Have you ever wondered who else has been swimming in your favorite body of water? Thanks to a new sampling technique, the collection and analysis of environmental DNA, we can now narrow that question down to species -- without having to take a single fish out of the water.

Environmental DNA (eDNA), also known as loose, extracellular, or naked DNA, results from the break-up of cells. It is continually cast off, yet doesn't persist long before breaking down, so the recent presence of many aquatic organisms can be reliably detected by looking for these DNA fragments. Monitoring  eDNA could supplement -- or even someday supplant -- traditional sampling methods, many of which can be time-consuming, expensive, and destructive to the very wildlife we seek to better understand.

To learn more, see this piece in Smithsonian Magazine. Better yet, join us next week for Jesse Ausubel's presentation at the VCS annual meeting (details above) and see the results from samples taken this year from Look's Pond and Tisbury Great Pond!

Global Issues Call for Global Perspective

In 1972, President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China, an acknowledgement that in the modern world, all nations — even rivals and adversaries — are economically interconnected. That year he also wrote the passage above, noting that environmental problems are also shared across borders, placing environmental stewardship among the ideals that the United States should seek to promote through leadership on the global stage. 

Earlier this month, 45 years after Nixon argued that the environment was something we had a duty to take responsibility for, President Donald Trump, in withdrawing from the Paris climate accord characterized the agreement as more than anything else, a bad deal for America:

“This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States. The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris Agreement. They went wild. They were so happy.”

If we take his argument at face value, it raises the question of which of these presidents’ starkly contrasting views of the world, and America’s role in it, is more appropriate for the leader of the most powerful country on earth. 

In Mr. Trump’s zero-sum world, when someone wins, someone else loses. If the Paris agreement is good for the rest of the planet, it is by definition bad for the United States. That is why “they went wild” — not because of the potential to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, but because “they” got one over on the USA.

Read the rest of our commentary at the Vineyard Gazette, where the ideological spectrum of quotes from famous Americans is better rounded out with the addition of a ten-year-old anarchist.