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Wilderness Drum > Wilderness on the Internet > Newsgroups | ||||||||||||||||||||||
— Gary Nabhan A newsgroup is one of approximately 80,000 discussion groups on Usenet, a network parallel to but independent of the Internet, using a protocol called the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). Anyone can send a post through a regular Internet Service Provider to a Usenet server, which then makes it available to all subscribing ISPs for reading, by anyone interested, by means of a news reader. Newsgroups can also be administered privately by individual servers. Most of the usual Internet email clients, such as Eudora or Netscape or Microsoft Outlook, have news reading capability; and there are also stand-alone news readers for various platforms, such as Agent, or its free equivalent, Free Agent. However, there is also a well-designed Web-based threaded news reader available at Google, with extensive search capabilities inherited from its predecessor Deja News. Note that in the entries below I have linked the newsgroups to the Google newsgroup server. Although there are some exceptions, Usenet newsgroups are generally unmoderated, and are therefore subject to rapid changes in tone and content. Some newsgroups attract serious and sophisticated participants; some newsgroups have devolved into small private clubs that subsist on deriding newcomers. Thus discussion on Usenet newsgroups can be interesting and thoughtful, or it can be banal, repetitive, and dominated by the voice and viewpoint of a relatively small number of regulars. If that is the case, it may be worthwhile to check back every once in a while to see if things have improved. But don’t count on it. The following are some Usenet newsgroups you might find to be of interest. Note that I have linked the newsgroups to the Google newsgroup server. Brief descriptions and traffic analyses – data such as the number of posts per month and per day, number of cross-postings, estimated number of readers – for some of the 80,000 available newsgroups can be found at the Newsgroups Info Center. Note too that some of the newsgroups below have subsidiary groups – for example, alt.fishing.walleye, rec.boats.paddle.whitewater, rec.oudoors.camping. The newgroup server will lead you deeper into each hierarchy. FAQs Some Usenet newsgroups have assembled a list of Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ (pronounced either eff-aye-cue or fack) for newcomers, so that regular members do not have to hear and answer the same basic questions over and over again. In some newsgroups, the FAQ is posted periodically for comment and suggestions. FAQs are often detailed and sophisticated consensus documents compiled by real experts in the field. There are two archives of all the Usenet newsgroup FAQs – the Internet FAQ Consortium and the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. It is worth poking around in these archives; you never know what you’ll find. The following are a few of the Usenet newsgroup FAQs that you might find of interest. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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It is ironic how many conservationists have presumed that biodiversity can survive where indigenous cultures have been displaced or at least disrupted from practicing their traditional land-management strategies. Ironic because most biodiversity remaining on earth today occurs in areas where cultural diversity also persists. Of the nine countries in which 60 percent of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages are spoken, six of them are also centers of megadiversity for flora and fauna: Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Zaire, and Australia. Geographer David Harmon has made lists of the twenty-five countries harboring the greatest number of endemic wildlife species within their boundaries and of the twenty-five countries where the greatest number of endemic languages are spoken. Those two lists have sixteen countries in common. It is fair to say that wherever many cultures have coexisted within the same region, biodiversity has also survived.