Articles by David Roberts

Even more Verdopolis

The very bestest Verdopolis coverage in the whole galaxy is, of course, ours. However, should you want to sample what else the web has to offer, there's more over on Treehugger, covering a speech (delivered via DVD!?) by the justly legendary Bill McDonough.

Death commentary

Mark Schmitt, a brainy progressive policy analyst whose Decembrist blog is one of the best on the web, has a pair of posts up on the Death Stuff. The first is a fairly extensive analysis that ends by enthusiastically agreeing with the central point.

That's where I find the best argument for blowing up the whole "movement," along with the others. We can't possibly find ways to move society forward as long as everything is put neatly into boxes labeled "environment," "health care," "campaign finance reform," "low-income programs," "pro-choice," etc., and the coalitions that exist are made up of representatives from those movements. Trying to force environmentalists to think about health care doesn't solve the problem either. We need a whole new structure, built around a convincing narrative about society and the economy, and a new way to fit these pieces together.

Matt Yglesias chimes in, coming at the same conclusion from a different starting point (national security):

As Mark says, what's needed here is something beyond "meetings or traditional coalitions around particular shared interests," which we do already have. What's needed, in short, is a real ideology that, as such, has adherents. The adherents would, of course, specialize to some extent as people always do. But what we have right now is really a coalition of lots of micro-ideologies and micro-interests that happen to collaborate with one another from time to time on this or that.

I agree. What's needed is more than procedural coalitions, more than other mechanisms to interact and collaborate. What's needed is is a uniting vision of the kind of country and world we want.

Schmitt's second post is also interesting.

Shrinkage

A couple weeks ago, Chip worried about worries about shrinking populations. Specifically, he worried that countries with shrinking populations -- or in China's case, shrinking proportions of males to females -- will try to stimulate procreation (hey, get your mind out of the gutter), which makes an enviro's spidey-sense tingle. He wished that someone would make the argument that a declining population is not necessarily a bad thing, economically speaking. Today in the Christian Science Monitor, David R. Francis gives it a brief shot.

Some random thoughts on population below the break.

More Verdopolis

More Verdopolis coverage over at Treehugger. We'll have some of our own up later today.

Update [2005-2-10 16:45:41 by Dave Roberts]: Still more, from Will Duggan, who was excited that businesses are finding good reasons to go green, but ends with this:

Inspiring two hours, yes, but corrosively depressing that there was no American business leader to match the vision, passion, and humanity on display.