Latest Articles
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If we aren’t causing it, why would reducing emissions fix it?
According to a new poll, a majority of folks in South Carolina — from both parties — agree that it’s time to do something about global warming. However, while the majority of Democrats polled believe that humans are driving recent warming, a majority of Republicans cite "natural processes." This position by Republicans, which I think […]
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Happy birthday!
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
"Sustainable development" is 20 years old this week.
On April 27, 1987, after four years of deliberation, the World Commission on Environment and Development released its report. The inquiry -- also known as the Brundtland Commission -- was led by the prime minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland.
I was at university then, and devoured the contents of the report, which was later published as the book Our Common Future. Here, at last, was someone tying together the environment and development agendas. The report had much to say, too, about the relationship between poverty and environmental degradation. And as a female leader, Brundtland was such an antidote to our own prime minister; she was pretty much everything Margaret Thatcher was not.
The report gave us an enduring definition of sustainable development: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own need."
So 20 years on, what is the legacy of sustainable development as a concept?
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Polls point to yes
There’s lots of interesting stuff in this new Quinnipiac poll, particularly this: Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani leads New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in the 2008 presidential race in three critical states – Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to Quinnipiac University’s Swing State Poll, three simultaneous surveys of voters in […]
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Travel to exotic lands …
During Vietnam we used to say that "fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity" (OK, not exactly, but you get the point). I had a flashback of that today here at Gristmill.
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Unwanted babies: the worst kind of emissions
We get the whole energy-wasting phone charger thing, and we think free Ben & Jerry’s sounds awesome, but is Unpluggit advocating unprotected sex in their online video? (h/t: reader MB)
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How to stop the agribiz giants from impeding the growth of local food.
In today’s Victual Reality I discussed how a few companies dominate U.S. food production, and how their market girth weighs heavily on efforts to rebuild local-oriented, environmentally and socially responsible food networks. Now I’d like to add a few words on what might be done to remedy the situation. First of all, it’s important to […]
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How food processing got into the hands of a few giant companies
Two years ago, dairy giant Dean Foods shuttered a milk-processing facility in Wilkesboro, a town at the eastern edge of North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. Photo: iStockphoto Dean processes 35 percent of the fluid milk in the U.S. and Canada — roughly equal to the combined market share of its three biggest rivals combined. In my […]
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Reading the fin print
Some folks are quick to give sharks a bad rep without considering their importance as top feeders in the marine food web. But when we remove these so-called lions of the ocean from their habitat through shark-finning and bycatch, it doesn't take long for the rest of the food web to feel the effects. Chew on this:
In 2004, North Carolina's century-old bay scallop fishery effectively ended because too few scallops survived into the autumn to sustain fishing, according to a report published in Science last month.
The culprit? Rays. Vast increases in the numbers of rays, which eat scallops. The rays have been decimating the young scallops before they could grow to commercial size.
So where do the sharks come in?
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Legally speaking
California is threatening to sue the U.S. EPA for obstructionism. You’ll recall that the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled decisively that CO2 is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, and that implementing restrictions on vehicle CO2 emissions does not abrogate the DOT’s authority to set fuel-efficiency standards. That ruling pretty well destroys the legal […]
