NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment
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 28, 2007Good stuff. Slate's explainer explains how horticulturists know when the cherry blossoms will bloom. (They ask and answer because the Washington, DC Cherry Blossom Festival is coming up.) It's a somewhat relevant follow-up to my earlier basic concepts post about the best way to "know" a lilac. The answer? Okay I'll give it away...
"The peak is technically the date on which 70 percent of the area's Yoshino cherry blossoms are open."
Knowledge knowledge everywhere, and lots and lots to drink.
By the by (code for "a propos of nothing"), my daffodils bloomed two weeks after my neighbors but…
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…
bcohen | February 27, 2007"The rapid expansion of renewable energy in Germany means there is no need to renege on the government's agreement to phase out nuclear power," reports Reuters today.
This is how things always happen for me. I was getting ready for class, and doing some searches to show the students how to use databases for their research. In doing so, I came upon a report from Reuters, put out just today, about the very subject just discussed in a post yesterday about wind energy in Germany.
At Factiva, one can find the article "Germany says renewables growth faster than planned." (I can't find it at…
bcohen | February 26, 2007China, the new great polluters. With their tremendous industrialization comes tremendous pollution. But what is the relationship between their shifting political system and the possibilities for a more ecologically sensible pattern of development (assuming that phrase is internally logical, "ecologically sensible pattern of development")?
Here is an interview from last Fall with Dale Wen, Chinese Native, Cal Tech PhD, and author of China Copes with Globalization: a Mixed Review, published by the International Forum on Globalization.
The interview touches on GMOs, western lifestyles in…
bcohen | February 26, 2007The recent AAAS meeting, as has been well-blogged about, was on the theme of sustainability. In parallel, there were a series of sustainability related articles in the accompanying issue of Science that week (9 February 2007). One that caught my eye was about the growth increase in wind power in Europe over the past ten years.
(sources [top to bottom]: European Union; P. Runci, PNL; Gallagher et al., Ann. Rwv. Environ. Resour. 3 193 [2006])
Germany had negligible amounts in 1995; they now have close to 50,000 MW from wind "installed."
Daniel Clery writes:
Concern about carbon emissions and…
bcohen | February 17, 2007Jenna Fisher at the Utne Reader has a guide to green campuses. This helps with an earlier post I'd added last Fall about campus sustainability, which in turn is a continuation of the conversation on consumption patterns.
Quoth Utne.com:In recent years, college and university campuses have proven crucial leaders in the movement to make large-scale, resource-demanding institutions more environmentally friendly. Many have implemented projects that promote alternative energies, energy efficiency, and environmental sustainability. But not everyone's jumped on the eco-bandwagon. So who's doing…
bcohen | February 6, 2007[Basic concepts: Epistemology.]
Adolph Quetelet, a mathematician of the High Enlightenment, explained with scientific precision how to know when lilacs will bloom (this was about the year 1800). The lilacs, he said, bloom "when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperature since the last frost added up to (4264C) squared."
So now we know. Whew!
That's one way to put it. This, to me, offers one way to get into the basic concept of what's called epistemology. Perhaps calling it a basic concept is a bit askew, since it is complicated and philosophically thick. But it's interesting,…
bcohen | January 30, 2007"Unhappy Meals," says Michael Pollan. That's the title of his article published in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday. (As Jonah has already pointed to.) After last year's The Omnivore's Dilemma, about what defines/describes different chains of food production, he is speaking still about food, but now more directly about nutrition. It's a push in the same direction to write about food and ecology, about how what we know of nutrition comes from a lot of scientific research that ignores the ecological relationships between and within food and human systems. Nutrition is a great…
bcohen | January 30, 2007With alternative energy proposals, the environmental lines are certainly not clear-cut. I've already noted why I think this is the case (short answer: they foster consumption possibilities, not reductions in consumption). But now there is a precise example of the complexity of such issues in many states proposing what are called Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).
How could one resolve these tensions, when we don't know which alternative is an improvement? The go-to answer there is generally, ask science. Get the evidence to demonstrate trade-offs. But we can't assume science will…
bcohen | January 22, 2007Virginia's State Advisory Board on Air Pollution released a report on greenhouse gases. Here is a Richmond Times-Dispatch front page story about it. What's fun is that famous anti-global warming critic, and University of Virginia Professor (though not "state climatologist"), Patrick Michaels "was on sabbatical and had no comment on the new report."
The report, my friend at the VA DEQ tells me, may be the first state-affiliated one in Virginia (other than academic papers from state universities) that discusses global warming and potential responses in any detail.
The newspaper article says…
worldsfair | December 20, 2006
So basically things aren't looking too good for Spongebob Squarepants and his buddies. The reason being that, all of this carbon dioxide we're pumping into the air is doing some serious shit to the oceans. However in this case, it's less to do with the usual greenhouse effects, but more to do with the ocean's role as a carbon sink. Anyway, it's an interesting and important sidebar to the CO2 equation, and one that I've looked into a bit more lately as I prep myself for potential topics of discussion in a new course I'm working on.
In essense, the oceans of the world have been changing…
bcohen | December 20, 2006This is ecological design of a completely different sort than our last post. And product design at its most beach-like. The bikini, part of a student project displayed at the ITP Winter Show, "cools your beer and charges your iPod! (With a USB connection!)." ITP, incidentally, is the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
(picture credit, where you can find a demo video too.)
Says, Andrew Schneider , the creator: "The suit is a standard medium-sized bikini swimsuit retrofitted with 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in…
bcohen | December 19, 2006Another way to seek solutions to carbon emissions and over-consumption without going nuclear. Prior posts on the same subject: tidal power, DG, campus sustainability, solar investments, ecological footprints, and consumption more generally.
Around Grounds here (they call it "Grounds," not campus, and don't ask), the leaders in ecological innovation are architecture, urban design, and engineering. Probably in that order. William McDonough, he of Cradle-to-Cradle and ecological sustainability design fame, used to be the Dean of the Architecture School, and now runs his company (McDonough…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Or not.
The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (They also saw a spike in attention last winter after a similar article in the San Fransisco Chronicle.)
"Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life." Other's haven't.…
bcohen | December 18, 2006Nobody has ever accused Mel Gibson of historical accuracy. There's one victory for him. Nobody has ever accused him of anthropological accuracy either. That's two victories to his credit. He's having a good day. Next thing we know nobody will accuse him of having chosen a timeless '80s hairstyle way back when, or of wisely choosing the Lethal Weapon sequels, or of his soothing way with words. Now it's time to not accuse him of appreciating Mesoamerican astronomical technology. Here's the image, and I'll explain what this has to do with anything below.
Master plan for Teotihuacan (Nat.…