Latest Articles
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It usually is
... or does "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan" sound like something a 14-year-old would nail to the wall of his treehouse? The only thing I'd add would be "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan Laser Patrol." Cool.
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As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price.
India's current burst of free-market reform and official attempts at "modernization" are by no means the area's first.
As Mike Davis shows in his luminous Late Victorian Holocausts (2001), the subcontinent's 19th century British rulers imposed an economic agenda literally ripped wholesale from the pages of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), that bible of free-market dogmatists.
Davis lays out in devastating detail (first chapter available for free here) how in the 1870s, high-living colonial administrators dismantled the old Indian system for handling droughts, replacing it with one in which the price of grain floated freely based on global supply and demand. Thus, when a drought struck a grain-producing region in India, the grain price surged. The only buyers who could then afford it happened to reside in merry olde England.
The subcontinent's railroad system, paid for by taxes imposed on the Indians, very efficiently carried grain being produced in the non-drought areas to ports for shipment to the mother country. Its cutting-edge telegraph infrastructure, also financed by colonial taxes, transmitted price hikes rapidly. Famine thus rippled throughout India, including in non-drought-stricken areas.
Tens of millions perished in a series of famines in late 19th century India; before, when drought struck a certain area, food would move in from luckier areas and famines were rare. Davis claims the English took advantage of these not-so-natural disasters to consolidate its grip on the subcontinent. It was all very efficient, really.
Today in India, modernization is bringing new food-related woes: growing despair among farmers and surging diabetes rates.
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Wonder if that’s in Bush’s plan too
Compare and contrast. Read Bush's plan. Then read this.
California filed a global warming lawsuit on Wednesday against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and three other automakers, charging that greenhouse gases from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars.
Which do you think will be more effective?
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Look on the bright side
The liberal media is always trying to claim that global warming (if it exists -- scientists are confused on that point) is bad. But just check out these pics of Greenland's burgeoning agricultural industry. Potatoes! Broccoli!
Also, think what it all means to the flip-flop industry!
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It’s just funny
Call me a junior high boy, but the fact that the Zurich-based Shahneshin Foundation is giving Shrinkage Awards makes me giggle. Who are they going to give them out to? SUV drivers? Polar bears?
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Umbra on phosphates in detergents
Dear Umbra, Why haven’t phosphates been removed from dishwashing detergents like they have been from laundry detergents? I know they make your clothing look brighter, but what do they do for dishes? Natalie Waddell-Rutter North East, Pa. Dearest Natalie, Phosphates in dish detergent do a few nice things for dishwasher-washed dishes. Their biggest contribution is […]
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Damn those activist judges!
Here's some big, breaking news. Reports AP:
A federal judge on Wednesday reinstated a ban on road construction in nearly a third of national forests, overturning a Bush administration rule that allowed states to decide how to manage individual forests.
U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Laporte sided with states and environmental groups that sued the U.S. Forest Service after it reversed President Clinton's 2001 "Roadless Rule" that prohibited logging, mining and other development on 58.5 million acres in 38 states and Puerto Rico.
In May last year, the Bush administration replaced the Clinton rule with a process that required governors to petition the federal government to protect national forests in their states.Laporte said the process violated federal law because it didn't require necessary environmental studies.
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"This is fantastic news for millions of Americans who have consistently told the forest service that they wanted these last wild areas of public land protected," said Kristen Boyles, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit in October 2005.Stay tuned for more ...
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Don’t call me Ishmael, I’ll call you
Recently, on the prompting of our own recently wed Sarah Kraybill Burkhalter, I read Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. For those of you not familiar, Ishmael is an influential novel recounting a series of conversations between a man and, well, a telepathic gorilla. Many environmentalists consider it a formative work. (As I was reading it on the bus a girl next to me pointed wide-eyed and said, "I love that book!" Her friend nodded and murmured, "it changes your life.") There is a longstanding web community centered around it.I want to tread somewhat carefully. In the review quoted on the book's cover, some guy says he will divide the books he's read in his life into two categories, those he read before Ishmael and those he read after. There was a time in my life when several books had that effect on me. I guess it started with the works of Tom Robbins (on which I wrote my undergrad thesis), and continued through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There was the Illuminatus Trilogy and other Robert Anton Wilson stuff. A bunch of stuff by the Beats. Several things by Timothy Leary. Just about everything by Alan Watts. The Tao of Physics. That kind of thing. All the hippie classics.
