Middlebury Voices in the News: Supreme Court, North Korea, Natural History

“Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. FEC has the potential to be worse than the 2010 Citizens United decision, not because of its immediate effects but because of its long-run impact on the way courts decide campaign finance cases,” said Middlebury political science professor Bert Johnson in an opinion piece for U.S. News.

“The universe of bad things they could do is pretty big,” said Jeffrey Lewis, of the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies to the Wall Street Journal regarding North Korea’s missile testing. “The main takeaway is that they’re moving away from ‘stun’ and using the tests to develop the military capabilities that they know they want.” On the same subject, Lewis told the New York Times, “…although China may have pressured North Korea to refrain from nuclear tests in past years, its influence on Pyongyang seems to have waned.”

The essential study of natural history has taken a slide in recent decades and needs a resurgence in science and society, says a team of scientists that includes Middlebury biology professor Stephen Trombulak. Natural history knowledge is of “vital importance to many disciplines, from human health and food security to conservation, management, and recreation,” the group says. The paper, which ran in the journal Nature, which ran an editorial about the study.