Judith Levine and her significant other decided to not shop for a year. She wrote about her trials and tribulations in her book, Not buying It: My Year Without Shopping. She also wrote about it in Washington Post in an article titled, "Don't Buy It." Here's an excerpt: People can…
What if there were far too many people living on planet Earth, but no one had the courage to talk about it? According to Global Population Speak Out, that is exactly our situation. Consider that we repeatedly see news reports about scarce and dwindling resources (e.g., water, food, fish, fuel, topsoil), but these news reports rarely consider the exploding population on Earth as a major contributor to these problems. This refusal to consider the carrying capacity of Earth is truly staggering. As a thought experiment, consider how our "environmental" issues would be altered if each country had 25% fewer people than it currently does. Or 50%. Instead, we the human population of earth is at 6.5 billion, headed toward at least 9 billion by 2050. When it comes to discussing sex, reproduction and birth control, we freeze up, even when out-of-control population growth threatens our way of life.
Isn't this a breath of fresh air? Watching Barack Obama talk about these important issues also makes me think of eight years of lost opportunities. At least we're going to have an energy policy, rather than policy vacuum driven by a blind faith in the "free market." [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvG2XptIEJk&eurl=http://www.facebook.com/home.php[/youtube]
There's been some talk lately about the need to upgrade our power grid. How complicated is our power grid? Consider this quote from "Upgrading the Grid," from the July 31, 2008 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers): The power flowing through the stadium lights cannot actually be traced…
Maybe there's something wrong with me. I am not enthused about the coming election. I hope Obama wins, but only because I have had enough of the Republicans and their wistful, "wish it were 1952 again" attitudes, and the ideological leech they've been carrying around since 1980 that wants to…