Tag Archives: author

Madhur Anand: Finding Poetry in Global Change Ecology

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Professor Madhur Anand is a global change ecologist and a poet. So how do the two combine? (Image Credit: Karen Whylie)

When I interview ecologists, there are two themes I always end up gravitating towards; how the earth is changing and how to improve scientific communication with the general public. So when my colleague Stephanie Januchowski-Hartley mentioned she’d recently spoken to a global change ecologist who also happened to be a poet, I jumped at the opportunity.

Professor Madhur Anand is the co-author of Climate Change Biology and the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, a collection of poems which bridge the gap between poetry and science. Along her way to picking up two Canada Research Chairs and the ICCC Female Professional of the Year award, she has worked with theoretical physicists, poets and mathematicians. I spoke to Madhur about interdisciplinarity, using poetry to connect with the general public, and the future of the planet.

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Andrew Hendry: The Changing Views and Speeds of Evolution

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The word evolution generally conjures images of millenia-long timescales. Maybe the 15 million years it took for whales to evolve, or the 2.5 million years it took to get from Australopithecus to modern humans. But over the last few decades, scientists have begun to realise that some forms of evolution can take place over much shorter timescales. Leading this field has been Professor Andrew Hendry, author of Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics, a “masterful, comprehensive synthesis treating most of today’s hot topics in ecology and evolution”.

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