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Bad mothers

I ran into this article in Live Science a few weeks ago. Evolution is a high-wire tightrope act. Research has shown that male mantids actively try to avoid being eaten by the female. What were the odds that hypothesis would pan out? However, those that are too successful at avoiding being eaten, are also less successful at mating and are weeded from the gene pool. To make matters worse, the mother-to-be who can successfully eat her mate has a better chance of successfully reproducing because of that one big meal at just the right time. We homo sapiens also walk tightropes, just different ones.

How to tell future generations about nuclear waste

Think of a mummy movie — any mummy movie. Treasure hunters enter a pyramid. The explorers either ignore or can’t read the hieroglyphics warning of the curse that awaits those who open the 3,000-year-old sarcophagus before them. The mummy awakens and kills most of the cast. Rough translation: Seriously dude, do not open this door. […]

Malcolm Gladwell on geothermal home heating

Malcolm Gladwell, of all people, has a long post up on geothermal home heating, of all things, including a fairly detailed explanation of the technology from his father, of all people.

(Gladwell, for those of you living under a rock, is the author of such wildly successful pop-theory books as The Tipping Point and Blink.)

Limitless sequestration?

Revkin points us to a new study that purports to identify exactly the undersea conditions necessary for "a limitless, low-risk repository for carbon dioxide."

More Wal-Mart

This is funny, but it also plays into another point I want to make about Wal-Mart:

After a long day searching houses in suffocating Iraqi heat, Lance Corporal Mike Wilson of Princeton, Kentucky recalls seeing relief in the distance.

Wilson said that looking through the haze he thought he saw a Wal-Mart and was ready to get some cold water for his men when he discovered it was an illusion.

(It's getting up around 125F in Iraq. Why are we there again?)

This average kid, plucked out of Kentucky, wandering through the desert heat ... what does he see when he hallucinates? Wal-Mart.

Why the late, lamented Doha round wasn’t really the answer for ag policy.

Harvesting a bit of vintage Reagan-era rhetoric, L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg recently denounced what he called "welfare queens on tractors."

The right-winger's target was clear: The U.S. farm subsidy program, which doles out around $14.5 billion per year (depending on market fluctuations), mainly to large producers of corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans, and rice. As Congress opens debate on the 2007 Farm Bill -- the omnibus five-year legislation that governs agricultural support -- the subsidy program has drawn a chorus of critics.

Goldberg gets it about right when he lists the program's opponents: "Right-wing economists, left-wing environmentalists and almost anybody in-between who doesn't receive a check from the Department of Agriculture or depend on a political donation."

To be sure, the subsidy-haters have a point. A vast literature shows that the real beneficiaries of U.S. ag subsidies aren't farmers at all, but rather agribusiness giants. Direct government payments encourage farmers to produce as much as possible, which pushes down the prices of ag commodities.

For years now, ag subsidies have helped enable Archer Daniels Midland to buy the corn it transforms into high-fructose corn syrup at well below corn's production costs. Meat producers like Smithfield Foods use cheap corn as fodder to run their profitable -- and socially and environmentally ruinous -- feedlot operations.

Wal-Mart’s devious profit motive

I'm in the midst of writing an op-ed about Wal-Mart's green transformation. One theme that comes up frequently in the commentary is this: Wal-Mart is "only" doing these things because they'll improve the bottom line.

Um ... yeah.

It's a business. It's supposed to make money. As a publicly held corporation, it's required by law to make money. If it went around doing things that deliberately reduced its profits, it would be subject to a shareholder lawsuit.

The whole point of the green business trend is that green makes business sense. Reducing waste is good management. What kind of bizarre message does it send if a business sees the light on this issue only to be told that they get no credit because their motivations are financial?

Sometimes I'm just not sure what greens expect.

Woe is Gristmill

It seems that August is vacation season here at Grist. My colleague Lisa Hymas has fled town for three weeks, and as she is the secret glue that holds this place together, expect chaos. There are also other editorial staffers taking vacations at various times, so we're all scrambling to cover for each other. In short: expect somewhat lighter blogging for the next few weeks. And more angst.

Brian F. Keane, renewable-energy marketer, answers questions

Brian Keane. What’s your job title? I’m president of SmartPower. What does your organization do? SmartPower is a national nonprofit marketing campaign that promotes the use of clean, renewable energy as a safe, readily available alternative to coal, oil, and other limited sources of power. In short, we’re the “Got Milk” people for wind, solar, […]

Champion of ‘social ecology’ dies at 85

Murray Bookchin, who championed a democratic and anti-authoritarian vision of environmental politics, died last week in Vermont at 85.

Bookchin has for years been on my must-read list. I write and work from within a tradition he helped shape. As Brian Tokar recently put it in his obit on Counterpunch, Bookchin sought to "reclaim local political power, by means of direct popular democracy, against the consolidation and increasing centralization of the nation state."