A Thinking Reed

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

Economy

  • Beyond antrhopocentrism and misanthropy

    I’ve been reading a short collection of essays by Wendell Berry called Another Turn of the Crank. I’m not ready to sign on to Berry’s agrarian vision, but I do think he makes some important observations. In an essay called “The Conservation of Nature and the Preservation of Humanity,” he points out that much of Read more

  • Bread for the world

    Interesting primer on feeding everybody, and sustainably to boot. Read more

  • Our farm policy: bad for animals, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for our waistlines…

    Michael Pollan writes about how US farm policy keeps the prices of fattening and unhealthy foods artificially low, while allowing prices on things like fruits and vegetables to rise. Why, he asks, would we want to encourage such a situation, especially if we face an “epidemic” of obesity? He also points out how this connects 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

  • Look for the label

    The last couple of posts got a bit bogged down in philosophical abstraction (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so I thought I’d offer an example of what I see as a good concrete proposal for changing our treatment of animals. The “Certified Humane” label is a program of Humane Farm Animal Care, a 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

  • Can we do without growth?

    Bill McKibben writes in the LA Times of the need, primarily for environmental reasons, to cure ourselves of our addiction to economic growth (“Growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,” Edward Abbey once wrote). But my question is this: is is possible to have an economy that is both sustainable and wealth-creating? There are Read more