Geography   Shepherd’s stone house and enclosure for sheep / goats, about 4,000 years old. Mt. Ainos, Cephalonia, Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos   Mainland Greece was never sufficient for all its inhabitants. About 80 percent of the land is dominated by mountains. Even the gods chose Mt. Olympos in Thessaly for their home. Thessaly is unusual because it has enough flat land for growing food. Prosperous valleys are rare in Greece. Attica that nourishes Athens is a valley, but, according to Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, the soil of Attica was so poor that Athenians were autochthonous people, that is, they were born in Attica and did not come to Attica from any place else.      Polis and civilization   Thus the geography of Greece, a country of mostly mountains, explains to some degree the passion of Greeks for freedom, their determination to live free or die. The advantages of living in the difficult conditions of mountainous Greece, or islands, were m

  Logo of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Public Domain.   Prologue   The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a large group of scientists from all over the world. These scientists study climate. They focus on the science that explains the origins and consequences of changing climate, particularly the anthropogenic origins and effects of global warming. In other words, how human activities are changing the planet’s climate.    Every year IPCC publishes a report that examines the state of the natural environment and climate. The report even summarizes the science for policy makers, making their climate education easier. The United Nations manages the IPCC and its studies. The UN sponsors an annual climate summit that brings together prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, and scientists. The yearly IPCC reports inform this powerful politicians the world over. The purpose of this summit is enlightened and possibly convince the nations of

    US gold coin of 50 dollars depicting the buffalo. Public Domain.   I watched a  PBS documentary  by Ken Burns on the extermination of the American buffalo in the nineteenth century. Buffalos by the millions roamed the plains for millennia.   Buffalo and Native Americans   “For thousands of generations,” said the documentary transcript, “buffalo (species   bison bison ) have evolved alongside Indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, revered the animal. The stories of Native people anchor the series [about the buffalo], including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the Lakota, Salish, Kootenai, Mandan-Hidatsa, and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others.”   Countless buffalo kept the land healthy and productive. Grass and flowers filled the immense land of the plains. Moreover, the buffalos were the backbone of the culture of indigenous peoples who ate some of the animals and lived their lives around th