Articles by Grist staff

Lead levels in toxic toys were off the charts

In reaction to the recent lead-painted-toy recalls, no doubt some laissez-faire non-parents shrugged it off — when pretty much everything is tainted with toxins, what’s a little lead in paint? Except that, well, it was more than just a little lead. Some of the toys recalled by Mattel this summer contained 180 times the legally […]

Siberian permafrost melt threatens to accelerate climate change, reveals mammoth bones

Some large sections of permafrost in Siberia have been thawing out in the last few years due to climate change. If the thaw continues apace (or speeds up) researchers worry that much more organic matter — leftover plant and animal leavings from thousands of years ago, like mammoth dung, that never fully decayed due to […]

Pesticides up to no good, says new research

A decrease in pesticide availability led to an associated decrease in suicide rates in Sri Lanka, researchers publishing in the International Journal of Epidemiology have concluded. In 1995 and 1998, restrictions were put into place on importation and sales of highly toxic pesticides in Sri Lanka; in 2005, the country’s suicide rate was half what […]

Carl Pope reviews Break Through by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

This is a guest essay by Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Two years ago, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's widely discussed essay "The Death of Environmentalism" predicted that the cause in which I've worked most of my life was about to gasp a grim last breath. The self-proclaimed "bad boy" authors must be embarrassed now. With their new book on the same theme about to land in bookstores, environmentalism is alive and perhaps prematurely giddy over progress made and even victories won in the fight against climate change.

But don't dismiss Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility just because its authors are lousy soothsayers. The book's secondary thesis -- that progressive politics, including environmentalism, is in dire need of optimistic grounding in 21st century reality -- is too important and intriguing to leave unexplored.

Progressive politics, the authors persuasively argue, is rooted in economic, social, and environmental nostalgia. Nostalgia for the New Deal era of solidarity driven by shared material scarcity; nostalgia for the post-war era of homogeneous and stable communities held together by neighborhood, workplace, and church; nostalgia for an American landscape not yet reshaped by industrial society. Stubbornly refusing to move beyond this nostalgia, progressives cling to an interest-based politics and an almost fundamentalist faith in rationality. When their efforts fail, they conclude that the problem is corporate money or media monopolies or human nature -- anything but their own politics.