bcohen | October 17, 2008Slate has a column called "The Green Lantern: Illuminating answers to environmental questions." This response to a question about CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) was nicely done. CSAs are one of the many things Michael Pollan touched on in his recent, already widely read, already widely cited essay, Farmer-in-Chief (which, yes, I need to post about too--but there's a lot in there, and I haven't done so yet, though I'll get back to Pollan below.)
(From the "Best of What's Around" CSA outside Charlottesville)
So some guy writes to Slate and asks this:
Every week, I get a box of…
bcohen | October 17, 2008These are some samples of a set of stunning landscape photographs out west by the photographer Jesse Chehak. The Morning News has an interview with Chehak, who is someone I didn't know about until coming across their slideshow. Go there for larger, more vibrant versions of the reduced-size images sampled below. I'm taken by the Primm, NV, one the most. Something about the modern clash of color and mountain and angles and fabrication amidst/against the scale of sky. There's also a lot to be said about the Rio Blanco one, with the dead deer in front of the fenceline, in the foreground…
bcohen | October 17, 2008It's one of our more clearly titled posts. Pictures below of a White Bengal Tiger named Odin, who is six years old, 10 feet long (tail to nose), and living at a zoo in Vallejo, California. This all according to the same guy who sent me those Patagonian Volcano and Yucatan Golden Ray pictures.
bcohen | October 14, 2008I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis.
Here I'll excerpt that part:
About that axis. Two historians began a call-in radio show earlier this year. One of them, let's call him Ayers, considered it an opportunity to contribute to the public debate about current issues by discoursing on historical context - voting, race relations, the environment, what have you. His…
bcohen | October 13, 2008I caught sight of an interesting article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago by Jane Black called "The Churning Point." It's about local farming in Maryland and the opportunities for dairy farmers to produce goods from their milk on premises--a creamery, that is. Once the milk is converted to cream or, say, cheese, it is then a processed product. Is that local farm then a farm or a processing (pseudo-industrial) facility? Does the environmental law protecting that land promote this processing or restrict it? Which is better, the farmland or the cream?
The case isn't clear cut.…
worldsfair | October 10, 2008
I tell you - first we have a great video from Beck on sustainability, and now he goes and uses the word genome in a new B-side. The word genome - a rare word, indeed, when you look on the song lyric sites.
Anyway, since the song is new, you can't really find a YouTube video or free streaming version of it yet. But here's a sample, and below are the words (as far as I can make them) with the genome bit included.
I'm so weary of taking up space
Sending junk mail to whole human race
Sold my genome to the salt of the Earth
Made my brain full to see what it's worth
Lights out. They're…
bcohen | October 10, 2008Appalachian Voices shows you how to connect to legislators shilling for Big Coal and how to follow the $$. They do good work there at AV. We've pointed to their actions before (with Mountaintop Removal, for one).
Go to this link: Follow the Coal Money. Then click on Zip Code and Name search. Then you get two ways to see the connections-- one, a visual mapping that connects your political representative to her/his funders; the other, tabulated data. The image below shows the results for Virgil Goode (R-VA), who is (unfortunately) the congressional representative for my district.
bcohen | October 9, 2008Add this to your daily read, I ask: Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner have expanded their occasional series of letters over at The Morning News into a full-on blog, back-and-forth, letters, epistolary. If nothing else, at least now you'll be able to use epistolary in a sentence.
worldsfair | October 7, 2008
I've got a pin-up published at the Science Creative Quarterly today (you can download the pdf at the link).
At its heart, this flowchart is really a comparison of the carbon tax, cap and trade, and the Conservative's somewhat disappointing Clean Air Act (or now the equally weak "Turning the Corner" plan). You can get a clearer write up of this at the following great piece published at UBC reports.
worldsfair | October 3, 2008Although Jennifer and I had our 1,000,000th comment party a few weeks back, I only just had an opportunity to get the video footage on to YouTube. It was funny, but the "having to video" bit was a little surprising, and of course, us Canadians can be a shy group by default.
Anyway, we had a decent turnout, with a few notables in joining us for drinks. These included Joanne Fox (who co runs the AMBL lab with me), Nicola Jones (UBC Science Journalist in Residence and Nature Editor), Rosie Redfield (Zoology prof and blogger), Dave Semeniuk (Bake For A Change founder and blogger), Simon Donner…
worldsfair | October 3, 2008700,000,000,000 - approximate number of US dollars proposed in the bail out bill (link).
0.7 - percentage of GDP agreed upon in 1970 to be set aside for foreign aid. Often sited as an appropriate funding goal to help meet the UN's Millenium Development Goals. (link)
0.16: actual GDP percentage of aid given by the US in 2007. (link)
7.5: approximate number of years of possible US aid at the full 0.7% benchmark if the one time $700 billion bail out was used for this purpose. (link)
2015: the end of which will be roughly seven and a half years from now, and also the target year for the…
worldsfair | October 3, 2008
You know the scoop. Every little donation counts (and I just noticed we got our first one!), and it's all in the name of education. In this case, environmental sciences. And just like the title says, we're not asking for much. In fact, the three little projects we've chosen to start with add up to just over $700 which is only 0.0000001% of the what the wall street bail out figure is - I mean $700 amount that really leaves no room for debate.
And you know me - the importance of education is really a no-brainer for me, and hopefully you as well. I mean, my role in academics pretty much…
bcohen | October 3, 2008Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Following that--or perhaps too similarly--I see that the book has been reviewed widely, suggesting a diverse range of readers. But who did you want to write it for?
GM: The book is meant to be a crossover book. By that, I mean it was written to appeal to scholars and students in environmental history, medical history, history of science, and historical and cultural geography, and also to a more general readership…
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…
Breathing Space: On the Historical Connections of Allergies and Landscapes, with Author Gregg Mitman
bcohen | October 1, 2008Part 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), with its author Gregg Mitman. Prof. Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a professor in the Department of Medical History and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies.
If you were to ask how one could hold together so many…
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…
worldsfair | September 25, 2008
ELIZABETH MAY: Ooh oh - I know this one: Something to do with the colour green. That's right. Wasn't she in Anne of Green Gables? "Oh Elizabeth May, I do believe that your frock is on backwards, which is not the impression of civility one wants to make in Cape Breton." (or something like that). This is important, because I can't remember if she was one of the nice ones in the show, or the girl who was basically a real bitch. That would make a big difference in whether I'd support her or not. Anyway, I'm a big fan of historical dramas which is great because at least someone will talk…
worldsfair | September 24, 2008My daughter recently bought a copy of Archie's Pals'n'Gals Double Digest (#124), and lo and behold the first story is about the kids from Riverdale thinking up things to reduce carbon emissions for a school contest. Anyway, the gradient from how Betty carries herself and how Veronica looks at things is intriguing, and I thought it could make an interesting slide down the road.
You can get the full slide image here. Just so you know (Spoiler alert!), Jughead comes up with the winning entry by suggesting fridges with see through doors. Awesome!
I guess the bigger question is where you…
worldsfair | September 22, 2008
Last week, my daughter had her seventh birthday party, and it makes my heart swell to tell you that she wanted to have it at my lab this year.
So what to do? What to do? With 15 or so six/seven year olds in a full on laboratory settng. Well, thankfully, this is where ScienceBlogs rocks, since I had happened upon an awesome post by Janet over at Adventures in Science and Ethics that was all about the simple act of "just adding water" to see what happens.
The only difference here, of course, is that we got to do it at a real lab, so it was wonderful to see the kids get a real hearty dose of…
bcohen | September 22, 2008And yet it continues. I'm so naïve. I was astonished several months ago to note that the same food miles and local food conversation was going on and on. But here it is again. The same one. Anew. Again. More. the. Same.
(from a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 2001-2002)
Another Food Miles article, another bad article. This one from Jane Black writing at Slate (though she's a food writer for the Washington Post). She carries forward the single variable case to skim the surface of the issue. Fine, journalists skim surfaces, it's what they do. But if it's…