I’m often fascinated by what’s left out of environmental stories. Tim McDonnell has written a piece for Mother Jones that is picked up by the Guardian. It’s titled: “Why the U.S. still doesn’t have a single offshore wind turbine.” There is a major omission in this section on wind opponents: Blowback from “stakeholders”: Whale and bird…Continue Reading…
The state of humanity is getting better every day. On the whole, people are richer, healthier, and living longer than ever before. We are also a less violent species, it seems. Statistically speaking, my two boys, born in 2004 and 2007, can look forward to a nice long life. Several years ago, a Duke University demographer said:…Continue Reading…
In recent years, we’ve seen episodic waves of hysteria over reports of brain tumors and other cancers allegedly caused by cell phones and WiFi. If I had to trace this legacy of electromagnetic fear back in time, I would credit a 1979 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology and a series of articles in the New Yorker (under…Continue Reading…
My eight year-old son is not a disinterested sports fan. He knows as much about European soccer as I do (which is zilch), but when we’re in a barbershop for 15 minutes and Manchester is playing Barcelona, he asks me who we should root for. Ditto for the NBA All-Star game, which I let him…Continue Reading…
In recent years, there has been an outbreak of media stories on early childhood disease outbreaks. The press has reported a spike in cases of measles, mumps, and whooping cough in communities from Seattle to Vermont. In many of the stories, a cause-and-effect relationship to lower childhood vaccination rates has been explicit. (Some journalists, however,…Continue Reading…
When a social cause gains momentum and becomes symbolically important, partisans inevitably hijack it for their own ends. They do this by trying to define and control the meaning of the cause and how it should be perceived. We’re seeing this play out now with the Keystone XL pipeline, which has become a touchstone for environmentalists…Continue Reading…
In a perfect world, every conversation we have about childhood vaccines, GMOs, alternative medicine, and global warming would be based on a set of facts agreed on by a majority of scientists working in those spheres. But we don’t live in a perfect world, so many conversations on the aforementioned subjects are often driven by…Continue Reading…
Remember when: Just a decade ago, ‘adaptation’ was something of a dirty word in the climate arena — an insinuation that nations could continue with business as usual and deal with the mess later. That’s Olive Heffernan, reminiscing several months ago in Nature. She goes on to say: But greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing at an…Continue Reading…
Does it matter if a social movement hitches its wagon to the wrong horse? For the food movement and its embrace of the GMO labeling cause, I argued yes in Slate, because it is predicated on junk science and blind, simplistic mistrust of multinational corporations…The pro-labeling camp wants people to believe that eating “frankenfood” is dangerous…Continue Reading…
A panel at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting was summarized afterwards in a AAAS press release: Cable news junkies, take heart: if you love wall-to-wall coverage of hurricanes, wildfires and superstorms, your future viewing schedules will be jam-packed. Researchers at the AAAS Annual Meeting said that wild weather events…Continue Reading…