Several years ago, I wrote about about an insurrection in the environmental movement. A new group of greens–called eco-pragmatists–had taken on the old nature-centric guard, which still held sway but also had rendered environmentalism anachronistic and ill-equipped to address complex 21st century challenges, such as climate change. It was a battle between what I called…Continue Reading…
For those of us fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances, life is good, with antibiotics, modern dentistry, vaccines, climate-controlled homes, big-screen TV’s, smart phones. The sum of this, however, is worrying to some: What is the toll to the planet, to the ecosystems that support us and the rich diversity of animals and…Continue Reading…
A joint NASA/Library of Congress symposium held today in Washington DC asked: Will human civilization on Earth be imperiled, or enhanced, by our own world-changing technologies? Will our technological abilities threaten our survival as a species, or even threaten the Earth as a whole, or will we come to live comfortably with these new powers?…Continue Reading…
I’m tempted to cut to the chase and tell you at the outset that conservationists have come a long away from the sense of urgency that in the mid-1980s gave birth to the field of conservation biology, which Michael Soule defined as a “crisis discipline.” True, for foot soldiers carrying the biodiversity flag the core mission…Continue Reading…
If there is one tenet for conservation biologists and environmentalists to live by in the age of the Anthropocene, it would be this pearl of wisdom from the ecologist Daniel Botkin: Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or…Continue Reading…
Bill Moyers has asked an array of luminaries to play speechwriter for tonight’s State of the Union Address. Everybody has their own pet cause or issue, of course. So here’s what Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva wishes President Obama might say (my emphasis): For the sake of the Earth, our family farms and our children’s health, we must…Continue Reading…
Nearly two decades ago, an environmental historian published a scholarly essay that enraged the environmental community. William Cronon, author of the seminal Changes in the Land (a book that deeply influenced me and many others) and the brilliant (equally influential) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, began his provocative essay this way: The time has come…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…
If you had to pick the human influences most responsible for altering the earth, what would they be? Half a century ago, this question was (dispassionately) addressed in a landmark symposium called, “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.” A 2005 retrospective review of the volume of interdiscplinary scholarship that emerged in 1956 notes that the syposium was…Continue Reading…
**UPDATE: Stuart Pimm, the highly respected conservation biologist at Duke University, emailed me his thoughts on the climate change/global land use dichotomy that is implied by my post. It’s an important perspective. Stuart has given me permission to publish his email in its entirety. You can find it below at this comment.** Perhaps the biggest…Continue Reading…