Latest Articles
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Search and You Shall Find
New Google philanthropy aims to build super-efficient hybrid car If you’re tired of waiting for bold innovation from big automakers, help is on the way from, of all places, iconic search firm Google. The company’s founders have established a controversial for-profit philanthropy, Google.org, which will focus on poverty, disease, and global warming. One of its […]
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The Magnificent 87
California’s Prop. 87, which would tax oil to fund renewables, spurs big spending Proposition 87, a California ballot measure that would tax oil production and use the proceeds for research into alternative energy, is spurring some big spending. Oil companies have raised nearly all of the more than $35 million in the “No on 87” […]
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The Ice Has It
More evidence of global warming from study of Arctic winter ice A NASA scientist has wrested free of his muzzle to declare that the drastic melt of Arctic sea ice is likely caused by global warming. New research published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that for the past two winters, Arctic sea-ice growth at its […]
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Umbra on oil drilling and seismic activity
Dear Umbra, How is drilling for oil affecting the stabilization of our planet? I wonder how much all the drilling is disturbing the earth’s crust. Could this be part of the problem causing tsunamis, earthquakes, and tidal waves? Susan Milliner Cedar Park, Texas Dearest Susan, Oil and gas drilling can do all kinds of nasty […]
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If environmentalism doesn’t include animal welfare, why not?
Over the past couple of weeks, I have tried to make what is essentially a straightforward case that environmentalism at its core is about respecting life and that separating this from our behavior towards individual living beings doesn't make much sense.
Since many environmentalists reject this notion and insist that environmentalism only includes preserving biodiversity and promoting resource sustainability, this suggests that one of the defining elements of environmentalism no longer holds: an opposition to whaling.
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How Mexico’s iconic flatbread went industrial and lost its flavor
In a spectacle similar to the one conjured up by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000, a Mexican judiciary panel handed the nation’s presidency to Felipe Calderón last week. Even The New York Times, in its circumspect way, acknowledged that the new president-elect’s narrow victory over leftist rival Andrés Manuel López Obrador involved seemingly illegal […]
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Wolves are returning to their home in Oregon
It seems that wolves are returning home to Oregon.
A little more than a decade ago, Oregon was wolf-less, along with the rest of the American West, a legacy of government-sanctioned poisoning, trapping, and shooting to make the land safe for cows and sheep. (Here's a cool animated map depicting our shrunken wolf range.)
But then in the mid-1990s, federal biologists reintroduced a few dozen wolves back into their native habitat of Yellowstone National Park and the wilderness of central Idaho. And the wolf population grew faster and healthier than anyone had been expecting.
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Can you ‘murder’ a chicken?
The word murder generally applies to people killing other people. 99.9 percent of all violent deaths to human beings are wrought by other human beings. The individual human being we look at in the mirror every morning is cooperative, caring, and kind. As a species however, our propensity and capacity to cooperate as a group to go after other groups is nothing short of monstrous. The fossil record indicates that this has apparently been true for many thousands of years now.
Using the word "murder" to describe the act of a human killing a non-human does not sit well with me. It is a special word that shocks and should be reserved for when one human deliberately takes the life of another. The use of it by animal rights activists to describe the killing of a farm animal is demeaning people. It puts farm animals on the same level as my children. Using that term in such a manner may be counterproductive.
It also isn't used when one animal "murders" another, for food, out of anger, or just for fun. Animals kill each other for all of those reasons.
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Interactive map will blow your mind
Check out Breathing Earth, an interactive map that shows ongoing population changes and CO2 emissions per country. Cool. And terrifying.
