Jurisdynamic agricultural law

I invite readers of Jurisdynamics to ponder how one might update the agricultural law curriculum to account for legal and social change in that domain over the past generation.

Ex libro lapidum historia mundi

Mazon Creek lagerstätte
All geology represents the present-tense freeze-frame of the earth's history, condensed conveniently in the chemistry of rocks and soils. Though the course of any single organism's life is infinitesimally minute by comparison with the history of the earth, only one species in the earth's parade of life — ours — has managed to crack the code. It is as though some geological variant of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle prevents observation over a more meaningful time span. Any organism attaining the power to unlock the earth's secrets also acquires, by that very stroke, the power to destroy the earth itself.

The true wonders in this world do not hide. Rather, they wait in plain sight, obscured not so much by ice or vegetation as by the shades we draw across our eyes. Most of geologic history belongs in this category of true wonders. Terrestrial history accretes at rates too slow for any mortal observer to notice. But it leaves records in the form of rocks and soils and layers.

On extremely rare occasions, the chroniclers of geologic time pause to pick one fragment of one organism — a leaf, a wing, a shell, a bone — and enshrine it in some durable medium. The imprints of Carboniferous ferns, horsetails, and club mosses, insects in amber, the barely perceptible bas-relief of a mollusk, cliffs colored by coccolithophorid shells, even the hydrocarbon relics of ancient plant life that humans so casually burn and polymerize — all these bear mute testimony to worlds long past.

As with sediment, so with sentiment: Our efforts at self-understanding have no chance of overcoming the mindless buzz of being and doing. We cannot understand feelings of the moment, with deep emotional footprints and even with lasting practical consequences, until we stop acting upon those feelings and seize the opportunity to look backward, in the serenity of solitude.

Logarithmic spirals and the nautilus

I just composed the following observations in connection with a MoneyLaw post and thought that the Jurisdynamics audience might appreciate them even more:


The chambers of a nautilus are arranged according to an approximate logarithmic spiral that can be calculated in polar coordinates according to this simple formula:

r = ae^bθ

where r represents the radial coordinate, θ represents the angular coordinate, e is the base of natural logarithms, and a and b are constants that (1) are arbitrary in modeling and (2) are empirically determined in real-world applications of logarithmic spirals.

I post this picture of the nautilus, which graces the banner for BioLaw: Law and the Life Sciences, because it is beautiful. It reminds us that beautiful things are often beautiful because they work. The nautilus and its relatives, after all, have cruised the seas for half a billion years with very few evolutionary adaptations.

For technical details, see Wikipedia's excellent articles on logarithmic spirals and polar coordinates. Extra intellectual credit goes to readers who tackle the article on spherical coordinates as well.

Disaster and Sustainability: The Cultural Perspective

»  Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer  «

I will take part in a November 6-7 symposium called Disaster and Sustainability: The Cultural Perspective. The University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Law will stage this symposium at Carlsberg Akademi:

It is widely accepted that the study of ecological and societal sustainability in general and climate change in particular involves all research disciplines from all faculties within the academy. The study of sustainability is inherently multi- as well as cross-disciplinary, given the fact that climate changes and other questions of sustainability relate to and influence every aspect of human society and its environment. In this two-day Copenhagen symposium, we will explore the huge and diverse field of sustainability studies by focusing on the interrelationship between sustainability and disaster as recto and verso of the same set of problems.

We consider the study of disasters an important and rewarding way of gaining knowledge about the sustainability of human societies and their environment. Disasters challenge the resilience and threaten the cohesion of the social fabric; however, disaster research shows how disasters can also strengthen the cohesion of a community in the short term, and work important changes in the long term.

In the recent decade the cultural and social aspects of disasters-questions such as how human societies contribute to the creation of disasters, how they perceive disasters, and how they respond when they strike-have gained acceptance as important constituents of disaster research. Yet the cultural perspective on sustainability studies-in the widest possible sense of the word, including social, economic, legal, religious, aesthetic, political, and philosophical inquiries-still seems like an area very much open for development and further research.

We have the pleasure of inviting scholars from all fields of research to explore the multi-faceted perspectives of the interrelationship between disaster and sustainability. With this symposium we hope to accelerate further research within the field. In joining scholars from different disciplines and traditions, we particularly hope to create an inspiring and synergizing platform for valuable exchanges in the years to come.