A Thinking Reed

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

Environment

  • First Things and climate denialism

    John Schwenkler with an excellent post taking down First Thing‘s resident climate change denialist, Thomas Sieger Derr. I’m not sure if I’ve changed or it has, but I used to really enjoy reading FT and was a faithful subscriber for about ten years. It introduced me to a lot of contemporary theology offered at a Read more

  • “The war over Waxman-Markey”

    Two helpful pieces from Mother Jones: Pass a flawed climate bill now, or wait for a better one? Environmentalists duke it out. The devil’s in the details of the new climate bill. Read more

  • Creation’s travail

    To hear some anti-green conservatives tell it, you’d think that nature-worship and radical environmentalism were making major inroads into our society. Of course, the opposite is much closer to the truth: the general attitude toward the natural world that underlies most of our daily activities is one that regards nature as little more than a Read more

  • What GHG emissions?

    Congress exempts factory farms from reporting their greenhouse gas emissions. Related, here’s an analysis of Waxman-Markey from the National Wildlife Federation. Read more

  • More command and control please!

    Interesting dissent on the Waxman-Markey climate change bill currently being stalled by farm-state Dems in Congress: …President Barack Obama has publicly described the bill as his and the Democrats’ preferred alternative to regulation. Without the bill, he has threatened, the EPA will directly regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, a power it was given by the Supreme Court Read more

  • VB6 (DTW)

    Lately I’ve been trying–with some success–to follow Mark Bittman‘s “vegan before six” (or vegan before dinner) regimen, with one qualification: only during the week. On the weekends I like to leave open the possibility of eggs for breakfast or a grilled cheese sandwich with fresh tomatoes from the farmers’ market for lunch, or what have Read more

  • What Big Food has to worry about

    Not a leftie, organic-arugala loving Obama administration, writes Tom Laskawy at Slate, but the constraints imposed by Mother Nature herself: The one threat that Big Food hasn’t proven itself very adept at handling, however, is the multiheaded hydra of climate change, drought, and the shrinking supplies of various natural resources. The industry is not ignoring Read more

  • The coming anti-meat tipping point

    This article suggests that we’ll be forced–by resource and environmental constraints, among other things–to give up eating meat, except perhaps the very rich, and that this will lead to a rapid moral revolution in our treatment of animals. It’s an interesting argument and pretty much the reverse of how we usually imagine these things go: Read more

  • Eating with civility

    I imagine this will be of interest to some readers: “Civil Eats,” a site dedicated to “critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities.” This post, by Paul Shapiro on big ag’s counterattack against animal welfare measures is worth checking out. Read more

  • Wanted: a new American dream

    William Greider recommends some changes to our economic system aimed at recovering some of the intangibles that get lost in the cash nexus. His argument dovetails with some of the “happiness research” that suggests a fairly fixed point of diminishing returns on income in terms of happiness. Bill McKibben makes use of a similar line Read more