Articles by David Roberts

Sustainability as economic advantage

Everything Nathan Newman says here about national healthcare transfers straightforwardly to environmental health.

I'll say more about this when it's not so far past my bedtime.

Depressingly beautiful — and vice versa — pictures

If Sprol isn't fulfilling your daily visual depression requirement, check out these amazing photos by Edward Burtynsky, now on display at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center. (See also Burtynsky's homepage, where he's showing off some recent pictures of Chinese industrialization.)

Conflating environmentalists and terrorists is all the rage

Gristmill has commented before on what seems a fairly coordinated push by the feds -- assisted by far-right media types -- to hype "eco-terrorism" as the next big domestic threat. This serves three overlapping goals:

• It stokes fear and anxiety about terrorism generally, which can only serve the interests of the executive branch of government.
• Classifying acts as terrorism rather than simple crime (arson, theft, vandalism) substantially expands the police powers that can be brought to bear, in terms of surveillance, search and seizure, etc.
• It demonizes a political force that has sought, and in many cases successfully secured, legal and regulatory restraints on corporate power.

On June 12, PBS is running a documentary called "The Fire Next Time," about the incredible strife in and around Kalispell, Mont., over environmental issues. In part, that strife has been exacerbated by the inflammatory rhetoric of a talk radio DJ named John Stokes, who says of environmentalists, "Eradicate 'em. Their message stinks. They're destroying America. And it all came out of the Third Reich. You know, the Third Reich was born out of the environmental community. I don't make it up. It's there."

Today in Grist, an essay by Michael Kavanagh examines this sort of rhetoric, alongside FBI efforts to cast "eco-terrorism" as the next big thing, and asks what effect it's having, both on our sense of environmentalism and our sense of real terrorism.

More SCOTUS rumor

Rehnquist to announce retirement later today?

Update [2005-7-8 16:57:47 by Dave Roberts]: And still more juicy speculation: The White House may be holding Rehnquist's resignation letter over the weekend, allowing the focus to stay on terrorism. Deliciously dastardly!