11 January 2009
Charismatic megafauna
I'd first encountered this phrase in a short piece in Lingua Franca--the excellent yet long-defuct 'zine covering academia--but could never find it in my back-issues. Last week, some online article used the phrase and prompted me to search: Google search got me to the Wikipedia entry which prompted me to research and find the article's author Paul Kedrosky's blog and ultimately to the article in a Lingua Franca archive. Bonus: the archive has several years of LF online.
(Charismatic megafauna is the term used for the cute endangered species. People care about saving those critters, yet scoff at the economic expenditures of saving the more stinky/creepy/ugly ones. There's a similar response to wilderness preservation. I've heard denouncements of ANWR protection on the grounds that it's mostly barren-ish tundra (even though it's not). There's cute land and ugly land too.)
- The city posted by sstrader on 6 March 2016 at 9:43:27 PM
- The children of Infinite Jest posted by sstrader on 23 August 2015 at 3:48:24 PM
- Posthuman dystopia posted by sstrader on 22 March 2015 at 10:21:25 AM
- Poetry and apocalypse posted by sstrader on 22 November 2014 at 10:41:33 AM
- Roman Jakobson's functions of language posted by sstrader on 5 October 2014 at 10:36:23 AM