NatureLand: What They Used to Call the Environment

I thought this blog post was pretty refreshing and kind of a nice way to look at things. It starts: When people hear that I spend two hours each way commuting to UBC from Surrey every day, the most common question is: but why? When the train broke down today, and it took over three hours to get to UBC, I was asking myself the same thing. I made a list to remind myself why commuting is good. Anyway, read the list by following this link.
This post was written by Jody Roberts.* After more than a decade of anticipation, the EPA released a draft list of possible endocrine disrupting chemicals that will be subject to a new screening protocol - this according to a new brief in Environmental Science and Technology. So, those of you who've been following this topic from its media peak back in the days of Our Stolen Future might assume that we'd find chemicals like bisphenol-A or classes of chemicals like phthalates - both of which have been the subject of tremendous amounts of research recently. But, well, that's not the case.…
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."George Eliot, Middlemarch
Don't miss our previous sponsors, and, for all you potential new sponsors, don't forget to contact us about some of our valuable web space. --- Oh that loveable Dow Chemical. Their extra-ordinary budgeting capabilities for advertisemsent and public relations (see sidebars around Scienceblogs and a glaring visibility in print media over the last year or so) outshines only their extraordinary abilities to deflect environmental responsibliity. So much so that even many of their shareholders (which technically includes me, since I have a retirement account from them, meager as it may be) are…
This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.* If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy. So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams reports in Sunday's New York Times on the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement, and the various views people have taken on this process. This on the heels of the two biggest big box stores - Wal-mart and Home Depot - taking the "green" plunge. As a committed environmentalist, I have…
When your grandchildren ask the inevitable question -- "Was Dick Cheney real?" -- you would do well to pull out this week's four-part series in The Washington Post to verify that he truly existed. Today's feature, the fourth part, addresses the means by which Cheney has consistently and disturbingly sacrificed environmental and human health for the sake of near-term corporate profit. And in a comment that could easily be the epitaph for the entire White House career of Bush and Cheney, the series of article ends thusly: the administration [has] redefined the law in a way that could be…
Don't you think it's twisted that so many kids know what this creature is, but so few can go about naming the birds in their backyard? - - - Well, I had briefly talked about this before, more as a whimsical train of thought, but there you have it - we're going to give it a go. Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, basically, this was inspired by a letter published in Science in 2002, entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon.." It starts: According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms.…
(This image, by the way (or the color version of it), is the winner of Seed's Threadless contest) Yesterday, I heard on the CBC, an interesting story about Dr. William Bird, who is Natural England's health expert. Natural England is an organization that: "... will work for people, places and nature, to enhance biodiversity, landscapes and wildlife in rural, urban, coastal and marine areas; promoting access, recreation and public well-being, and contributing to the way natural resources are managed so that they can be enjoyed now and in the future." Anyway, Dr. Bird is most well known for…
[To go with this post on images of consumption and that post on what we eat in a week.] "Each year, between 20 and 50 million tons of electronic waste is generated globally. Most of it winds up in the developing world." The caption from Foreign Policy was simply, "Throwing Stuff" Foreign Policy has a photo essay, "Inside the Digital Dump," about the ungodly mounds of electronic waste we ship over to China. Oh you should go take a gander. And I offer a few sample images here for the faint of clicking. They say, by way of preface, "Welcome to the digital dumping ground, where the poor make…
Recently in my neck of the woods, the Green Party of Canada has been suggesting the addition of a straight-off 12 cents per litre tax on the price of gasoline. This is mainly positioned as a carbon tax to try and encourage the use of higher efficiency alternatives. What's kind of promising is that there actually seems to be reasonable public support for the idea (although this appears largely anecdotal). Still, it's inevitable that they'll also be some serious criticism of this plan as well. In any event, it got me thinking about how exactly (if enacted) would such a measure fare. Would…
Artists Chris Jordan, from Seattle, has a fascinating series of images making "contemporary American culture" more visible. It's called "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait." The series will be on display at New York's Von Lintel Gallery starting mid-June. A student of mine sent me the link, and I'll put a few of the images below. This is right up the same alley as Dave's post a while back on "What different parts of the world eats in one week." But check out Chris Jordan's site, and check out the actual show in person if you can. In quiz fashion, then, I ask: what is the…
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. And now we'…
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…
Lots of Rachel Carson links of late, and understandably so, as it would've been her 100th birthday this Sunday. Elizabeth Kolbert makes her the Talk of the Town this week. (We had E.B. White on Carson from 1964 before, now more commentary from the magazine that originally published most of Silent Spring in serial form.) The point of Kolbert's comments on Carson is to suggest that the more things change the more they stay the same. Not a new lesson at Scienceblogs, certainly not a new lesson at The World's Fair, where several recent posts have ever so gently been about the historical…
This 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…
"Why should a poison...spray enjoy immunity [while] endanger[ing] the public health?" Circa 1964. In The New Yorker. Right here. With nary a mention of Charlotte or her web. Add it to Tim's posts about poorly equipped, intellectually speaking, Rachel Carson critics. A quote from White: In the lower Mississippi, fish have been dying from a cause as yet undetermined. In Oklahoma, quail are not hatching their full clutches of eggs. In Maine, salmon bearing a rich payload of DDT have been taken from Sebago. In the Gulf of Mexico, shrimpers are wondering whether their catch will be next on the…
There are deep historical and cultural roots to current energy consumption patterns. No surprise. But I don't mean just the past few decades, or even the post-WWII era, or even the twentieth century (typical answers to the query, when did all this glug glug glugging begin?) I want to point to the Jeffersonian roots of energy over-consumption. I don't do so by way of blame or culpability (no, we can't make a causal connection, fun as it would be, to a single source) but to note the depth of the cultural configuration of energy patterns. Urban planners recognize what I'm getting at in…
Want 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).
Editorial 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…
This 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…