Environmentalism, as a social movement, has atrophied. At the national level in the United States, it’s become reflexively oppositional, a marginal political force, and subject (with good reason) to caricature. This is because it remains wedded to an outdated paradigm, as I’ve previously discussed here. Despite its long history of anti-pollution advocacy, which has helped lead…Continue Reading…
It’s not in the headlines or on the evening news, but there’s a big story that some people are discussing. And it’s going to get bigger and matter way more than the heat waves and extreme weather that everyone in climate circles is buzzing about this summer. To catch up on this story, you should…Continue Reading…
How inconvenient. I go away on vacation for a few weeks and during that time everybody, it seems, becomes convinced that global warming has struck the earth like the Ten Plagues of Egypt. So does this mean the message (unabated carbon emissions = climate damnation) finally–finally!–has been received by 1) the media, 2) all earthlings…Continue Reading…
Of all the postmortems on the recently concluded (and much maligned) Rio +20 Earth Summit, this observation strikes me as the smartest takeaway: “I think the expectation that there is one document or one approach that can solve one of the major questions of our time “” how do you maintain economic growth and protect the…Continue Reading…
Anyone familiar with sensationalist media coverage of science knows that many stories need to be taken with a big dose of skepticism. Thus, people increasingly shake their heads at screaming headlines on the latest autism/red wine/exercise/gay parenting/climate change study. When it comes to GMOs (genetically modified organisms), however, plenty of people are also prepared, it…Continue Reading…
It’s hard to overstate the legacy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was published in June of 1962. Carson’s monumental book drew widespread attention to the overuse of pesticides and their lethal effects on wildlife and the environment. But Silent Spring accomplished much more than that. As Robert Gottlieb observed in his own seminal history on environmentalism, Carson…Continue Reading…
In the science blogosphere, medical falsehoods and pseudoscience are routinely called out. The watchdogging is done by a mix of scientists and journalists, who are constantly rebutting a never-ending stream of misinformation about vaccines, autism, and other public health-related subjects. For example, the indefatigable blogger known as Orac (he is a medical doctor and cancer researcher) regularly…Continue Reading…
My previous post on Nature’s use of “denier” in a recently published paper has triggered a lively comment thread, including this question to me: Since you obviously object to the usefulness of the term “˜denier’, would you care to comment on its appropriateness after considering Micha Tomkiewicz“˜s thoughts? This is in reference to several provocative blog posts by a Holocaust…Continue Reading…
Several years ago, while wrestling with the climate skeptic/denier terminology, I queried a number of my colleagues on which term they used as shorthand. None of them used the “denier” term, but most were also uncomfortable with “skeptic” as a one-size-fits all label. My own thinking on this was captured by Time’s Bryan Walsh, who…Continue Reading…
In the not so distant past, before there was a “collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems,” as Jon Foley lamented in 2009, biodiversity was the poster child for environmental crises. It was an issue that captivated journalists, scientists and greens alike–much as climate change does today. Indeed, concern over the loss…Continue Reading…