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A Char, Char Better Thing That I Do

New study finds salvage logging bad for burned forests The timber industry and Bush administration officials contend that salvage logging post-wildfire is the quickest path to reforestation, but a new study refutes that claim. Published in Science, it found that logging of burned trees after the 2002 Biscuit fire in Oregon — the biggest wildfire […]

So Fresh, So Clean

Whole Foods makes record-setting wind-power purchase Whole Foods Market, mega-purveyor of organic and free-range foodstuffs, plans to purchase a jaw-dropping 458 million kilowatt-hours of wind-energy credits. It will be the largest-ever such purchase in North America, enough to offset the entire company’s projected energy use through 2006. The move will keep about 700 million pounds […]

The shrinking-population scare is mostly hype

Demographers are projecting that population in some parts of the globe -- Russia, the Ukraine, Japan, much of Western Europe -- are set to decline over the next 50 years or so. Of course, talk of a shrinking population seems to send some people into a panic, which is why you occasionally see stories decrying the new "population crisis" -- not too many people, but too few.

The Economist has this to say about the doomsayers:

People love to worry -- maybe it's a symptom of ageing populations -- but the gloom surrounding population declines misses the main point. The new demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to celebrate. Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high mortality. Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low mortality. Women's control over the number of children they have is an unqualified good -- as is the average person's enjoyment, in rich countries, of ten more years of life than they had in 1960. (Emphasis added.)

That seems just right to me. And the article makes some other worthwhile points too -- including that economic output per capita is a far better measure of the health of an economy than total output. Measured by total output, a place with a shrinking population might seem to be in economic decline, even if the average person is getting wealthier.

(Of course, even better than total output per capita would be a measure that looks at how the poor and middle class are faring. Still, policymakers should keep in mind that per-capita measures of economic health are more significant than total output.)

Kia ads: ‘Save the greenbacks’

The problem with these Kia ads is not that they mock environmentalists -- the world needs more mockery, not less -- the problem is that they're not funny.

(via desmogblog)

Philosophical musings.

Since I am cut off from the news, I thought I'd discuss some philosophical issues.

Environmentalism is shot through with the same dualisms that have confused Western philosophy from the beginning, and the practical effect (philosophy does too have practical effects!) is to confuse environmental discourse and strategy.

It's probably too much to get into in a single blog post, but let's just think for a moment: What do we mean when we refer to "nature"?

Of course there's the colloquial meaning, i.e., trees and streams and stuff. But follow it up a little. What is nature? Or, phrasing it another way, what isn't nature? What separates nature from not-nature?

One common line of thinking contrasts the natural to the supernatural. Nature is the material world, and then there's the immaterial world inhabited by God, souls, angels, ghosts, and what have you.

A related and sometimes overlapping school of thought contrasts nature with humanity.

The contrast might be positive: Nature is violent, insensate, and irrational (red in tooth and claw), while human beings are unique in virtue of possessing rationality. This has been the default approach for most of Western history.

Or it might be negative: Nature as a kind of harmonious, balanced, holistic system ("Gaia"), while human beings are a cancer on the planet, either unaware or dismissive of any "natural" limits. This is a more recent way of thinking, bound up with the social upheavals of the 60s and 70s, frequently found among those who profess "deep ecology."

Now, if you believe in the supernatural -- i.e., God -- then there's no need to trouble your mind. Usually the picture is pretty clear: God "gave" nature to us, his most special creatures, to take care of (dominate or tend lovingly, depending on your predilections). Or, if you're of a certain persuasion, nature is basically disposable, since the Rapture's on the way.

The Enlightenment project has been to either bracket the supernatural or dismiss it entirely. For secularists, then, it's a little more complicated: How do we conceive of nature and humanity, environmentalism itself, without the supernatural?

Don’t let catastrophic visions get you down … well, not all of them

We greens spend a lot of time obsessing about how life as we know it is likely to end: in a slow, painful miasma of greenhouse gases; in the violent cross fire of a nuclear gang war; in mass ignominy, dead and bug-eyed in our folding chairs after endless rounds of fruitless policy discussions. But […]

Grist Dashboard widget now available

While you may only account for about 10 percent of our site's visitors, we love you no less than your Windows (and Linux!) counterparts. And to show you our gratitude, we've released the Grist Dashboard widget, which will deliver Daily Grist headlines directly to your desktop.

What is a Dashboard widget exactly? I'll let Apple explain:

Dashboard is home to widgets: mini-applications that let you perform common tasks and provide you with fast access to information. With a single click, Dashboard appears, complete with widgets that bring you a world of information -- real-time weather, stock tickers, flight information, and more -- instantly. Dashboard disappears just as easily, so you can get back to what you were doing.

Please note that the widget will only work for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) users.

If you do download our widget, please let us know what you think in comments. And feel free to share ideas for other widget applications, like a climate tracker.

Thanks to Advenio LLC who was instrumental in the development of our widget.

You Be Spillin’

China faces two more toxic river crises Two new toxic spills have hit rivers in central China. Last week, cadmium seeped out of silt dredged in a cleanup effort on the industrialized Xiangjiang River, contaminating a 60-odd mile stretch of the waterway, and a broken pipe at a power plant dumped six tons of diesel […]

Forest Trump

Judge halts more than 140 Northwest timber sales to protect rare species U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman has reinstated the “look before logging” rule on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest — abolished in 2004 by the Bush administration — and ordered a halt to 144 timber sales in California, Oregon, and Washington that might […]

Been There, Bumped That

Whaling and protest ships collide in Antarctic waters Japanese officials are claiming that a Greenpeace ship intentionally hit a whaling ship in the Southern Ocean on Sunday. But crewmembers of the protest vessel say the whaler rammed their smaller ship, and they’ve posted video of the incident on the Greenpeace blog. The collision left a […]