Posts Tagged ‘deforestation’

Sacrificing Cultures on the Climate Change Altar

This story by Elisabeth Rosenthal in Saturday’s New York Times unintentionally highlights an issue that receives scant attention in the media. Which is the bigger, more immediate problem: land use (such as deforestation) or climate change? If you want to make things even more complicated, throw in natural climatic events, such as drought. Rosenthal tries…Continue Reading…

Pandemic World

Mexico may still be in lockdown mode, but I suspect American fears of swine flu are ebbing. Alas, we may have only a short reprieve before pandemics starting hitting with regularity, warns epidemiologist Larry Brilliant in the WSJ weekend edition: In our lifetimes, or our children’s lifetimes, we will face a broad array of dangerous…Continue Reading…

The Killer MacGuffin

Several days ago, this story at Slate, by Brendan Borrell, argued that habitat destruction posed a more immediate threat to wildlife and biodiversity than climate change. That makes obvious sense. Until recently, ecological degradation, be it from deforestation or overfishing, was the pre-eminent environmental concern of our time. “Now, writes Borrell, “being green is all…Continue Reading…