A Thinking Reed

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

Environment

  • 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

  • We’re doomed, the continuing series

    When I read things like this, I can understand why people want to ignore the issue of climate change. If things are as bad as writers like McKibben say, and if the measures they describe are what’s called for, then I just can’t see how we’re going to pull off anything that radical in time Read more

  • Real food

    Via Jeremy, a review Michael Pollan’s new book at Slate. Laura Shapiro defends Pollan from charges that he’s a mere “lifestyle guru” uninterested in political changes that could actually change the way we eat. That Pollan is interested in motivating political change should be clear to anyone who’s read his articles over the past year Read more

  • It’s a small world

    The Mother Jones article on the global impact of China’s environmental problems that I mentioned the other day can be found online here. It’s long but well worth a read. Read more

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer. We’re in Indiana Read more

  • Of staph infections and disappearing honeybees

    What does it mean to say that our industrial food system is “unsustainable”? Michael Pollan suggests an answer: when you insist on treating animals like machines as a necessary requirement of your food system and they persist in behaving like organisms. Call it biological blowback. Read more

  • Hillary and the meat-industrial complex

    The recently announced co-chair of “Rural Americans for Hillary” is the former head of “the main trade group representing CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operations, a.k.a. factory farms] operators.” More here. Hard to think of too many things that’ve been more generally detrimental to the livelihood of “rural Americans” that industrial farming (not to mention their Read more

  • 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

  • D.C. = most walkable

    Lucky for me as I walk pretty much everywhere I go. I might take the Metro once or twice a week, but we’re lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where pretty much all the necessities (and several of the luxuries) of life are within a couple blocks’ distance. Of course, we pay for that Read more

  • Huck on the environment

    Better than most of the other Republicans (except possibly McCain). Still, I think this is an argument that might appeal to conservative Christians otherwise inclined toward skepticism about climate change: Do you believe that human beings are the primary drivers of climate change? The honest answer is I don’t know. And for me, that’s not Read more