The famed evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has a plan to save biodiversity – but it will take about 50 percent of the planet:
Throughout the 544 million or so years since hard-shelled animals first appeared, there has been a slow increase in the number of plants and animals on the planet, despite five mass extinction events. The high point of biodiversity likely coincided with the moment modern humans left Africa and spread out across the globe 60,000 years ago. As people arrived, other species faltered and vanished, slowly at first and now with such acceleration that Wilson talks of a coming “biological holocaust,” the sixth mass extinction event, the only one caused not by some cataclysm but by a single species—us.
Wilson recently calculated that the only way humanity could stave off a mass extinction crisis, as devastating as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would be to set aside half the planet as permanently protected areas for the ten million other species. “Half Earth,” in other words, as I began calling it—half for us, half for them. A version of this idea has been in circulation among conservationists for some time.
How might that work? Wilson envisions “a chain of uninterrupted corridors” connecting “core” national biodiversity parks and other sanctuaries:
The new challenge, as Wilson sees it, is to link up national parks and wilderness reserves and restored landscapes to “protect in perpetuity entire faunas and floras.” He has high praise for several such projects out West—especially the Yellowstone-to-Yukon initiative to join vast areas of the U.S. and Canada, and the even more extensive Western Wildway vision, a tri-national arc of land along the length of the Rockies from Mexico to Alaska sponsored by the Wildlands Network, a consortium of biologists and activists headquartered in Seattle.
The last passenger pigeon died 100 years ago yesterday. Elizabeth Kolbert mulls over the mystery of the bird’s extinction:
In his recent book “Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record,”Errol Fuller, a British author, argues that an “additional factor” must have been at work in the species’ extinction, because “in a land as vast as the United States there can be no mopping-up hunting for a species as small as a pigeon.” (Fuller’s book contains a grainy and not particularly flattering photo of Martha standing in her cage in Cincinnati.)
Some have argued that the “additional factor” was deforestation; by this account, it’s no coincidence that the passenger pigeon went extinct right about the same time that land clearing in the eastern U.S. reached its maximum extent. Others speculate that the passenger pigeon was one of those animals that require great densities to survive.
She adds that, whatever the answer, “the mystery should give us pause” because “species that seem today to be doing fine may be sensitive to change in ways that are difficult to foresee.” Carl Zimmer is on the same page:
[David Blockstein, a senior scientist at the National Council for Science,] sees many lessons in its disappearance that apply to protecting threatened species today.
It’s a mistake to assume that a species with a big population is immune to extinction, for example. “The endangered species category is really all based on numbers, rather than biology,” he explains. Even a species with billions of members may have a biological Achilles’ heel that makes it vulnerable to human pressure.
To appreciate a species’ true risk, we have to understand not just its biology, but also our own technological advances. In the 1800s, the new technology included the telegraph and trains. Now it includes global positioning systems, cell phones, and huge fishing vessels. “We have factory ships that can vacuum up the ocean,” says Blockstein.
Mark Fischetti highlights efforts to resurrect the species:
The hundredth anniversary of Martha’s death is a sad occasion but it is also marked by an intriguing possibility. Ben Novak, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is trying to use genetics to bring them back from the dead. As a recent article by my colleague David Biello explains, Novak has sequenced the genomes of 32 birds that are preserved at various museums and labs and is inserting edited version of those genomes into living band-tailed pigeons, a close relative.
If he succeeds—and that’s a big if—Martha’s newly created kin could one day darken the skies again.
Update from a reader:
Just last week I heard Joel Greenberg, author of A Feathered River Across the Sky, speak about extinction at the Field Museum in Chicago. I have no idea why anyone would be confused about the factors that combined to lead to the extinction of what was once the most numerous vertebrate on the planet. Its forests were indeed diminished, but human predation did the species in (as we probably did in prehistoric megafauna across the Americas and Eurasia). And to relate it to our contemporary world:
The passenger pigeon went extinct in part due to … lack of government regulations for hunting. They were hunted relentlessly (and hunters used technology like telegraphs to locate the flocks), because they were so numerous. They laid one egg a year per nesting pair, but were not allowed time off from hunting to breed, and so billions became zero. Their extinction, along with the near-extinction of the American bison (aka buffalo) was one of the leading causes of laws regulating hunting and habitat in the US.
The Guardian review of Greenberg’s excellent book is here.
(Photo: The last passenger pigeon, Martha, named after George Washington’s wife, died in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. From Wikimedia Commons)
News broke today that ISIS has made good on their threat to behead kidnapped journalist Steven Sotloff, when a video of the murder appeared on social media:
A masked figure in the video also issued a threat against a British hostage, a man the group named as David Haines, and warned governments to back off “this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State”, the SITE monitoring service said. The purported executioner appeared to be the same British-accented man who appeared in an Aug. 19 video showing the killing of American journalist James Foley, and it showed a similar desert setting. In both videos, the captives wore orange jumpsuits. “I’m back, Obama, and I’m back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State, because of your insistence on continuing your bombings and … on Mosul Dam, despite our serious warnings,” the man said. “So just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.”
For those who must have the details, the Wire provides a fuller account of the video, including Sotloff’s last words, in which he is forced to lament that he is “paying the price” for the US intervention in Iraq. Much as I’m convinced that Sotloff’s murder will do nothing for the jihadists but shock and disgust the world even more than their past atrocities already have, that’s not much comfort to his poor mother.
Ed Yong reviews the first results from the Home Microbiome Project, which seeks to “map” the ecologies of microbes we carry with us wherever we go. What researchers learned after analyzing six weeks’ worth of participants’ swabs from around their homes:
[I]t rapidly became clear that each home has a distinctive microbiome, which comes largely from the people who live in it. Light switches and doorknobs look like hands. Floor looks like feet. Kitchen countertops look like skin. We turn our homes into microbial reflections of ourselves.
This happens quickly. As soon as we move into a space, we inject microbes into it, and those bugs colonise the area within 24 hours. One of the young couples demonstrated this in the starkest way:
at the start of the study, they were staying in a hotel. After they moved, their new home was microbially indistinguishable from the hotel room. “People always say, “Ewwwww, someone else was in this room and it has their microbes all over it.” That’s irrelevant,” says [researcher Jack] Gilbert. You are constantly overwriting the microbes in the world around you with your own. When you move house, your microbial aura moves too.
Yong shares why Gilbert decided to welcome a new addition to his family – a shelter dog named Captain Bo Diggley – after seeing the study’s results:
Dogs supercharge the flow of microbes between people and their homes. If two people share a house, they also tend to share their microbes, and couples do so more than mere roommates. But if there’s a dog around, that traffic surges. Dogs also increase the microbial diversity of a home by bringing in bacteria from the outside world. In a world where the presence of bacteria is equated to filth and squalor, some people might see that as a bad thing. Gilbert saw it as a plus. We need microbes to help train our immune systems and to ensure that they develop properly. “We wanted to make sure that our kids had that capacity,” he says.
The crises in the Middle East and Ukraine are frequently described in ideological terms, as battles between freedom and tyranny, liberal democracy and illiberal authoritarianism. The latest piece in this vein is from Lilia Shevtsova, who calls Russia “an advance combat unit of the new global authoritarianism, with China acting as its informal leader and waiting in the wings to seize its own opportunities”. I think this argument may give both Russia and China too much credit, especially as the informal leader of the new global authoritarianism is feeling threatened by a pro-democracy protest movement in Hong Kong. Evan Osnos looks in:
On Sunday, the Beijing government rejected demands for free, open elections for Hong Kong’s next chief executive, in 2017, enraging protesters who had called for broad rights to nominate candidates. China’s National People’s Congress announced a plan by which nominees must be vetted and approved by more than fifty per cent of a committee that is likely to be stacked with those who heed Beijing’s wishes. … Hong Kong’s growing activist network, known as Occupy Central (named after the city’s downtown) has increasingly alarmed leaders in Beijing, and they now describe the activism as a brush fire that could sweep over the mainland. In a piece published on Saturday, the People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, hinted about foreign agitators “attempting to turn Hong Kong into a bridgehead for subverting and infiltrating the Chinese mainland. This can absolutely not be permitted.”
Osnos analyzes the situation as a competition between nationalism and globalism; his analysis is instructive, but at a time when political thinkers are worrying themselves over the possibility that the Western model of liberalism is in decline or failing to gain traction in the developing world, this long-simmering conflict looks to me like the most clear-cut test case of liberalism vs. authoritarianism in the world today.
When the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre came around in June, Hong Kong stirred. And as Isaac Stone Fish points out, the Hong Kong protests point to the PRC’s bigger-picture problem of containing the demand for democracy, which people tend to like and want to keep once they get a chance to try it out:
Beijing could crack down on Hong Kong, but it needs to be careful not to push too hard — that risks alienating the majority of Hong Kongers who aren’t bothered by the status quo. More importantly, Beijing is very wary of the message communicated to Taiwan, the self-governing island of roughly 23 million people claimed by China. For decades, Beijing’s paramount foreign policy goal has been the reunification of Taiwan to the mainland. Probably the most likely way for that to happen would be a situation similar to Hong Kong — whereby Taiwanese would enjoy significant autonomy and a wide range of political freedoms. But the more Hong Kongers suffer, the more difficult it will be for the CCP to make the case that Taiwanese should voluntarily join the mainland.
Noah Feldman also sees the decision as a message to Taiwan:
The latest Hong Kong development strengthens the case for taking the risk of promoting independence. China is signaling that it will not democratize even at the margins during Xi’s leadership. That means nationalism — Xi’s “Chinese Dream” — will continue to be an important source of legitimacy, and that in 10 years, China will probably only be closer to insisting that Taiwan become Chinese.
And Rachel Lu connects it to Hong Kong’s declining economic clout relative to the mainland, which is highlighted in a new report:
In taking a hard-line stance against granting true democracy to Hong Kong, the Chinese government has made clear to the rest of China — as well as Taiwan, which Beijing considers a rogue province — that threats of civil disobedience will not lead to political concessions. The central government probably also believes that it can now cast a menacing shadow over Hong Kong with its increasing economic weight. The report by Trigger Trend does not appear to be commissioned by the Chinese government, but the report’s conclusions have been widely publicized in mainland media and align nicely with the central government’s unspoken message to Hong Kongers: The special administrative region is no longer very special.
I have little background in Chinese politics or history, so I have no expert insight to render here, but even from casually following the news out of China, one has to wonder how tenable the status quo is. Capitalism has won the day, as it has in most of the world: does liberalism necessarily follow? It certainly hasn’t done so everywhere, but what’s interesting to me about China is that there are about 30 million people in Taiwan and Hong Kong who have long since proven that liberal democracy can speak Mandarin. In other words, one can’t credibly say that China is culturally indisposed toward democracy, as is often said (unfairly, I think) of Russia, Iran, and the Arab world. Of course, the legacy of Maoism and the past half-century of history bear heavily on the politics of the mainland, but it’s entirely possible that a free China could emerge in the long run, provided a catastrophic war doesn’t derail everything.
In any case, again, it’s certainly worth watching. China’s political trajectory has huge implications for American foreign policy (and indeed, for the entire world) in the coming decades. Which brings me to a couple questions I’ve had in the back of my head for a while and would like to pose to the collective brain that is the Dish readership: 1) what do you think of the prospects for democracy in China? and 2) given the choice of an ascendent Russia and an ascendent China, which should the US prefer? My off-the-cuff answer is “obviously China”, but I’d be curious to hear what you all think. E-mail me your ideas at dish@andrewsullivan.com. I’ll revisit these questions later this week, hopefully with some brilliant insights from the inbox.
It’s not a perfect measure of partisan leaning, but according to the 2012 election results, New York is more Democratic than California and Minnesota, two states where Democrats control the entirety of the state governments, and where things have not yet completely collapsed in a morass of welfare handouts and tax hikes. So it’s a bit strange that the Republican Party controls the New York state Senate, the body where, traditionally, liberal legislative priorities have gone to die. It’s stranger when you learn that New York voters did actually give Democrats the majority in the Senate in 2012, at which point a coalition of state Senate Democrats known as the Independent Democratic coalition broke off from the party and formally allied with the GOP. Thus, the longtime state Senate Republican majority – the majority that had successfully thwarted nearly every liberal policy push made by the previous two Democratic governors – was preserved.
Andrew Cuomo likes to paint himself as the governor who saved New York from the political dysfunction that typified state politics during the reigns of his predecessors, David Paterson and Eliot Spitzer. Cuomo is the man who forced the sclerotic state legislature to finally act on marriage equality, criminal justice reform, and gun control. You would think that such a governor would prefer to work with Democratic majorities in both state legislative bodies, because, you know, those are all Democratic party priorities that Republicans (mostly) oppose.
You would be wrong. Blake Zeff (full disclosure: he’s my former editor) has a story at Capital New York that confirms what most observers of New York politics already suspected: Cuomo was instrumental in forging the alliance between the IDC and the GOP, because he never actually wanted his own party to wield real power in Albany:
When the coalition was created, Cuomo spoke with IDC leader Jeff Klein to offer advice on how to publicly sell the arrangement and move it forward. According to multiple sources, the governor advised the leaders of the new alliance to emphasize “progress on key issues,” such as campaign finance reform, stop and frisk and increasing the minimum wage. (The conference would use just that language in its announcement, and later release a minimum wage report that February and campaign finance plan in April.)
To move the arrangement forward, the governor and Schwartz would talk directly to Republican leaders and Klein. To help make the coalition work, the governor regularly spoke (by phone and in person) with GOP deputy majority leader Tom Libous, who was effectively Cuomo’s go-to person in the Republican Senate conference. GOP majority leader Dean Skelos was also involved in the discussion, and the governor would talk often in particular with top Skelos aide Robert Mujica. Meanwhile, another top administration official, Joe Percoco, was dispatched to deal with the Senate Democratic conference to try to assuage their concerns even as the governor helped their rivals.
Why would Cuomo do this?
In part because Cuomo’s method of “getting things done” is actually a very old fashioned one, with a rich history of use in New York in particular: It involves shady back-room dealing, obsessive secrecy, strong-arming of opponents, and frequent outright dishonesty. (Spitzer did try similar tactics, but his fatal flaw was that he fought state Republicans instead of governing with – and like – them.) The IDC, then, has been extremely useful for Cuomo. The alliance allows him to push through legislation that liberals would balk at if they held power in the Senate, and the coalition also makes a convenient scapegoat for the times when Cuomo is unable – or, more likely, unwilling – to advance a particular liberal cause.
Cuomo, understand, is a ’90s vintage pro-corporate “New Democrat” – he’s still that Clinton-era DLC type who blames his party’s failings on traditional liberalism – and he is attempting to maintain power in a state where the Democratic Party is, mostly, to the left of the national party, especially on economic issues. But Cuomo believes the key to his own political future rests on appealing to right-leaning whites, because he assumes he won’t have to do anything in particular to win the votes of liberal, black, and Latino New Yorkers. And he seems to just genuinely dislike liberals, period. (See: his not-at-all subtle undermining of New York City mayor and economic populist Bill de Blasio.)
Cuomo is running for reelection this year, and he sort of belatedly realized that he may have a bit of a problem with the state’s liberals. So rather than risk an unpredictable three-way race, he negotiated himself the support of the left-wing Working Families Party. (He then promptly announced plans to undermine them by founding an unasked-for new political party, for women.) As part of his agreement with the WFP, Cuomo agreed to finally denounce the GOP-IDC alliance. He did not do so with much enthusiasm. This is the very alliance that thwarted Cuomo’s much-touted women’s equality and campaign finance bills, and the governor was still unwilling to publicly go on the record and say that he thought his own political party should control the state Senate:
Cuomo finally condemned the alliance, under pressure, after he was given a choice this spring by the Working Families Party between publicly calling for the IDC to caucus with Senate Democrats and losing WFP’s endorsement and ballot line to Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, who he now faces in the primary. At first the governor resisted the demand, with two sources saying he initially refused to include it in a video he recorded for WFP delegates at the party convention in late May. But ultimately he blinked and made the deal, saying in the video, “the Senate has been a problem” and “we must change the leadership of the Senate.”
Cuomo can’t seem to wrap his mind around the crazy idea that maybe the easiest way to get things you support passed is to help elect people who also want those things to pass, instead of people who don’t support those things but are open to being bribed or threatened into changing their minds.
After the convention, Zephyr Teachout, Cuomo’s challenger for the WFP nomination, launched a Democratic Party primary campaign. The election is Tuesday, September 9. There’s a decent chance Cuomo will be forced to ditch the very conservative running mate he selected, which would be funny.
Last week, a nine-year-old firing an uzi accidentally shot and killed her instructor. Matt Valentine identifies pro-gun advocates critical of “putting a submachine gun in the hands of a slight nine year old” but he has “yet to hear any prominent gun rights advocates call for a change to the law—even to prohibit behavior they consider foolish and dangerous”:
To suggest a new regulation, no matter how reasonable, would be wholesale defection from the party line. The NRA tells us that gun laws are worse than useless. Criminals won’t obey them, so new laws “only punish lawful gun owners,” according to Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.
Which regulations is he talking about? Take your pick—the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs uses that language, “punishment for law-abiding gun owners,” to describe dozens of proposed state and federal laws, from background checks to magazine capacity restrictions to safe storage laws—even to laws banning the transfer of ammunition to people who aren’t authorized to have guns. The same rhetoric has been used by gun-friendly politicians and pundits for years. “Bad guys don’t follow the laws,” Sarah Palin said after the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. “Restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer.”
That line of argument has always been a tautological black hole, but it seems an especially inadequate rationale for opposing a law prohibiting children from using fully automatic weapons.
The same political forces that gather around gun rights are those railing against government in any form, even the kind that involves keeping children and their gun instructors, or other teachers, safe. We are left not only with lax gun laws but shake-and-bake shooting ranges. This is part of the explanation for why talking to the gun lobby about “common-sense regulations” never seems to go well. They are drawing on, and stoking, a view that presumes the foolishness of regulations. It is sad and telling that the only department left to look into Vacca’s death is the state equivalent of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—regularly derided by Republicans—and that it’s unlikely to be able to do much at all.
Less than a year ago, just 18 percent of GOPers said that the United States does “too little” when it comes to helping solve the world’s problems, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Today, that number has more than doubled, to 46 percent. Over that same span – from November to today – the percentage of Republicans who say the United States does “too much” has dropped from 52 percent to 37 percent, and those who say the United States does about the right amount has declined from 26 percent to 14 percent.
A couple weeks ago, Laurie Garrett advocated for a stronger response to the outbreak. Yesterday, Adia Benton and Kim Yi Dionne called out Garrett for fear-mongering:
In her recommendations, Garrett often draws on her experience reporting on the Ebola epidemic in 1995 in Zaire (the work that won her a Pulitzer Prize). During this outbreak, Zaire’s ruler, the notorious Mobutu Sese Seko, isolated Kikwit, the affected region, with military force to keep people from leaving the city of 400,000 people. Honestly: Is Mobutu’s a model of health governance we want to repeat? Under his militarized quarantine, prices of food escalated, and people were deprived of common household goods. There is growing evidence that this is happening in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Indeed, it appears that steps intended “to prevent the disease’s spread have hampered both food production and caused prices to soar”:
The Ebola outbreak is causing food harvests to dwindle in West Africa, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday. After infecting and killing more than 1,550 people across five countries, the disease has also put food supply “at serious risk,” with the F.A.O. issuing a special alert for Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the three countries most heavily affected by the outbreak.
“Even prior to the Ebola outbreak, households in some of the most affected areas were spending up to 80% of their incomes on food,” Vincent Martin, head of an FAO unit in Dakar, Senegal, said in a statement. “Now these latest price spikes are effectively putting food completely out of their reach.”
Aberdeen Fishing Village, Southern edge of Hong Kong Island, China.
A much more detailed entry:
My guess is that this a view of the Mediterranean coast of Peniscola, Spain. Several factors lead me to draw this conclusion. The piece of land appears to be a peninsula because part of it juts out farther than the rest, creating two inlets of water. The water is almost certainly the salt-water ocean, as indicated by the crashing waves and decreasing water level on the shoreline. The leaves of the trees in the center and top left corner of the image suggest there are palm trees, which do, in fact, grow in Peniscola.
Peniscola has a peninsula and the Serra D’Irta mountain range behind it. The intense blue of the water and golden color of the sand in the image very closely resemble the colors of the coast of where the Mediterranean Sea borders Spain. The architecture of the buildings along the coast – the salmon colored rooftops and white stone – are also extremely similar in appearance to images of buildings on the coast of Peniscola. In comparing an image of the Peniscola peninsula to this view, the architectural style of buildings, mountain range, and vegetation including palm trees in the two photographs appear to be very similar. One difference, however, is that the view from the window has more vegetation such as heavy tree growth and fewer houses. I believe the photographs were taken from different angles and in different points along the coast. The view from the window is more distant from the main hub of houses, possibly closer to the mountains and more isolated.
Another finds a loophole:
You’ve ruined every one of my Saturdays for over a year now with your obscure locales, wild goose chases and Google Street View shenanigans. But finally, I can say with absolute certainty where this photo is located – my balcony:
Yee-haw, gimme my book.
Another reader is thinking the south of France:
I took one look at that picture and the words from a song in the early-1960s British Musical Stop The World – I Want To Get Off popped from my lips:
Give me half a chance
In the South of France
To make my pitch
And I’ll be dirty, rotten, stinkin’ filthy rich.
Of course I’m probably whole continents off from where this actually is, but now I should get out the vinyl and listen to the original cast recording for the first time in decades since it’s going to be going through my head all afternoon anyway.
A whole continent off, sadly. An eagle-eyed player notes an essential clue for amateur hotel reviewers:
Wherever it is, they are automatically going to lose a star on Trip Advisor. Why can’t building staff take care of all those annoying dead bugs in webs on the outside of the windows?
Another finds the view within:
Green mountains, white beaches, palm trees … I’ve never been there but this is how I imagine the Caribbean Sea.
Wrong coast. Another try:
Catalina Island, California.
Wrong country, but the following reader nails the right one:
In April our cruise ship docked at the port of the Pacific beach resort village of Santa Cruz Huatulco, Oaxaca State, Mexico. The coast line there has several small bays, each with a cluster of resort hotels and condos. Every thing looks new and fresh and clean, all perfect for the comfort of the turista. I couldn’t make an exact match from the Google satelite images, but my educated guess is the Huatulco coast.
A few other readers guessed Acapulco, but the following reader remembers the view, even after four decades and the march of Mexico’s progress:
There are some immediate dead giveaways that this view is of the Pacific coast of Mexico: the vaguely Moorish, white-stucco hotel turrets, the white-painted trunks of the palm trees, the golden sand, the nearby mountain range, the banana trees, the little turista-jaunt boats anchored just off shore, and the multiple bays. We are looking at the Tesoro Manzanillo resort in Manzanillo. I have no idea from what window.
But allow me a Dishian digression. In 1970, while on Christmas break from college, I drove with two other girlfriends from San Antonio down the Gulf Coast, stopping in Veracruz and then on through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to Oaxaca. We foolishly scored grass everywhere we went, bought embroidered blouses, got very tan, drank fresa con leche, dallied with cute boys, and endured the rudimentary toilets of Pemex stations all to the soundtrack of the recently released Plastic Ono Band:
Ah, youth. In Oaxaca we asked the locals where we should go on the West Coast that was beautiful but not touristy. “Manzanillo,” they said. Four years later Las Hadas opened, the prototype for all other Moorish-turreted Manzanillan resorts and put the little fishing village on the map. Asi es la vida.
A previous winner notes:
Manzanillo hosts the fleet of Mexico’s Navy Region 6 and the city is home to the only statue of Snoopy outside the United States. Both of which, sadly, are in the opposite direction from this view out of Villa Las Cumbres.
Another reader:
This is the first contest where I recognized the subject of the photo. Years ago my wife and I traveled to the state of Colima, in which Manzanillo is located, to visit her sister. She arranged a two-night stay for us at Las Hadas Resort, also on the Peninsula de Santiago, where we enjoyed very inexpensive accommodations in exchange for sitting through a hard-sell time share “opportunity”! Las Hadas, being the location for the Blake Edwards film “10” which popularized white-girl cornrows, showed that film nightly in the guest rooms.
Meanwhile, Chini figures that many were frustrated by this week’s view:
Between the holiday and US Open tickets I was hoping for a quick hunt this weekend and we got just that. Unfortunately, it probably made some view-hunters miserable. Finding this view is all about using small clues to locate an otherwise generic resort. If you did it right (as I’m guessing a ton of folks did) this one was a near insta-find. But if you misinterpreted them you could spend hours searching Hawaii, Indonesia or the like.
This week’s view comes from the shores of Manzanillo, Mexico:
The pic was taken next to a potted plant at the top of a staircase in the main hallway of the Villa Las Cambres bed and breakfast and looks north by northwest along a heading of 332.75 degrees over Ascencia harbor.
Another has a pic of that potted plant:
I spent a good amount of time Saturday afternoon scanning the coast of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica. Eventually I gave up on the Caribbean because most of the large resorts didn’t really have fishing boats close in, and there weren’t that many places with mountains that large close to the sea.
I switched my focus to smaller peninsulas along the Pacific coast of Mexico, and a few minutes later found the Santiago Peninsula in Manzanillo, Mexico. We are looking down at the Tesoro Manzanillo resort from a rental house called Villa Las Cumbres. Helpfully, they have a Facebook page with quite a few photos.
Along the top floor (just inside the front door?), there are two large windows:
A view from the street level provides a view through the right window, which is close but too far right.
So that leaves us with the left window. I tried to find a decent exterior view, but the best I could get is a crop of a wide angle Panoramio photo from way, way down on the beach:
This week’s picture was taken by someone standing on the landing, through the window highlighted below. Quick and dirty Photoshop reenactment created with help from Shutterstock:
Good contest – not so hard to find the location, but getting the window was a bit tricky because the geography made street view useless.
This week’s winner was last week’s runner up and another veteran player from our list of long-suffering Correct Guessers:
This week’s picture was taken in Manzanillo, Mexico, from the northwest side of Villa Las Cumbres B&B (43 Avenida de los Riscos). Here is the window, on the 2nd floor:
A tough one, at least for me. It was fairly easy to tell that this was probably some tropical
American country; the obvious clue to follow afterwards was the hotel in Moorish-Mediterranean style in the bottom right corner of the picture, but for some reason it took me nowhere at first. A Tesoro – “treasure”– so is named the resort – a little hard to unearth.
From the view’s submitter, a contest veteran himself:
I was pleasantly surprised to see my window submission show up as this week’s contest. I don’t get to travel much, and when I saw this view I knew it would make a good contest.
Here’s some more detail about the location: The shot was taken from the entry hall of a rental vacation home at Avenida de los Riscos 43, Manzanillo, Mexico. The property is also called Villa Las Cumbres (House of the Summits). Every year, we take a trip with my kids and my brother’s kids to a beach somewhere, usually Oregon, Washington or Texas. We call it the “Cousins’ Trip” and this year we splurged and went out of the country to Manzanillo. I’d never been to the Pacific coast of Mexico before and it was breathtaking. We managed to luck out and find this house that sleeps 10 on AirBnB the day before and the views were spectacular.
Above is a shot of the house from the beach, with the window highlighted. My only regret is that I have to wait until next week to solve a contest.
Errol Fuller, a British author, argues that an “additional factor” must have been at work in the species’ extinction, because “in a land as vast as the United States there can be no mopping-up hunting for a species as small as a pigeon.” (Fuller’s book contains a grainy and not particularly flattering photo of Martha standing in her cage in Cincinnati.)
The Dish 
