Uncategorized

G8 nations agree on weak climate deal, Bush admin tools with Clean Water Act, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: A Jury Of Your Pyrrhus Raptor ‘Round Their Fingers An Ugly Alternative Find ITT on eBay Clean Water Is Highly Overrated

A. Carl Leopold, nature activist, answers Grist’s questions

What work do you do? Mostly the organizations I’m involved with are oriented toward active programs for nurturing quality pieces of nature. I am on the board of the Aldo Leopold Foundation; president of the Tropical Forestry Initiative; founding president of the Finger Lakes Land Trust; on the board of the Black Locust Initiative; vice […]

Nice job, Einstein

I'll give you some hints. Just a few days ago, a man walked on a stage a few hundred yards from where I sit to accept an honorary degree in science. Following is the speech that preceded the award:

As Einstein is to relativity you are to biodiversity -- the insight that our world is unimaginatively rich in its number of species, whose lives are inextricably woven together. This idea has powered much subsequent biological research and re-shaped forever human understanding of the world and our place within it. This intellectual journey began, as so often in science, with a child's curiosity -- in your case with the ants you collected in the series of Southern towns in which you were raised. Your fascination in the face of nature's detail led to your adult study of how species adapt to their surroundings and how genes and culture interact to affect social behavior. Most recently you have inspired the growing inquiry into the vast array of species with which we share this planet and into the delicate web that holds together all life. In doing so you have fathered the modern environmental movement and inspired countless scientists with the knowledge that there is so very much more of life to be discovered. Like Einstein you, too, are dedicated to unifying ideas across the disciplines -- to finding those areas in which science, humanities, and social sciences converge -- and to exploring how science can best inform religion, morality, and ethics. And, as relativity shaped so much of the human agenda of the Twentieth Century, so biodiversity stands poised to do in the Twenty-First -- providing head-spinning new insights along with the sober realization that upon the use we make of this knowledge hangs the very existence of human life.

Richard Rorty, RIP

This will likely be of interest to exactly none of you, but one of my great philosophical heroes died yesterday. The first paper I ever presented at a professional philosophy conference was on Rorty. I can’t improve on what Chris Hayes says: Rorty had an uncanny ability to stare into the post-modern abyss, in which […]

Jon Stewart on the G8

Friday music blogging: M. Ward

M. Ward is a rarity: an artist who started out as something of a novelty act but has gotten consistently better, blossoming into one of the most expressive, interesting songwriters on the current indie scene. His first album, End of Amnesia, was good but samey: scratchy, faint, analog, like on old homemade folk recording you […]

Law & Order … in the ocean

Playing hard-nosed Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy, actor Sam Waterston has thrown the book at the bad guys for years on TV's Law & Order.

Bad guys on boats and beaches better watch out now, too, because Waterston recently joined Oceana's Ocean Council, a panel of academic, business, and philanthropic leaders who represent and support Oceana's efforts on the global stage. Also on the Ocean Council are actors Pierce Brosnan and Kelsey Grammar.

Declining production and what comes next

This week the Durango Herald discussed the steadily declining production of methane gas from wells in southern Colorado's La Plata County and what impacts there will be when the wells go dry.

Unfortunately, the article focuses only on the economic implications and goes nowhere on the topic of what the landscape will look like when those companies pull up stakes for new pastures. Even if all the well pads are reclaimed, which would be a miracle, what kind of rangeland and habitat will these parts of the West be left with when the boom is over?

Make Our Green Day

Spare a little cash for your favorite eco-news site? Bravo on making it through another week. But have you made it through without succumbing to our sweet pleas for financial support? We count on you, dearest readers, to support our nonprofit butts. And we love you so much we’re offering fabulous prizes to those who […]

Sea Vous Plait

Study says Europe’s seas in trouble from fishing, farming, other threats In case you think Europe does everything right, a study shows that the continent’s seas are in sea-rious trouble. More than 100 scientists in 15 countries surveyed the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean seas and the North Atlantic, finding that fishing, farming, shipping, and development […]