Two helpful pieces from Mother Jones:
Pass a flawed climate bill now, or wait for a better one? Environmentalists duke it out.
Author: Lee M.
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Creation’s travail
To hear some anti-green conservatives tell it, you’d think that nature-worship and radical environmentalism were making major inroads into our society. Of course, the opposite is much closer to the truth: the general attitude toward the natural world that underlies most of our daily activities is one that regards nature as little more than a vast storehouse of resources to be used and a vast sink in which to deposit our waste.
Still, it’s true that Christians, at any rate, shouldn’t idealize nature in either its benign aspects or its wilder and more threatening ones. There is a strain of deep green thinking that is anti-human and anti-civilization. But Christians should be a bit ambivalent about nature.
I don’t like to talk about nature as fallen, because that implies that there was a time when it was unfallen. I don’t think modern science permits us to think that, and I don’t think the Bible requires it. Instead, I’d prefer to talk about the created world as being “in travail” (cf. Romans, chapter 8). This implies that nature is good, but is on its way to being consummated by the power and grace of God. Nature doesn’t provide the standard of good and evil, but neither is it to be disregarded for the sake of human interests.
This view, not incidentally, provides a more solid grounding for compassion and justice for animals than either nature-mysticism or a purely utilitarian attitude toward the natural world. We don’t have to ignore the “red in tooth and claw” aspects of nature in order to recognize that our fellow creatures are caught in a world order that is indifferent to their suffering.
Yes, trying to intervene in the predator-prey relationship will usually cause more suffering than it alleviates, but we can at least recognize that it does cause innocent suffering and will (please God) be abolished–or at least radically transformed–in the eschaton. How much more, then, does a recognition of nature’s travail provide grounds for not adding to the suffering of God’s innocent creatures by imprisoning them in our institutionalized systems of food production and scientific experimentation?
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We’re number 37! USA! USA!
The World Health Organization ranks the world’s health care systems.
EDIT: Note that the ranking is several years out of date. I mistakenly thought it was new data. Post in haste, repent at leisure, I guess…
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The resurrection of Eastern Market
My wife and I live about a block and a half from Eastern Market, but the fire that gutted the building happended just before we moved here, about two years ago. Since then, the butchers, fish-monger, etc. have been housed in a makeshift building across the street, while the weekend produce vendors set their stalls up on the sidewalk outside. Great to see this historic building and center of community life being restored.
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One sentence movie review: Revolutionary Road
I can’t decide if it was a good movie that failed to acheive greatness due to a couple of glaring flaws, or just a really well-made, but fundamentally bad movie.
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What GHG emissions?
Congress exempts factory farms from reporting their greenhouse gas emissions.
Related, here’s an analysis of Waxman-Markey from the National Wildlife Federation.
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John Gray on Isaiah Berlin
Berlin is remembered by philosophers for defending ethical pluralism – the claim that human values make conflicting claims that cannot always be rationally reconciled – and arguing that this pluralism is the true basis of a liberal society. The argument is hardly demonstrative – if values can conflict in ways that have no rational solution, what reason can there be for favouring individual choice over other goods? But Berlin’s achievement was not to give liberalism a watertight foundation. It was to present liberalism as an attractive vision of life, and one that is not tied to a quasi-religious belief in progress. Though Berlin was solidly committed to the values of the liberal Enlightenment, he never shared the faith of Enlightenment thinkers that growing knowledge could resolve fundamental conflicts of value. For him such conflicts were part of what it means to be human, and any philosophy that offered to deliver us from them was both deluded and illiberal.
Read the rest here (via the American Conservative).
I don’t know how much Gray is over-reading Berlin here, but this certainly seems to aptly characterize Gray’s views. He’s been on a jihad against progressivist utopian delusions over the last few years, from taking on humanism in his provocative Straw Dogs (see my thoughts here) to critiquing apocalyptic religion and crusading neoconservatism in Black Mass.
Gray’s pluralistic, anti-progressivist liberalism definitely resonates with me. I’m deeply suspicious of narratives of historical progress and claims to basing society on a unified conception of the good. But I also have my reservations. Anti-progressivism can easily slide into complacency about rectifiable injustices. Sometimes we need the zeal of the radical.
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More command and control please!
Interesting dissent on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill currently being stalled by farm-state Dems in Congress:
…President Barack Obama has publicly described the bill as his and the Democrats’ preferred alternative to regulation. Without the bill, he has threatened, the EPA will directly regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, a power it was given by the Supreme Court in 2007 and which it announced it would exercise in April 2009. Indeed, the bill specifically prohibits Obama’s EPA from regulating these emissions.
The bill’s carbon-cap-and-trade provisions are by all reports its heart and soul. They exemplify a Republican approach: Don’t tell polluters what to do, bribe them and hope they do what you want. Democrats have faked left and gone right.
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Most environmental leaders and Democratic Party officials argue that we should support this bill no matter how imperfect because it represents an important, small step forward. Strip it of its cap-and-trade provisions and I would agree. Retain the cap-and-trade provisions and I see it as a giant step backward that may well hobble further progress in federal efforts to combat climate change for years to come.
For a qualified defense of the bill, see David Roberts at Grist. I don’t have the wonky chops to determine if the special interest giveaways overwhelm the positive aspects of the bill, though people I trust still seem to be behind it.
A Thinking Reed 