Culture & Ethics

LegalPlanet Gets Its 100,000th Hit

McDonald’s used to have signs, back in the day, announcing that they had just sold their one millionth or two millionth hamburger.  In a similar spirit, we are excited to announce that the site has now had 100,000 visits!! All the thanks goes to you as our readers.  We’ll do our best to deserve your …

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The Low-Carbon Meat Diet

If you’re like me, you like meat.  Especially red meat, like a pepper-crusted steak or a juicy burger drizzled with bleu cheese.  But if you’re also like me, you’re concerned about climate change and the impact that our lifestyle has on the planet.  While hyrbids and CFL light bulbs get a lot of attention, Ezra …

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“It is not natural…

…for a man to write this well every day.” So commented the great literary critic Alfred Kazin on Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, which he kept quite regularly from his Harvard College graduation in 1837 to just a few months before his death. Kazin is right: the Journal is a real gem of American letters and …

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Small Steps on Nanosilver

Regulation often develops through accretion rather than bold paradigm shifts, at least in its nascent stages.  Nanotechnology appears to be no exception.  In mid-September, the agency announced an upcoming meeting of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) focused on the use of nanoscale silver and other nanomaterials in pesticides.  …

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Climate Change Lesson #4: Small Ordinary Things Add Up in a Big Way

This is the fourth in a series of short homilies about climate change. In terms of climate change, the contribution of any one automobile, light bulb, or felled tree is microscopic.  Put enough of these together and you can change the temperature of the world for centuries to come.  It’s hard to believe – and …

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Climate Change Lesson #3: Everything is Connected to Everything Else

This is the third in a series of short homilies about the lessons of climate change. Barry Commoner called this the first law of ecology.  Because “everything is connected to everything else,” he said: the system is stabilized by its dynamic self- compensating properties; these same properties, if overstressed, can lead to a dramatic collapse; …

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How useful are “planetary boundaries”?

The latest edition of Nature has an interesting article and accompanying commentaries (freely available here; longer version of the principal article here) on the concept of boundaries, or limits, or thresholds if you prefer, for the planet.  The principal article, which has 27 authors led by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center, is called …

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Eid Mubarak: Islam and the Environment

This evening, Muslims around the world are celebrating the end of Ramadan. All the talk of political Islam has overlooked the question of what, if anything, Islam says about the environment, and a short blog post can hardly be comprehensive.  My initial reading of the Qu’ran reveals something that should be unremarkable to those who have …

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In Defense of Impact Men (and Women)

Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the new film documentary opening this weekend in LA and NY, “No Impact Man,” based on the nonfiction book of the same title, by Colin Beavan, that depicts his urban family of three trying — impossibly, of course — to shrink to nothing its environmental footprint, even going as far as to give up …

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Rising Seas: Doing the Math

Real Climate has a very interesting if occasionally highly technical post on sea level rise.  There’s considerable disagreement about projections.  Some projections rely on detailed modeling of the dynamics; others are based on fitting a model to past changes, more or less the way economists do modeling.  The latter, “semi-empirical” projects are also in some …

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