A Thinking Reed

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

Environment

  • Breaking it down

    Nation Washington editor and friend of ATR Chris Hayes has launched a cool new podcast feature–“The Breakdown”–aimed at explaining, in understandable terms, convoluted or technical political and policy issues. The first edition is on the differences between cap-and-trade and a carbon tax. Check it out. Read more

  • Forthrightness needed on climate e-mails

    Andrew Leonard at Salon makes a good point about what has come to be called (inevitably) “Climategate.” Yes, the hacking into private e-mails was a criminal act, but the apparently unethical behind-the-scenes behavior of the scientists involved is bound to shake public confidence in climate science, whether or not such a response is reasonable. As Read more

  • More on assisted migration

    Here’s a Wired article from last year on assisted migration (or colonization) for species endangered by climate change, as discussed in the previous post. Apparently this is something that at least some ecologists take quite seriously. Obviously, a huge concern is the havoc that such transplants could wreak on their new ecosystems, as Camassia pointed Read more

  • Noah, climate change, and “assisted migration”

    In Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough’s Creaturely Theology, Christopher Southgate expands on an idea he discussed briefly in his recent book The Groaning of Creation (see my posts here). Southgate points out that, due to human-caused climate change, we’re looking at a massive die off of animal life in the near future (what has been Read more

  • Did we save the rainforest?

    Not really, as it turns out. Though climate change may be putting it back on the agenda, as the rainforests are pretty important for keeping vast amounts of carbon from escaping into the atmosphere. Incidentally, this is a nice example of how the “free market” often works in practice: the World Bank bribes a relatively Read more

  • Factory farming power grab in Ohio?

    Ohioans will vote Tuesday on a measure to amend the state constitution and create a board of political appointees that will set standards for the treatment of farm animals. The problem, as this Mother Jones article spells out, is that any such board would be outside the normal rule-making process, immune from public comment, and Read more

  • A very kinky book

    The new book Superfreakonomics (sequel to the much-ballyhooed Freakonomics) hasn’t even been published yet, and it’s already receiving massive smack-downs for its highly misleading chapter on global warming. See Joseph Romm (here, here, and here) and Paul Krugman. Read more

  • Yes, Virginia, the pope believes in global warming

    Apparently some right-wing Catholics have interpreted the fact that the words “global warming” or “climate change” do not appear in Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical to mean that the pope is a global warming skeptic of some sort. Neil Ormerod, a Catholic theologian in Australia, attempts to set the record straight. Read more

  • The need for cranks

    I meant to flag this interesting article from the New Republic last week: “The Usefulness of Cranks: Nature as a standpoint for social criticism.” It’s about, among other things, the tensions between forms of environmentalism that value nature for its own sake and the progressivist and humanist assumptions of liberalism. Mainstream environmentalism (as represented by Read more

  • Addendum to previous post

    Something funky happened to that last post, and part of it got cut out. But in the version I originally wrote, I included on my list H. Richard Niebuhr’s Radical Monotheism and Western Culture. I posted a bit about it here. Read more