A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Bill McKibbon

  • Alterna-nomics

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and I’m tempted to call it my non-fiction book of 2007. It manages to be both troubling and hopeful as it paints a bleak picture of what our present obsession with “growth” is doing to us and to the planet, while holding Read more

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month: The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is Read more

  • Skeptical of the skeptical environmentalist

    The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section ran a lengthy piece form “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg (based on his new book), arguing that we need to avoid the “extremes” in the climate change debate – those who deny that human-caused climate change exists on one hand and those who see it as an extremely serious and Read more

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises: In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Read more

  • More from McKibbon

    A while back I blogged a couple of items on the argument Bill McKibbon makes in his new book Deep Economy for rethinking our commitment to growth uber alles. Interested readers may want to check out this article at Mother Jones where McKibbon develops his argument at greater length. In short, the argument is that Read more

  • Radicalism vs. gradualism on responding to climate change

    This is where I, as a layman, get lost. Bill McKibben and others argue that we’re in the middle of a catastrophe in the making and that only radical changes in our way of life can mitigate the disaster. Meanwhile, Jonathan Rauch admits that climate change is a real and harmful phenomenon, but argues that Read more

  • More on growth, happiness, and climate change

    Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s an interview with Bill McKibbon that fleshes out some of his economic ideas a bit more. McKibbon uses the term “deep economy” (the title of his new book) to describe an economy that tends to draw in its supply lines instead of extend them. It produces using more people Read more