A Thinking Reed

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

Environment

  • Ethics and human-animal relationships

    Philosopher Clare Palmer provides a summary of her new book Animal Ethics in Context (via Scu). The intent of her book, according to Prof. Palmer, is to argue that animals’ capacities, while important, are not all that’s morally relevant. We need to take context and relation into account as well—just as we do in the Read more

  • Elizabeth Johnson on ecological Christology

    If you haven’t checked it out, the Homebrewed Christianity podcast series has some really good interviews with top-flight theologians. Today I listened to to this podcast with Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth Johnson. It seems she’s working on a book on “ecological Christology”–a very interesting discussion ensued. I also loved how when at the end the Read more

  • Is universal vegetarianism (or veganism) possible?

    In his interesting book Beyond Animal Rights, philosopher Tony Milligan considers, among other questions, whether the whole world could be vegetarian (or vegan). If not, this could be considered a strike against these two dietary choices. The problem, he argues, is that we need to transition to a more ecologically sustainable system of food production, Read more

  • Election fallout – animals & the environment

    Obviously the big news from this week’s election is the G.O.P.’s takeover of the House and seats it gained in the Senate, neither of which bodes well for meaningful action on climate change or other environmental issues. (As was pointed out in various places, all the G.O.P. Senate candidates disputed the global warming consensus and Read more

  • NASA’s climate change evidence page

    http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ A very handy summary of the evidence for climate change. Not that it will change the minds of hardened deniers. (Particularly since we all know that the crypto-Islamic/Kenyan anti-colonialist Obama administration has turned NASA into a Muslim outreach enterprise.) Read more

  • “The production and consumption of novelty”

    Interesting TED talk by economist Tim Jackson on the limits to growth and alternative understandings of prosperity (via Nothing New Under the Sun). Jackson wrote a book called Prosperity without Growth, which you can read about here. And the “eco-friendly” search engine he mentions is Ecosia. Read more

  • A world without carnivores?

    I meant to link earlier to this piece from the NYT Opinionator blog by philosopher Jeff McMahan. He poses the following question: Suppose that we could arrange the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones. Or suppose that we could intervene genetically, so that currently carnivorous species would gradually evolve into Read more

  • On weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, and other part-timers

    A while back I wrote a post about the debate between vegetarians and “conscientious omnivores.” I proposed that this debate was largely irrelevant to the bigger problems that characterize the standard American diet: [T]his is an extremely specialized debate among a very tiny segment of the population. The vast majority of the meat consumed in Read more

  • 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

  • Questioning growth in Asia

    I thought this article in the NYT was very interesting: not only are some Asian economists questioning whether their countries’ economies can continue to grow at a double-digit clip, they’re questioning whether growth should even be the ultimate object of economic policy. In considering this risk and the increasing evidence of the toll that rapid Read more