A Thinking Reed

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

Doom-mongering

  • Death of the seas

    The WaPo ran a good review this Sunday of two books on the slow-motion environmental catastrophe taking place in the earth’s oceans. Read more

  • Against threat inflation

    Stephen Walt and Matthew Yglesias both have smart posts on looking at climate change through a national security lens. Possibly one of the worst outcomes of our failure to address climate change (and other attendant issues like peak oil) would be to lock ourselves into a zero-sum, conflict-based position with the rest of the world. Read more

  • Global warming, food shortages, and … civilizational collapse?

    I got to hear a talk the other day by Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute. He talked, among other things, about the relationship between global warming, food scarcity, and the geo-political instability that could result. Scary stuff. This article provides a summary of his ideas. Read more

  • “Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts”

    Joseph Romm on our global economic Ponzi scheme. Sobering stuff. Read more

  • Pre-Christmas odds and ends

    The ATR household is off to visit family for the better part of the next week, so blogging will be light–well, even lighter than usual. Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading ’round the Web lately: Christopher has several posts on l’affaire Rick Warren that are, as usual, very much worth your time. (See Read more

  • The oil crash: a very inconvenient truth

    I just finished watching this extremely well-done documentary (if you subscribe to Netflix you can stream it from their site as I did). If anything, it was more terrifying than An Inconvenient Truth. I think that’s because the consequences–drastic economic dislocation, a series of resource wars, etc.–are more immediate and viscerally disturbing. (Obviously the two Read more

  • Less Friedman, more Schumacher

    Patrick Deneen calls for an economic re-thinking on the Right. It remains to be seen, I think, whether the Right or the Left will be the first to seriously re-examine the assumptions underlying an unlimited growth/unlimited consumption economy. The Left has a long history of attending to social justice issues and questions of equality, but, Read more

  • The trouble with food

    Speaking of hippies, here’s a review of some recent books critiquing our industrial food system, including Paul Roberts’ disturbingly titled “The End of Food” (he also authored the equally cheery “The End of Oil”) and Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” (which I heartily recommend). Read more

  • John Gray contra humanism

    Over the weekend I started reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Gray, a British political philosopher, has gone from being a free-market Thatcherite to a critic of global capitalism to a proponent of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. If there is a connecting thread here it’s Gray’s resolute opposition to utopianism Read more

  • We’re doomed, the continuing series

    Two items from yesterday’s WaPo: Are we witnessing a massive slow-motion extinction of species? And what does that mean for our future and our children’s future? Cheap accessible cars for the people of India: commendable free-market egalitarianism or death sentence for the planet? Read more