Check out the blog Casaubon’s Book. See it’s About page.
Don’t forget about No Impact Man who’s still going strong:
Meet real needs, make sustainable products
Here’s a question: if the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, [...]
Archive for the ‘sustainability’ Category
Reviving this blog
Posted in agriculture, big business, sustainability on July 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
make big car owners pay
Posted in cars, economic justice, population pressure, sustainability, urban design on April 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Writing in a NYT op-ed, Owen D. Gutfreund, a professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College and author of 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, says,
It’s imperative that we rethink the way we approach transportation. Our highway policy has remained largely the same since the 1950s even as driving [...]
food or conservation?
Posted in agriculture, biodiversity, food, sustainability on April 9, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In the New York Times, As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program:
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, [...]
food riots
Posted in agriculture, economic justice, sustainability on April 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Guardian reports: “The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,”…
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said “many more people will suffer and starve” unless the US, Europe, Japan and other rich countries provide funds. He said prices of all [...]
water in the West
Posted in sustainability, water on March 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Warming affects trees, streams in West from AP:
The Rocky Mountain snowpacks that melt earlier in spring leave less water for summer irrigation and heat up trout streams. Glaciers, which provide consistent stream flows during summer, are melting. The glaciers at Montana’s Glacier National Park could melt entirely by 2022…. Montana, Idaho and Wyoming had [...]
water footprint
Posted in population pressure, sustainability, water on March 28, 2008 | 2 Comments »
By Arthur Max, Associated Press Writer:
The threat of climate change has drawn attention to carbon footprints…. Now scientists have begun calculating a water footprint, the amount of water needed to produce goods or services.
“What we are doing now can’t keep up with the issues we already have,” says Carol A. Howe, an expert working [...]
Bangkok climate talks to begin
Posted in climate change, sustainability, world politics on March 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »
AFP story by Charlie McDonald-Gibson:
Meeting for the first time since marathon talks in December on the Indonesian island of Bali, members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will try to thrash out differences that almost derailed their last gathering.
The five-day meeting, beginning on Monday in Bangkok, aims to set out a detailed [...]
Good Environmental News
Posted in sustainability on March 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
See this post at the Pump Handle.
US timber industry
Posted in agriculture, big business, carbon regulation, forests, sustainability on March 19, 2008 | 3 Comments »
“Michael Roddy describes the ecological costs in terms of CO2 emmissions related to choices that builders make when they choose what materials they will build with.” This page has the link to the Roddy’s 10 page PDF.
Excerpts:
…wood framed houses do not last beyond two or three generations without requiring extensive maintenance. In many cases, [...]
We Feed the World
Posted in agriculture, big business, biodiversity, economic justice, globalization, oceans, population pressure, sustainability on March 16, 2008 | 2 Comments »
The 2005 Austrian documentary film We Feed the World has been showing on the Sundance channel in the US recently. (IMDB entry.) It’s incredibly well done.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow [...]
zero carbon required
Posted in carbon regulation, climate change, sustainability, world politics on March 12, 2008 | 6 Comments »
Carbon Output Must Near Zero To Avert Danger, New Studies Say in the Washington Post:
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease [...]
link heaven (or hell)
Posted in climate change, sustainability on March 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A Few Things Ill Considered, a blog by a Gristmill contributor Coby Beck who wrote the outstanding How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic guide, has an extensive weekly roundup of global warming news.
See also H.E.Taylor’s page of links (a main source for Beck’s roundup) on a variety of topics many of which are about [...]
Living Planet Report 2006
Posted in biodiversity, fossil fuels, oceans, reports, sustainability on March 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Since 2000, the WWF has issued the Living Planet Report every other year. Read about it in this Mongabay news article.
From the forward:
The Living Planet Report 2006 confirms that we are using the planet’s resources faster than they can be renewed – the latest data available (for 2003) indicate that humanity’s Ecological Footprint, our [...]
population & environment
Posted in economy, population pressure, sustainability on March 7, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Gary Peters taught geography in the California State University system. Among the ten books he has authored or co-authored is a textbook on population geography. Read his excellent overview of population and environment issues.
It may be time to see that our numbers, combined with our expanding affluence and constant need to consume more [...]
big downside to biofuels
Posted in US politics, agriculture, biofuels, sustainability on March 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
At Grist Tom Philpott asks, “Why are biofuels losing steam in Europe — and barreling ahead in the U.S.?” His short essay neatly ties up the connection between growing crops for biofuels, the need for fossil fuel based fertilizer to do that, how it is increasing the removal of rain forests, and how the [...]
Beyond Civilized and Primitive
Posted in sustainability on February 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Beyond Civilized and Primitive, a recent, thoughtful (and long) essay from Ran Prieur:
I don’t think there’s any escape from complex high-energy societies, so instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its participants — that the activities necessary to keep it [...]
UNEP Year Book 2008
Posted in biodiversity, climate change, oceans, reports, sustainability on February 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The United Nations Environment Programme’s annual report, UNEP Year Book 2008 (PDF, 62 pg, 7 MB), “documents some of the many insights, events, and issues that have emerged during 2007 and, not surprisingly, it is dominated by the theme of climate change.” (See here for translations and individual sections.)
Excerpt:
If average global temperatures increase 3.4° [...]
a climate for conflict
Posted in climate change, population pressure, sustainability, war on February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history, D.D. Zhang et al., December 4, 2007, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (open access). [See Emmett Duffy's review: A climate for conflict.]
Abstract:
Although scientists have warned of possible social perils resulting from climate change, the impacts [...]
population and climate change, a discussion
Posted in climate change, population pressure, sustainability on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A useful roundtable discussion of population and climate change. From the introduction:
A larger global population means a larger demand for everything–most urgently, energy. And although Earth’s resources have apparently stretched further than Paul Ehrlich infamously predicted four decades ago in his book The Population Bomb, the mounting climate problem suggests that the consequences of [...]
Sustainability & Moral Disengagement
Posted in climate change, economic justice, population pressure, sustainability, world politics on February 21, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Here is one of the most thoughtful articles you’ll find on sustainability and the reasons we don’t address it: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement by Albert Bandura, David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, Stanford University.
Environmental degradation of human origin stems [...]
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