep water, or as challenging as an hours-long marathon along the coast. Whatever you prefer, take the time to enjoy being immersed in a watery world.

Rebecca Olive, ARC DECRA Fellow, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Girls Can't Surf shows how determined women battled sexism in their sport

Review: Girls Can’t Surf, directed by Christopher Nelius

The documentary Girls Can’t Surf spans the 1980s and early 1990s as women surfers battled in and out of the ocean. It has the predictable surf movie elements — a countercultural vibe and lots of fluoro fashion — but its power comes from the untold stories of brave, tenacious and funny women who fought to be taken seriously in their sport.

In the 1980s, a fierce international group of determined women surfers decided enough was enough in the battle against sexism and unequal pay. The film highlights the fight on and off the waves that contributed to women surfers’ eventual 2019 equal pay deal with the World Surf League.

Read more: Women’s surfing riding wave towards gender equity

Christopher Nelius (director, writer and producer) and Julie Anne De Ruvo (co-writer) have sourced an unbelievable series of clips, likely dug out of garages the world over, combining previously unseen footage with brutally honest interviews.

The women interviewed include Australians Jodie Cooper, Pam Burridge and Layne Beachley; South African Wendy Botha and Americans Frieda Zamba, Lisa Andersen and Jorga and Jolene Smith. They speak frankly of the fight for equality in a chauvinistic time, their struggles in the surf and their own coming of age.

In the early years of competitive surfing, the sentiment of these women could be summarised as we will succeed despite. As the film tells, pioneering women surfers earned a tenth of the prize money and were at times relegated to holding contests during the men’s lunch breaks.

Inferior Waves

The film highlights how much of the sport’s early focus was on how women looked. Speaking of women surfers in the 1980s, Damien Hardman, former surfing world champion, said, “I think they just need to look like women. Look feminine, attractive and dress well.”

Pam Burridge, the world champion in 1990, observes: “I got some flack that you girls need to lose weight or else the whole sport would fail.”

It was hard for competing women to get the chance to even surf proper waves. Jorja Smith, former pro surfer and rookie of the year in 1985-86, describes men surfing the best waves while women were left with “this shitty, hell-hole, scum pit [part] of the ocean” with onshore winds.

The surf conditions provided to these women were part of the bigger picture of respect and equality, or lack of it at the time. Although pay is the most visible topic in discussions of sports equality, broader respect for women’s competitions and the provision of support services are just as important.

You can’t help but cringe as the film flashes back to 1989, when organisers of the Huntington Beach OP Pro in California decided to drop the women’s event to provide more prize money to the top 30 male surfers. (But, of course, keep the bikini contest). After an outcry led by the Smith twins, the OP relented, reinstating the women’s event.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Isabel Letham, daring Australian surfing pioneer

‘Lacking Permission’ But The Tides Will Change

An oft-stated argument at the time was that women surfers didn’t bring in the money through sponsorships from companies such as clothing brands — they didn’t sell bikinis the way male surfers sold board shorts.

But in 1993, Quicksilver discovered there was a shortage of the smallest size of boardshorts — because women were buying and wearing the men’s gear. It started a dedicated women’s surf wear brand called Roxy, which turned over US$600 million in just four years.

This film shows how women in surfing faced sexism and social backlash as they advocated for their rights, better pay, visibility and sponsorship deals.

As surf writer Nick Carroll observes:

The girls who got into pro-surfing in the early 1980s were pretty much exactly the same as the boys. They had the same dreams, the same visions but they didn’t have the permission of the surf culture.

Girls Can’t Surf cements the idea that sport is a microcosm for society. The 1980s was a time of stark contrast: of bikini contests on the beach versus the “power suit”. For women surfers, the swimsuit was at the centre of their battle.

The skimpy bikinis they were required to wear in contests tended to go awry while competing, ending in “an enema so bad, I thought I was going to die”, in the unforgettable words of Jodie Cooper, an ex pro-surfer from West Australia, known for her ability to surf big waves. (Sadly, big waves were in short supply for women competing at that time).

Girls Can’t Surf has an ebb and flow, like the ocean’s tides. There is, at times, a sense of two steps forward, one step back. In 1999, for instance, at Jeffrey’s Bay in South Africa, women surfers were sent out to compete in a heat when there were no waves. They refused to paddle out — instead, collectively sitting at the water’s edge. This moment was regarded as a turning point.

Yet as these women show, a few passionate and dedicated people can be the start of a movement that changes history. At this year’s Tokyo Olympics, surfing events for both men and women will make their debut.

Girls Can’t Surf will premiere at the Perth Festival on January 11, at Sydney Film Festival on January 17 and be released in Australian cinemas nationally in March, 2021. The Sydney screening screening will be attended by special guests Layne Beachley, Jodie Cooper, Pam Burridge, Pauline Menczer, and Christopher Nelius.

Sophia Nimphius, Professor of Human Performance, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Flip flop: the un-Australian history of the rubber thong

The shoe known in Australia as a “thong” is one of the oldest styles of footwear in the world.

Worn with small variations across Egypt, Rome, Greece, sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, Korea, Japan and some Latin American cultures, the shoe was designed to protect the sole while keeping the top of the foot cool.

Australians have long embraced this practical but liberating shoe — but history shows we can’t really claim to it as our own.

Read more: The erotic theatre of the pool edge: a short history of female swimwear

Geishas, Workers, Soldiers

Japan is often cited as the pivotal influence, perhaps because the culture features not only the thong’s closest ancestor (the flat-soled zori, traditionally made from straw) but also the chunky geta sandal, famously worn by geisha for centuries in an effort to keep trailing kimono hems out of the mud.

In the late 19th century, Japan started to export aspects of its culture to diverse corners of the world. An early example was the Hawaiian “slipper” or “slippah”, a thong-like version of the zori with roots in the footwear of Japanese plantation worker immigrants in the 1880s. The slipper rapidly became part of the Hawaiian sartorial code (as in Australia, the shoe suited the relaxed outlook and beach lifestyle).

The popularity of the shoe may have spread after US soldiers, stationed in the East Pacific during the second world war, brought back souvenirs — but that claim is contested.

During the 1940s the technology for mass-producing synthetic rubber was developed, and this undoubtedly increased dissemination and influence of the humble flip flop. However, it was not until around the same time Hawaii became the official 50th state of the USA in 1959 that thongs became a globally recognised symbol of leisure.

Downunderfoot

Despite the thongs’ strong identification with Australia, details of its exact arrival here are not easy to pin down.

From 1907 onwards, for example, advertisements described “Japanese sandals” with “flexible wooden” or jute soles, although the few illustrations that exist do not depict shoes with a thong fastening.

In 1924, Melbourne’s The Herald discussed criticism levelled at Melburnians for walking with a “flip-flop movement, bringing the back of the heel down too heavily on the ground, causing jarring to the body and fatigue”.

Heels were suggested as a remedy for women with this complaint. Nearly a century later, podiatrists still recommend avoiding thongs for long term wear. (These days, they’re not fans of heels either.)

In 1946, department store David Jones promoted “Olympia”, a Greek-inspired thong sandal with additional ankle straps. But it was not until around 1957, when Kiwi businessmen Maurice Yock and John Cowie both claimed credit for what they termed the “jandal” — a portmanteau of “Japanese” and “sandal” — that Australia’s connection with the flip flop became more established and, at the same time, questioned.

In 1959, Dunlop in Australia imported 300,000 pairs of thongs from Japan. They started producing them internally in 1960.

Read more: Take a plunge into the memories of Australia's favourite swimming pools

As Australia’s tourism boomed during the 1950s and 60s, so too did its sartorial image, with thongs taking centre stage as the footwear of choice for an egalitarian, laid-back society.

So widespread did they become, in fact, that by the mid 1960s bans were being sought by state governments to avoid frequent injuries at the workplace — especially construction sites.

In the name of professionalism, in 1978 the Queensland government decreed that schoolteachers not be permitted to wear thongs to work. This year, they have been banned for wear at Australia Day citizenship ceremonies — a decision reflecting a wish for greater “significance and formality” to be represented at official events.

But the rubbery love affair endured, perhaps shown most ardently when Kylie Minogue made her entrance as part of the Sydney 2000 Olympics atop a giant rubber thong carried by lifeguards.

Dressing Up, Dressing Down

Thong-related concerns have not been limited to Australia.

In 2005 members of an American college women’s lacrosse team wore them to the White House to meet President Bush. There followed a furor over whether this brazen act was disrespectful, a distraction from the women’s achievements or signalled a casual shift in attitudes to leaders (and fashion) in the years after the Clinton sex scandals.

Since the late 1990s it has been possible to buy more formal heeled versions. Although these were widely mocked as expensive aberrations of the style, they looked to making a Kardashian-led comeback in recent times.

Branded versions are also available, with couturiers like Hermès selling a very unassuming flip flop for a cool A$600.

There is a poignant irony in the fact that thongs are the most popular kind of shoe in developing countries, precisely because of their cheap manufacture (often made from recycled rubber tyres) and consequently, very low purchase cost.

This practice of appropriating “ordinary” or “working class” clothing — transitioning it from the practical to the fashionable — is nothing new. We’ve seen it with singlets and boilersuits. Clogs are another footwear example.

Rather than a form of fashion whimsy, Australians take their thongs seriously. Even the naming of them — after the structural make-up of the shoe’s fastening rather than the onomatopoeic “flip flop” used by other countries — flies in the face of the Australian preference for shortened diminutives and nicknames.

That shows true commitment, but also that thongs are not really so dinky-di, after all.

Read more: Friday essay: vizards, face gloves and window hoods – a history of masks in western fashion 

Lydia Edwards, Fashion historian, Edith Cowan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mary Shepard: the artist who brought Mary Poppins to life

The success of Disney’s 1964 movie Mary Poppins has often obscured the fact the popular series of books describing the experiences of the enigmatic nanny were in fact written by the Australian born author P.L. Travers.

Travers’ own sense of ownership of her creation in turn obscured the contribution made by the illustrator Mary Shepard. Despite a 54 year collaboration, Shepard is regularly ignored in discussions of the books: the 2013 movie Saving Mr Banks, which detailed the genesis of the film, did not even mention Shepard or the pivotal role she played in the books’ success.

Shepard was born in Sussex on Christmas Day in 1909, the only daughter of Florence Chaplin, a painter, and E.H. Shepard, who illustrated Winnie the Pooh and the Wind in the Willows. Her mother died suddenly in 1927, and that same year Mary was accepted into the Slade School of Art where she studied painting and drawing.

Even as a new author, Travers was never one to sell herself short, wanting E.H. Shepard to illustrate the first Mary Poppins story. He declined, too busy with other drawing commissions, but fortuitously Travers saw Mary’s artwork on a Christmas card and felt her whimsical style was well suited to her vision for Mary Poppins.

Shepard had recently graduated and was invariably humble about her talents. Travers was ten years her senior and far surer of herself. She saw the illustrations as servants of the text rather than artworks in their own right.

Read more: How Australia's children's authors create magic on a page

This view would colour their whole working relationship.

Years later, Shepard recalled the struggle to create an appropriate “Mary Poppins”. In her typically self-effacing style, Shepard wrote in her unpublished biography it was finally achieved “after some effort and a lot of help and advice from Pamela.”

The inspiration for Shepard’s initial sketches was a wooden Dutch doll owned by Travers.

Travers did not want Mary Poppins to be beautiful: Shepard wrote she was directed to make Mary Poppins “totally bosomless, as flat as a board, which as a character seemed to suit her best!”

But in later drawings there is a visual change, perhaps reflecting Shepard’s growing confidence. Poppins becomes prettier, more feminine, and eventually Shepard goes so far as to transpose her own features onto Poppins’ face.

A Difficult Relationship

Shepard’s family background and her humility were perhaps the main reasons why the long collaboration with the notoriously prickly Travers was even possible, with Shepard illustrating all eight Mary Poppins books from 1934 to 1988.

But Travers’ desire to exert artistic control is evident in letters and notes on Shepard’s preliminary sketches.

Writing about their relationship in 1980, Travers said: “the word, as it appears in print, needs to be served by both writer and artist, mutually and in harmony”. But closer to her real view was expressed in a letter to her agent, Harriet Wasserman: “what counts most is text, not picture”.

Ultimately, this ensured this long and financially successful collaboration with Shepard was often an unhappy one. Closer to the truth than Travers’ self-serving assessments is publisher Frank Eyre’s observation, that, because the character of Mary Poppins is so important:

Mary Shepard’s illustrations are of the first importance too, for they present Mary Poppins to us visually in a way that establishes her for ever.

The £1,000 Feet

The relationship between Shepard and Travers came under particular pressure with the release of the Mary Poppins film.

Disney spent decades trying to reach an arrangement with Travers, and though Travers hated the film, it was – for her and Disney at least – financially very lucrative.

Shepard did not initially receive any financial benefit from the film, nor was Travers supportive of her efforts to do so.

Her agent A.S. Knight finally succeeded in winning Shepard £1,000 for the unique portrayal of Mary Poppins’ feet in the first ballet position as she descends from the sky.

The placement of the feet, which Shepard described as portraying the “firm implacable stance which seemed to indicate Mary Poppins herself”, was inseparably associated with her creation of Mary Poppins’ image.

I’ll Stay Till The Wind Changes

Shepard was a talented artist who also illustrated Ruth Manning-Sanders’ Adventure May be Anywhere (1939) and A. A. Milne’s Prince Rabbit and The Princess Who Could Not Laugh (1966).

In 1937, she married E.V. Knox, the editor of Punch magazine who her father worked for as an illustrator and political cartoonist. It was a happy union, with Knox often standing in as a model for Mr Banks in Shepard’s drawings.

Mary Shepard died in September 2000, and her grave is beside her stepdaughter the writer Penelope Fitzgerald, who was only seven years younger and to whom she was very close.

Fitzgerald’s headstone depicts a hand with a pen. Shepard’s has a hand holding a paintbrush. A fitting tribute.

Margaret Baguley, Professor in Arts Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland and Martin Charles Kerby, Associate Professor Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

3 reasons to study science communication beyond the West

Ask a science communicator how old their field is. They might say a few decades, or even centuries, because they’re thinking about the Western science communication tradition associated with a scientist-public gap.

These days, we almost exclusively associate science communication with Western science. Yet humans have always communicated knowledge about the world within their own societies and to others. There’s evidence of this going back tens of thousands of years.

Society today should recognise past and ongoing science communication approaches that diverge from the West’s relatively recent ones.

Also, as we have explored in a paper and webinar, we should include this knowledge in science communication histories. Here are three reasons why.

1. Framing Science As ‘Western’ Is Political

The histories we tell are political. Political factors can determine important elements such as where a story begins and ends and what is included or excluded. Histories of science aren’t immune to this.

We often equate science and scientific practice with a gold standard of credibility. But there’s much rhetorical power behind the “science” label.

Some influential 20th-century scholars, such as the late British historian Herbert Butterfield, valorised Western science and judged other sources of human knowledge production as failed attempts.

Others such as Andrew Cunningham, while trying to redress that tendency, defined “science” so narrowly that only the Western version of professional knowledge production applied.

Read more: It's taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge

Both these stances denigrate non-Western knowledge systems as lesser, by excluding them from “science”.

They have shaped science communication histories taught today, wherein we mostly ignore the diverse ways in which cultures across the world have communicated knowledge.

Thus, most science communicators lack insight into how these cultures tailored their communication to different audiences, aims and mediums.

Did you know medieval European medical writers regularly used Arabic pseudonyms for their published works to confer prestige?

This was because, at the time, Arabic cultures demonstrated strong leadership in pharmaceuticals and other scientific fields across the Afro-Asian-European landmass.

Or consider the Persian engineers who built ingenious constructions to provide water, air conditioning and refrigeration to desert communities thousands of years ago.

They communicated their technical expertise over generations through spoken word and actions.

Such snippets offer deep insight into myriad science communication cultures. Unfortunately, they’re rarely included in science communication histories today.

To borrow from Peter Pormann, a professor of Classics and Graeco-Arabic Studies at the University of Manchester, this is a case of intellectual amnesia.

It may be historians’ wish to respect diverse cultural categories, since “science communication” is an English term associated with Western culture. But a side effect of this is a profoundly Eurocentric approach.

2. Human Cultures Are Diverse And Wonderful

All over the world, different science communication systems have been adapted to different locations, lifestyles, cultures and histories. They are manifestations of a glorious wealth of human expertise and creativity and should be celebrated, not ignored.

Some are poetic, some instructional. Some were used to bridge cultures and some to maintain knowledge throughout generations, over centuries and even millennia.

Māori pūrākau (stories) are one example of a narrative technique for communicating mātauranga (Māori knowledge) about the environment, culture, values and more.

Westerners often dismiss pūrākau as myths. In fact, they encode evidence-based knowledge, gathered and tested over many ages, into a metaphor-driven form of communication.

One pūrākau associated with the Waitepuru stream in the Matatā region of Aotearoa New Zealand describes a “taniwha” — in this case a lizard whose tail flicks from side to side.

Among this pūrākau’s many meanings is a warning about the stream’s movement over time, indicating where it’s dangerous to build.

The pūrākau encodes complex hydrogeological knowledge that has been observed, tested and communicated over centuries.

The Māori process of constructing knowledge on the evidence of time-honoured experience is, in fact, consistent with Western science’s expectations of evidence-based knowledge.

Yet, strategies such as pūrākau for communicating that knowledge are culturally-specific and unique. Science communicators should pay them attention as part of the rich diversity of global knowledge communication.

3. Science Communication Should Be Inclusive

The past few years have seen the science communication discipline come under heavy fire for exclusionary practices.

The strongest supporting evidence comes from University College London science communication researcher Emily Dawson. She worked with low-income ethnic minority communities in London who weren’t heavily involved in science communication practices.

They didn’t visit science centres or museums. Dawson’s work showed “powerlessness” and “cultural imperialism” (feelings of being “othered”) were key reasons why.

Western science museum exhibits incorporating historical narratives may tell stories about the world from a European perspective. This can perpetuate racism and ratify European colonialism.

If European-descended Westerners are the only demographic who see their culture reflected and respected in science communication histories, this can lead to further social exclusion.

For cultural resilience and continuity, we must support knowledge-keepers’ efforts to sustain their science communication practices.

Even where ancient practices are no longer part of a society’s contemporary life, cultural roots still matter.

For instance, many modern Iraqis have great interest in the 2,000-year-old cuneiform cultures of Babylonia and Assyria. Exploring cuneiform science and its communication practices should be on our collective agenda.

Who had access to Babylonian knowledge about lunar eclipses? Within what worldview did Babylonians frame that knowledge?

These are exciting questions we can and should explore, to ensure the science communication histories we learn and teach leave none behind.

Read more: Friday essay: the recovery of cuneiform, the world's oldest known writing 

Lindy Orthia, Senior Lecturer in Science Communication, Australian National University; Dan C H Hikuroa, Senior Lecturer; Ehsan Nabavi, Lecturer in Science and Technology, Australian National University; Francesca Rochberg, Distinguished Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and Paula DeVos, , San Diego State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.