resources
Dark satanic steel
The raw materials of society
A big hole in the ground: This is where most of the raw materials of an industrial society come from. To appreciate the scale of this excavation, note that the bright blue object on a shelf near the center of the image is a Porta Potti.
The dragline
A dragline is the largest of the machines used to strip away the overburden and mine the ore layer at an open-cast mine. A bucketload for this particular dragline, one of the world's largest, is 220 cubic yards. Note the school bus, which would easily fit in the bucket.
A metropolis for hydrocarbons
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
The Pleasure of Observing
Abbreviation
I generally do not like to abbreviate behavioral notes. An important detail may be ignored or considered irrelevant and discarded because it lacks a discrete category on the list. It is often an anecdotal event that offers special insight.
Beyond dry facts
If one has a personal knowledge of the individual animals being studied, observations in field notes cease to be impersonal, and an observer’s empathy can lead beyond dry facts to better intuition and insight.
A study should persist
Since we cannot interview the subject, we can only infer the past from the present. Ideally, a study should persist for at least the life span of an animal.
Precious intangible values
The “precious intangible values” of this wilderness.
Independent fragments of existence
You cannot divide me into independent fragments of existence.
— The Last Panda, 1993
Panda routes
A detailed route of a panda foraging on bamboo shoots, showing the number of shoots eaten and droppings deposited (black spots) on May 31, 1982.