The business journalist Marc Gunther has a really good article at the Guardian on yet another battle brewing on the GMO front. It’s about a food advocacy group’s campaign to stop McDonald’s from using new strains of a genetically modified potato, which as Gunther writes, are designed to deliver both environmental and health benefits. They…Continue Reading…
We are living in strange times. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative politician and until a few months ago, a longtime supporter of nuclear power, has vowed to shutter her nation’s 17 nuclear reactors and make renewable power, such as wind and solar, Germany’s dominant source of energy by 2030. Meanwhile, staunch British environmentalist George Monbiot, the…Continue Reading…
It wasn’t that long ago that George Monbiot was accusing Stewart Brand of running the most insidious and subtle exercise in corporate propaganda I have yet encountered. I thought it was a tad hyperbolic. But that was then. It turns out that both of these environmentalist icons share remarkably similar views on nuclear power, coal, and…Continue Reading…
Have you ever known someone too proud or pigheaded to admit he was wrong? Let’s say it was a particular claim this person made, that turned out to be false, but which the person couldn’t admit to getting wrong. Would this then lead you to think that the person’s stubbornness in this one instance masks…Continue Reading…
It’s pretty one-sided, with George Monbiot continuing to land all the punches. But in going for the knockout, Monbiot swings and misses hugely. Here’s why. At the end of his latest takedown of Stewart Brand, Monbiot selectively lists some of Brand’s corporate clients, setting up what Monbiot thinks are the following two death blows: When…Continue Reading…
One of my favorite new blogs (for me) is Ecological Sociology. Its current post on Stewart Brand’s hypocrisy hits all the right notes. (Monbiot is all over this.) Long story short: In Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline, he evidently writes (I haven’t seen the passage myself yet): …In an excess of zeal that [Rachel] Carson…Continue Reading…