Not long ago my wife and I went out to dinner at a restaurant with another couple, who, like us, have two boys. The conversation inevitably turned to our kids, school, family stuff. Their older son made the transition this year to junior high school. I asked how this was going. Pretty well, the mother…Continue Reading…
If you are a regular consumer of environmental news and commentary, you are familiar with the narrative of humanity’s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on…Continue Reading…
It’s not often that an aging social movement gets a chance to redefine and reinvigorate itself. Environmentalism has that opportunity now, with the Anthropocene, which National Geographic has dubbed, The Age of Man. What does that mean? As I recently wrote in Slate, the Anthropocene represents a growing scientific consensus that the contemporary human footprint—our cities, suburban…Continue Reading…
One of the main points I was making in this recent post is that the shelf life of green catastrophism has expired. But environmentalists don’t want to hear this. Many have responded indignantly to the contrast I set up between what I call green traditionalists and green modernists. In the coming week, I’ll respond in…Continue Reading…
If you’re not preparing for the end of the world, don’t worry, some of your neighbors are. And teenagers today, well, they’re all over it. So are millions of Christians, who don’t want to be Left Behind, when armageddon comes. Those who see eco-decay and social mayhem resulting from unchecked capitalism are similarly fatalistic: The race…Continue Reading…
As you know, the world didn’t end last year, like it was supposed to. By now, this is an old story. Yet many people continue to be drawn to doomsday alerts. 2012 promises to be another banner year for failed end-of-world predictions. But instead of arbitrary biblical interpretations, attention will shift to a supposed Mayan…Continue Reading…
A lament from Time magazine’s Bryan Walsh: Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one…Continue Reading…
Mike Tidwell, a journalist turned activist, has published a how-to-ride-out-the-climate apocalypse instructional in The Washington Post. Years ago, global warming had already put Tidwell on high alert. But events in the last year have elevated his personal threat level: Now I’m changing my life again. Today, underneath the solar panels, there’s a new set of…Continue Reading…
I have a deeply cynical side but I’m also an optimist by nature. Ms. Collide-a-scape is the fretter in the family. Several months ago, we finally got around to watching the dystopian documentary that made quite a splash in 2009, which NPR accurately characterized: So this is how the world ends: Not with an action-movie…Continue Reading…
Michael Klare sees a bad moon rising. I hope you got your things together: