Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and "Collapse." In an op-ed piece in the January 2, 2008 NYT, he reports that American rates of resource consumption are horribly out of wack with the…
Scientific American has just published a comprehensive article on how to switch the United States substantially over to sunlight. The headline: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions." The cost of this immense clean-energy-producing plan would be $420 billion. That's a HUGE…
I ran across a site I'm really enjoying, No Impact Man. Who is "No Impact Man"? He is a fellow who got tired of only talking about living an ecologically responsible lifestyle: I am no eco-expert. I am just a liberal schlub who got sick of not putting my money…
I've been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, "The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism." (you'll need to scroll down to the z's). Zimbardo's article appears as one of…
On Bill Moyers' Journal, Bill Moyers discussed this multifaceted issue with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. This video is well worth watching for many reasons. The introduction includes a clip of John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to Southern Baptist…