Ethics Palace: Where ethical questions go to live or die
bcohen | June 5, 2007
Notice of a local event, here in central Virginia, and a comment on the idea of local itself.
I'm currently teaching environmental history (summer school), and we're to the point where we're discussing modern food systems. We had a nice trip to Whole Foods last week, with a scavenger hunt for all things so-labeled:
organic (unsurprisingly, almost everything)
"natural" (unsurprisingly with a great range of justification and definition)
local (not so much, but cheese and wine)
non-GMO (only a few volunteered to label as such)
or otherwise.
You know, just to see what's out there.…
bcohen | May 31, 2007
NASCAR wreck* or parable for the future?
Just thinking out loud here, but you've got at least three problems with car racing as related to environmental health: gas usage in the races themselves, the use of leaded gasoline, and the hundreds of thousands of cars that drive to the races.
Doing a full calculation of the environmental cost of NASCAR (number of cars per race, number of miles per race, number of miles per practice run, number of races per week, number per season, number of fans driving to the races, number of beer cans thrown out the window) is beyond me.
So, just as a…
bcohen | May 23, 2007This is a first-person commentary by Rebecca Harding Davis on life at the Iron Mills of West Virginia. I paste it below for your reading.
Incidentally, it's from 1861.
A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron works? The sky sank down before dawn, muddy, flat, immovable. The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. It stifles me. I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul…
bcohen | May 17, 2007This week's sponsor is none other than the Hungarian Cookery, whose world famous motto is a one word "Yum!!" Cuz let me ask you readers something: are you Hungarian? Know what? Doesn't matter. Know why? Cuz you don't have to be Hungarian to love homemade goulash and dumplings and whatnot.
One of the reasons we took on the Hungarian Cookbook as a sponsor this week (and late at that, eep!) was that they accept *both* Mastercard and Visa. A class act, all the way. Here's the kicker too: you're not sure what you want to eat or if you want to plunk down the just-shy-o'-ten bucks? Well…
worldsfair | May 11, 2007
The SCQ recently published an interesting piece on the topic of science and religion.
It's called "Science, Religion, and the Creation of Life on Earth."
My feelings on the relationship between science and religion are described very well in the words of Dr. Henry Eyring[1]:
"For me there has been no serious difficulty in reconciling the principles of true science with the principles of true religion, for both are concerned with the eternal verities of the universe"[2]
This is obviously not a universally held view. There are many who believe the field of science and the field of…
bcohen | May 9, 2007Please, won't you join us here for another in our occasional series of non sequitur posts? Pull up a chair. Make a scrutinizing face. Stare pensively.
Just a surmising here, but I'd like to promote the title of this post as a new bumper sticker platform.
Whenever I hear pro-life arguments, it's generally by those who go out of their way to support pro-death policies for anyone who is already born. Their concern about the yet-to-be born stands in contrast to their concern for the already-born. You know, things like war and bombs and not supporting health care for citizens and cutting…
bcohen | May 4, 2007Want to fight global warming without changing anything about lifestyle?
Thinking Thomas Friedman and his astute "we don't have to change a thing, now let's go get 'em!" analysis is onto something, with Gore and Schwarzenegger? (But not with James Kunstler?)
Then "Tom the Dancing Bug" has a take on carbon offsets for you! It's at Salon (go here, and wait a sec for the ad, then you'll get to it).
bcohen | May 2, 2007Since we scorn corporate ads, we'll do our own advertising here. Today's ad:
So giddy up and head on over to Cutter Bill's. And tell 'em D and B sentcha!
Why this post?
One would be hard-pressed to summarize the frustration of this blogger at having to see ads for The Dow Chemical Company (his one-time employer) at his blog. I am not inclined to encourage anyone to click anywhere "to learn more about how The Dow Chemical Company is solving human problems." If one had to click somewhere, if one was simply forced to do some kind of clicking, they would do better to read over the…
bcohen | April 23, 2007Classes resume today in Blacksburg. Somehow.
A wiki site (here) has been created at Virginia Tech, but meant for all. This is the main cover page that leads to the wiki.
As Jane Lehr, who has posted the site, writes:
As we begin on Monday April 23rd to 'teach after April 16th', some of us may decide - at some point in the future - to explicitly address recent events in the content of our courses. Others may decide to more subtly explore issues raised by this tragedy. All of us are working to understand how we and our course materials and research might function as resources for our…
bcohen | April 5, 2007Editorial at The New York Times today keeps the corn-bonanza trend in the spotlight. A few prior posts here at the World's Fair have broached the issue of the dangers of gung ho ethanolism (one, two, three, four). In the face of massive energy production, consumption habits, and climate change debates, the burgeoning corn boom is worth sustained and critical attention, before, rather than after, it happens.
The brunt of the editorial is to put farmland conservation into the spotlight:
[The] corn boom puts pressure on land that has been set aside as part of the United States Department of…
bcohen | April 5, 2007This is an article from the Christian Science Monitor: "What's happening to the bees?: Suddenly, the bees farmers and growers rely on are vanishing. Researchers are scrambling to find out why." Worth a read.
Here's why we might care:
While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops - from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons - rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. Honeybees pollinate every third bite of food ingested by Americans, says a Cornell study.
Here's why it's happening:
For many entomologists, the bee…
bcohen | April 4, 2007So, like most of us, I'm reading over back issues of The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and I stumble upon an article I'd dog-eared some time back. It's an "Analysis of Boston Waters," from their April 1846 issue. You know, page 362? The one that has Benjamin Silliman warning against lead poisoning. You know Silliman, leading light of the early years of American science, founded and editor of the American Journal of Science, incorporating member of the National Academy of Science? Yes, that Benjamin Silliman. Well, he's saying "it is the course of safety to avoid, as far as…
bcohen | April 3, 2007So says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, fan of Thatcher, admirer of Reagan, despiser of global warming rhetoric. Speaking to U.S. Congresspeople last week, he offered a few nuggets to chew on (but didn't mix metaphors like that). The Inter Press Service News Agency reports it here.*
A few snippets:
[The] Czech President asked the congressmen not to yield to pressure from environmentalists and abandon the principles of free society: "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants.…
bcohen | March 30, 2007Peter Melchett writes in The Guardian (on-line) that the scientific evidence for organic food's healthier claims is clear and persuasive. (Melchett is "policy director of the Soil Association, a UK organic food and farming organisation.") But will that sway governments to encourage organic over their preferred GMO or pesticide-based ag systems? Probably not.
It's a commentary on the relationship between macro-political influence and agricultural habits. More closely it's a commentary on food and politics, and science and politics, and science and food.
But to say it's just "politics…
bcohen | March 30, 2007Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, writes today in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the lessons and conduct of that pyschological test.
The conclusion of his updated reflections on the good-v-evil pairing:
Group pressures, authority symbols, dehumanization of others, imposed anonymity, dominant ideologies that enable spurious ends to justify immoral means, lack of surveillance, and other situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters,…
bcohen | March 29, 2007Grist has been posting many excellent links, discussions, and interviews about Mountaintop Coal Removal in the Appalachians. It's been a while since we added to our MTR posts (one, two, three, four), so allow me to do so now.
photo source: Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
First is an article in Blue Ridge Country by Peter Slavin.
Slavin reports on the anti-MTR movement over the past year, with successes in Tennessee, large protests in West Virginia, with sit-ins, congressional action, and with new popular press articles ("Features have appeared in 2006 in Orion (January), National…
bcohen | March 26, 2007The Washington Post ran an article yesterday in thier Outlook section about "The Negligible Benefits of Ethanol, Biodiesel." The authors are discussing the article today here. Check it out.
David Tillman and Jason Hill wrote it -- Tillman is "an ecologist at the University of Minnesota and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Jason Hill is a research associate in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota."
Also, last Friday the BBC reported that "Biofuel demand makes food expensive." It's a brief article; go forth, check that out too.
bcohen | March 23, 2007Can the principle of sufficiency, of seeking enough, face the dominance of the efficiency model that currently underpins our economic structure and works to undermine ecological sensibility?
I've been reading Thomas Princen's (2005) The Logic of Sufficiency (MIT Press) with great interest. Princen is a professor at the University of Michigan. He works in the School of Natural Resource and Environmental Policy, specifically working on Natural Resource and Environmental Policy. He's also the co-editor of another fine book (with Michael Maniates and Ken Conca), Confronting Consumption (2002…
bcohen | March 22, 2007Our very own Seed Magazine reports: "US researchers have created genetically-modified mosquitoes resistant to a malaria parasite, raising the possibility of one day stopping the spread of the disease, a new study says."
Perhaps doing so isn't such a good idea. Perhaps ecological awareness would suggest that the consequences of such a move are not entirely understandable by us. The problem may not be solvable with strictly technical means. Just an observation.
Why are they working on a genetic fix? Because the problem is significant:
Each year 350 to 500 million people are infected with…
bcohen | March 18, 2007One "newsmakers" blurb in particular from last week's issue of Science (Vol. 315, No. 5817, 09 March 2007) stood out to me. It was about how Taranjit Kaur, a pathobiologist at Virginia Tech, is working to reduce the ecological footprint of her own research.
(Consider this a nice and brief addition to the ecological footprint-related posts Dave and I have added to the site over the past months, but instead of Tom Cruise, or me, it's about ecologically conscious scientific practice, maybe more like this.)
Here's the full text of the story:
PACK 'N PLAY. While studying to diagnose disease in…