Over the past few years I’ve found much to appreciate in Dr. Corinne Wieben’s podcast Enchanted; the History of Magic & Witchcraft, particularly when she takes up an aspect of the natural world.
Enchanted: The Red Branch
John E. Riutta
About John E. Riutta
Posts by John E. Riutta, MA, MBA, FLS, MemRES:
Brand Antarctica
In just over two hundred years, Antarctica has gone from being a distantly seen, near-fictional place to becoming a tourism destination of choice. In her new book “Brand Antarctica; How Global Consumer Culture Shapes Our Perceptions of the Ice Continent,” Dr. Hanne Elliot Fønss Nielsen explores how this transformation occurred through the popular media and what the implications of such a media-generated understanding of it are.
Climate Change on Mountains
While there is no definitive way to determine if the Prussian polymath Alexander von Humbolt was truly the “last person who knew everything,” it is an appellation that has been justifiably used in reference to him sufficiently often to secure him a place in the finals of such a contest. Natural and moral philosopher, geographer, […]
On AI-generated Images of Birds
As one who has dedicated decades of his life to helping people learn about, understand, and as a result it is hoped care more about the natural world and the present state it is in, I am particularly troubled by AI-generated images of birds and other wildlife as they present the unreal as real, encouraging many of those seeing them and not understanding that they are nothing more than the random collection of data assembled into visual images by an AI image-generating computer program to develop a distorted expectation of how the natural world truly appears.