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About dublinsoil

Professor of Environmental Science

Trees behaving badly

Posted on March 5, 2012

by Liam Heneghan To James White, botanist and teacher. Though you might forgivably mistake a man for a tree at the level of gross morphology, nevertheless, a tree undeniably dwells in place whereas a person’s home is born in motion.  … Continue reading →

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Dude, your evolutionary theory just ate my philosophy – Leopold and the evolutionary possibility of a Land Ethic

Posted on October 30, 2011

Somebody somewhere at this moment is writing a reverential essay about Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.  I feel a little ungenerous, I admit, to write in less than enthusiastic tones.  It seems to me though that if the land ethic, Leopold’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Environmental History, Evolution, Philosophy | Leave a comment

The Ecology of Knowledge: Ecological Resilience and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Posted on October 2, 2011

As students of science we have all, no doubt, absorbed the lessons from the history of our disciplines that changes in thinking tend not to be meted out incrementally. The Darwinian and Wallacean account of evolutionary change through natural selection … Continue reading →

Posted in Environmental History, Philosophy, Science | Leave a comment

George Perkins Marsh – Master of Footnotes

Posted on September 27, 2011

George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), a polymath and polyglot, was born in Woodstock, Vermont and was a lawyer, congressman, and a US envoy to the Ottoman Empire and later to Italy, where he died.  One of the better known scholars of … Continue reading →

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It’s Mumford Time! Environmental Icarine Writers and the verification of spectacular claims

Posted on September 11, 2011

The case of the monastic clock and the invention of capitalism. Fashioning an intellectual life is like unraveling a wooly sweater in reverse where instead of picking at a loose thread or two and witnessing the garment come asunder, one … Continue reading →

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The Irish Pre-famine Population

Posted on August 22, 2011

A couple of days ago I posted on Ken Connell, the Irish economic and social historian whose conclusions about the Irish population before the Great Famine remains influential and controversial.  I posted a longer piece on the topic at 3quarksdaily…  … Continue reading →

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Professor K H Connell (1917-1973) and Irish Pre-Famine Population Statistics

Posted on August 20, 2011

I have been spending a good bit of the past week thinking about Irish pre-famine population statistics.  I am hoping it will be a good case-study for students in the coming months as teaching gets going again.  I will also … Continue reading →

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Civilization and its contents: how the world’s earliest cities manifest Neolithic carnal excesses

Posted on August 6, 2011

Being primarily a note on V Gordon Childe ( (1892 – 1957) and the definition of civilization. “Libraries”, Foucault said, “are the habitat of Man.”  I was in a university library when I read this.  It was the Arts library … Continue reading →

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The Social Ladder and the Ecological Ground – Julian Steward and multilinear evolution in the middle 20th C

Posted on July 29, 2011

The urban experience is a relatively new one for us.   The oldest cities emerged from 5000-3500 BC, slowly evolving out of antecedent Neolithic villages and settlements throughout the world, some of which date back as far as 10,000 BC.  George … Continue reading →

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Brain, liquefaction of

Posted on July 25, 2011

The following is an excerpt from my unpublished manuscript “A Shorter History of Bodily Fluids” B.  Brain, liquefaction of: also known as encephalomalacia (from the Greek, μαλακία softening), necrencephalus (from Greek, νεκρο + κεϕαλή  deadhead), ramollissement cérébral (from the French … Continue reading →

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