Articles by Kit Stolz

After the Garden

On Neil Young's fairly great Living With War Today site, check out the release of his new video, based on the song "After the Garden."

To me the song sounds like a raucous thirty-years-later revisioning of the enviro classic "Back to the Garden," by Young's old friend Joni Mitchell, but Neil says the song was inspired by An Inconvenient Truth.

Also on the site is the video of the very first run through from this year's raging "The Restless Consumer," the toughest, angriest song Young has recorded in years -- with the loudest guitar to prove it.

Capitalism v. environmentalism: a poll

Don Boudreaux, an economist, argues that doing nothing is the best policy for global warming.

As David, biodiversivist, Tim Lambert, and ThinkProgress point out, this argument has a lot of screws loose. (ThinkProgress also has a picture of Boudreaux, who looks slightly insane. He is also, by sheerest chance, with the Cato Institute, which according to a book by two University of Colorado law school scholars, "receives most of its financial support from entrepreneurs, securities and commodities traders, and corporations such as oil and gas companies, Federal Express, and Philip Morris that abhor government regulation.")

Just for a moment, let's ignore the whiff of prostitution. Let's ignore the alarming changes that global warming is expected to bring to climate, and the worsening of drought, floods, forest insect pests, hurricanes, species extinctions, among other aspects of life on earth.

Let's focus instead on the politics of the claim.

Finding hope in the world today

Worried about global warming? The acidification of our oceans? D4 (the highest-known level) droughts in the U.S. today? The idea that palm oil biodiesel might be worse than fossil fuels? A Republican plan to rewrite the Official Secrets Act to make talking to the press about government foul-ups a crime?

Well, you have reason to worry. But not to despair, as environmental writer and hero Barry Lopez points out in a terrific interview with Christian Miller in the latest issue of the Georgia Review:

How to protect — and restore — lost fishing grounds

"Something in our oceans has gone greviously wrong," report Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling in a remarkable week-long multimedia series called "Altered Oceans."

On the web, the series turns out to be a collection of impressively-arranged videos, charts, and photographs, focusing not just on the usual complaints -- overfishing and mismanagement -- but also on the threat of plastics to birds, "slime" to divers, and toxic algae to sea lions. The special -- the web version plays almost like a documentary -- has been lavishly praised by visitors to the L.A. Times message board.

But of course, if there were any doubt about the threat to our oceans, one could also pay attention to National Geographic on "dirty fishing," Nature [$] on acid level rise, the Monterey Herald on the collapse of salmon fisheries in California this year, Mother Jones on our blindness to the fate of the seas, and no doubt many other thoughtful, well-researched articles and documentaries.

But for a ray of light amidst the gloom, consider this fact: Lobsters are thriving in the waters off Maine, despite an ever-growing and highly profitable commercial fishery.

Why?