Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
bcohen | August 20, 2009Old school The Onion re-posted below, from 2002:
"Guns Are Only Deadly If Used For Their Intended Purpose"
By Ted Farner
President, Brothers In Arms U.S.A.
June 12, 2002 | Issue 38â¢22
"As the president of Brothers In Arms U.S.A., the nation's third-largest gun-rights organization, I've heard all the arguments made by the anti-gun propagandists. And of the many misguided aspects of their anti-gun rhetoric, the most off-base is this bizarre notion that guns are inherently deadly. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is, guns are only deadly when used for their intended purpose…
bcohen | August 13, 2009Seed/Scienceblog alum Katherine Sharpe (she of austere head office fame), recently conducted a fascinating experiment in deprivation. There's Lent, of course, the standard bearer of voluntary deprivation. And there are those who give up caffeine, or television, or the internet, or long lists, or sarcasm for some time. But this is the first I've seen of someone trying to live in our culture, our 21st century hyper-consumer, radically plasticized culture, without plastics. But Katherine tried it. Plus, she began it with a nod to Chris Jordan's compelling art on our plasticized world (about…
bcohen | June 18, 2009Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm is about a half hour from Charlottesville, give or take. His local prominence preceded the Omnivore's Dilemma bump of '06 and continues on after. Jane Black, the food writer for the Washington Post, wrote last year about the Chipotle franchise's decision to use Salatin's pigs as the sole source for their Charlottesville store's carnitas. I use her story in a few of my classes as an entry into the larger topic of local food, infrastructure, distribution, and land use.
Nightline ran a story last night about the Chipotle-Salatin partnership. I don't know how to…
worldsfair | May 15, 2009
Science Scout twitter feed
Yes, those forlorn looking children are my kids, Hannah and Ben. This post is another oldie but goodie, but with the summer looming ahead, this picture still cracks me up. Mainly because it's an example of total misrepresentation of the product.
Specifically, here is what the picture on the box looked like:
Obviously, you can tell the huge discrepancy between the image on the box and what we might call reality.
Anyway, a slide with both of these graphics now often makes an appearance in my talks on science literacy. Particularly as a great visual…
bcohen | April 9, 2009A commentary, I think, on the public understanding of basic human decency. Or lack thereof.
Stewart on tyranny, poor memory, and potato day:
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
Or try here.
bcohen | March 30, 2009Just an accounting of the last month of local food, sustainable agriculture, and science/food/safety articles is difficult to produce. Let alone a full understanding of them. One problem with studying the topic is that the proliferation of literature on sustainable ag and its associated elements brings with it sifting and organizing difficulties. It's a microcosm of the problem of the internet itself - more information leads to more traffic, leading to slower travel. How to make sense of it all?
Here is a quick sampling of some recent literature on what we might call the current "food"…
bcohen | March 16, 2009
Landfills are leading consumption indicators. Their use is declining in the recession. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the Loudon County landfill (that's in Northern Virginia) has seen a decrease of 30% in the past year; nearby Prince William's County has seen a 20% decrease. Loudon County's landfill was slated to close in 2012, filled to capacity by that time. Because of the decrease in consumption--fewer Circuit City boxes to throw away, fewer packages and old appliances, more saving and reuse--it will be open for an additional year and half.
In an extravagantly…
bcohen | February 26, 2009"The [Environmental Justice (EJ)] movement," writes Gwen Ottinger, "was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color. EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this 'environmental racism.' Currently, however, it is not equality but health that dominates grassroots activists' campaigns against chemical contamination."
Ottinger is a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's (CHF) Center for Contemporary History and…
bcohen | December 15, 2008My question is about the moral equivalence of the scientist.
I'm currently reading Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is, briefly put, a kind of biography of the modern scientist. (Here's the subtitle: "A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.") Shapin is a professor of history at Harvard, well known historian and sociologist of science, author of several influential texts in the history of science, the sociology of science, and STS. One common thread in most of his work is the role of virtue and character in the history of science. In The Scientific Life, the first few chapters…
bcohen | October 27, 2008These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images:
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.
On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty,…
bcohen | October 2, 2008Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Given the class issues you deal with, the book is also a contribution to the history of environmental justice. How would you characterize environmental justice and issues of health?
GM: I think it is difficult to separate out issues of environmental and social injustice. When you combine inadequate access to health care, for example, with increased exposure to air pollution caused by the siting of bus depots in…
bcohen | September 29, 2008This one's about integrity, oversight, and endocrine disruption and how the tangled web grows bigger by the day. It's a guest post by Jody Roberts, of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
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Two news stories in last week's edition of Chemical and Engineering News perfectly demonstrate the complex interweaving of technical, social, and political processes in attempting to grapple with emerging sciences and environmental health. In the article, "Debating Science," we see once again the hot button issue of science and politics, science in politics, and politics in science. In "Test of Endocrine…
bcohen | September 11, 2008In the pantheon of American letters, The Guilfoile-Warner Papers have long held a spot of hallowed pre-eminence. With their contribution this week, the correspondence has now reached Daily Shovian levels of excellence. I had sought to choose the best line in their column, but got caught unable to rank which of the many great lines was best. So, for us, a sampling below. I'll let readers decide how to rank their astuteness. But please, for sanity's sake, confer the entire column here at The Morning News.
On the implausibility of Pailn's selection:
The [probability] that [Palin] might be…
bcohen | September 11, 2008"As America's colleges and universities search for ways to go green, many are looking at the dining hall....where five times more energy and water are consumed than any place else on campus." (WVTF)
Small things matter.
Here at U.Va. and apparently at several hundred other colleges, Aramark--a primary food distribution company for large organizations like schools and hospitals and corporations--is going without trays. (Listen here. See here.) Large-scale food distribution provides both the benefits of efficiencies of scale and the drawbacks of efficiencies of scale. They can get a lot of…
bcohen | September 5, 2008Or thank whatever/whoever it is atheist readers thank. PZ I guess.
Required viewing below the fold.
From the 3 Sept 08 show.
bcohen | August 22, 2008I was struck by the comments over at Razib's blog on the matter of Jamaicans and genetic pre-disposition. I even left a skeptical comment there about it. I'll keep going on about it here.
I'm sure genetic make-up has something to do with pretty much everything; and I'm just as confident that other factors (coaching, money, environment, cultural value, education, prestige, discipline, etc.) have something to do with pretty much everything. So it's a wash. But if a Jamaican wins a race and everyone says its because of genes, then why isn't anyone asking if American women have the Beach…
bcohen | August 12, 2008MIT Press publishes a series called Urban and Industrial Environments. Several of the "author-meets-blogger" books were from that series. The main editor is Robert Gottlieb of Occidental College out in California. I was just made aware of a blog for his Urban & Environmental Policy Institute there, where one can find notices of new books, discussions of current issues in environmental justice, and, you guessed it, matters of urban and environmental policy more broadly speaking.
In addition to the well-stocked and premier Urban and Industrial Environments list, Gottlieb also edits a…
bcohen | August 8, 2008"But it's delicious."
Here's a link worthy of linking to, eminently linkable: "Carnivores, Capitalists, and the Meat We Eat", by Jon Mooallem, in The Believer some time back (October 2005). It's all about popular meat writing. I take that to be about environmental ethics too, about how humans live in and treat the non-human world.
He starts by quoting Whitman. I paste it here for us:
This is the meal equally set--this the meat for natural hunger;
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous--I make appointments with all...
--"Song of Myself"
It's my understanding that Mooallem…
bcohen | June 11, 2008
Won't you read this story over at Orion? Choice, consumption, citizenship.
Then reread Charles Kettering's 1929 article, "Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied." Says Kettering:
If everyone were satisfied, no one would buy the new thing because no one would want it. The ore wouldn't be mined; timber wouldn't be cut. Almost immediately hard times would be upon us.
You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times. You can have your choice.
Says Jeffrey Kaplan, in "The Gospel of Consumption," to give a sample of the link:
As far back as…