 | STILL the MOST INTERESTING Class in the World! |
36TH REUNION!!! MAY 20-22, 2022 | |
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Dues not only constitute a pledge of your continuing membership and engagement in the Class of 1986, but they also subsidize off-year Reunions events, both in person and virtually, both in Princeton and around the globe. They also help us to include classmates who might otherwise be unable to go back to "the best old place of all".
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Reading Glasses Book Club
Monday, October 28, 2024
8:00 PM EDT
Once again, the '86 "Reading Glasses" Book Club will join incoming students in reading and discussing President Eisgruber’s Princeton Pre-read selection for the Class of 2028. This year's book is The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li.
Dr. Li’s book describes the journey that took her from her native China first to Parsippany High School, then to Princeton, and eventually to international recognition as one of the world’s leading computer scientists. After developing technologies that enabled a breakthrough in computer image recognition, she has become an advocate for a “human-centered” artificial intelligence that benefits society. She ties together her personal and professional narratives by suggesting that, in life and in science, some of the most generative thinking happens “on the borders, where ideas are forever trapped between coming and going, explored by strangers in strange lands, insiders and outsiders at the same time” (p. 317). The Worlds I See both illuminates the exciting potential of scientific discovery to transform our world and highlights the profound ethical and policy questions that accompany rapid technological change.
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Climate Corner
Saving Our Waterways, One Dam At A Time
by Leila Philip
Water – too much causing catastrophic floods, too little resulting in crippling drought, rising seas erasing coastlines - and dwindling supplies of national groundwater. Environmental challenges from climate change are greatly magnified because of our damaged river system. But here’s the good news... A small, North American animal has been hard at work, addressing all of our water problems. Now that animal, caster canadensis, the North American beaver, needs our help to keep at it.
My recent book, Beaverland, sets out to show our long social history with beavers and how central they are to the health of the river network -- that vast circulatory system which pulses water throughout the continent. By building their networks of dams, beavers create a rhythm of ponds, wetlands, and beaver meadows which not only result in structures we can see, but set in motion ecological, biological, hydrological and geomorphic processes which profoundly impact the ecology and function and thus health of the river system. For eons, the 400 million beavers that lived throughout North America helped manage our waters.
The new paperback edition of Beaverland comes out in a time when there is much to celebrate in Beaverland. In the past months since the book first went to press. “Beaver believers” are moving from the fringe into the mainstream. Government agencies, Federal and state employees, tribal governments, and state legislators are joining nonprofits, scientists, individuals, ranchers, farmers and other landowners in new partnerships with the shared goal of harnessing what beavers do to help restore river systems and create watershed resiliency.
With equal ambition, a team at Google Earth is working with scientists to upload images of beaver damming complexes in order to train Google Earth to identify them. Using artificial intelligence to locate, map and count the beaver damming complexes of North America would greatly aid current research projects looking at fire and flood resiliency and as well as the biologic, ecologic, hydrologic and geomorphic impacts of beaver dams and canals. Slowly but surely, the values of beavers in the landscape, are becoming more widely, particularly in economic terms. For years most farmers and ranchers out West fought beavers on their land. Recently a farmer who once proudly reported killing 90 beavers in one summer called up an environmental consultant after reading the article he had given him about the water gains of beaver wetlands on grazing lands with a blunt question: “How many beavers did you say you could get me?”
But these gains have happened in a dark backdrop. In May 2023, the United States Supreme Court adopted a new and narrow standard for deciding which wetlands and waterways of the nation were entitled to protection under the 1972 Clean Water Act. A five-to-four majority overruled science (and Congress) in a decision which has left seventy percent of the river system without protection from development, pollution, and destruction. As we watch the impacts of accelerating climate change, knowing that floods and fire and drought and rising seas and erasing coastlines all have to do with our problems with water, the decision seems nothing short of delusional. To only protect the visible waters of a river system is as foolish as thinking we will stay healthy if we only lather on skin cream and brush our hair.
Wetlands, which beavers create, are called the “kidneys” of the river because they cleanse its waters, while deep below in the hyporheic zone, where soil and water mix, complex geochemical processes begin, and a world of microbial life travels.
We say water is life, but our story with water is more directly personal; water is not just life, water is us. Humans are composed of roughly 97% water. The human body contains 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries. If we unfolded each tuck of the origami of our lungs it would cover a soccer field. We don’t question this vast circulatory system that keeps us alive even though we can’t see it. Everything would change if we could accept the fact that a vital part of the river network is circulating with waters we also cannot see.
For beavers to thrive and do the valuable work they do helping mitigate some of the worst environmental challenges accelerating with our accelerating climates - wildfire, drought, flooding, biodiversity loss and dwindling supplies of groundwater - they need streams to live in, all those tributaries, which for the most part are no longer protected by the Federal Clean Water Act.
The Supreme Court decision puts the burden on states, local communities and individuals to do all we can to protect our river system – which includes that stream and brook behind your house, and the swampy area too. You can find out about the river system where you live by going to the EPA website How’s My Waterway, which will tell you which watershed you live in and the condition of its waters. Then do what you can on a local, state and national level to help protect it. You can start by contacting your local conservation commission and watershed protection group. If you are lucky, you might already have some beavers living nearby.
Two young beavers created a beaver pond in just a year on the steam system near my house in northeastern Connecticut. What was interesting about this site was that they did not dam up a flowing current. They built a dam across a pinch spot in a relatively dry area, then kept extending it as water began to fill. Eventually their pond complex would extend to a series of 3 dams. Their beaver dam complex actually enabled subsurface water to fill a shallow area between the drumlins, reconnecting an area of the stream system that had been dry for decades. Now millions of gallons of water have restored the hydrology of that area and it is once again a free-slowing stream. This is just the water we can see. Every beaver pond has about 3x as much water stored beneath it, a “sponge” of water that the river draws upon in times of drought and uses to help slow down and absorb floodwaters, enabling more water to enter the acquifer, cleansed and ready for our use as a recharged water supply.
So why am I hopeful? In the months since Beaverland has been out and I’ve been traveling the country giving talks and speaking to environmental groups I’ve been amazed, encouraged and deeply inspired by the grassroots activism that is rising up across this country as citizens take part in protecting their local environments, supporting the work of beavers, who create wetlands that cleanse our water supplies. #theleilaphilip |
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