In the News...

Back to Petroleum

Thanks to the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the public is finally seeing through BP's decade-long greenwashing campaign.

In the News...

China’s Cancer Villages Are Real—and Probably Worse Than Reported

Because Chinese media and academic journals are governmentally controlled, their reports tend to be conservative about politically sensitive and negative subjects. However, there have been no reports disputing the cancer-village phenomenon. There is no known national ban on cancer-village reporting, though new cancer-village reports are rare after May 2009. There are reports that local government agencies and polluting factories threatened, harassed, and assaulted investigators and reporters. The government often disciplines and removes newspaper and journal editors who publish politically sensitive and negative reports. … In addition, the traditional Chinese culture continues to identify people with the particular village where they are from. A personal label of “cancer village” would turn away potential investors, tourists, friends, and spouses.

Lee Liu, writing for Environment.

Reblogged from Utne Reader.

Geo-engineering...is it such a good idea?

What can we do about the climate crisis? Well, we could treat the symptoms by trying to offset the greenhouse gas effects of warming. Maybe we could dump a surrey of iron into the ocean to spur the growth of carbon-sequestering algae. Maybe we could "dope the stratosphere" with sulfate aerosols in order insulate the globe from the sun's radiation. (The recent volcano in Iceland actually did this for us.) Or...SPACE MIRRORS!

These schemes seem a little dubious. And very presumptive.

Yay, NPR!!!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125789622

Anthropocentrism

All Natural Water Purification....with a catch.

The Catskill Watershed provides water for New York City. This is where I live!

In order to create the 8,300-acre Ashokan reservoir several communities in the valley were flooded; people either abandoned or moved their homes. The house that our local fire chief lives in, a quarter of mile down the road from me was transported in the early 1900’s from Olive, a town that was flooded to make the Ashokan Reservoir. Miles and miles of railroad track was removed and relain, highways were discontinued, and over 30 cemeteries and the bodies in them were relocated. A steam whistle was sounded a full hour just before the area was flooded indicating that people had to leave. Then the waters came rushing in. Can you imagine? Entire towns were relocated to just outside the reservoir’s boundaries, hundreds of houses built and thousands of people relocated. Historical markers indicate where towns used to be. "Former site of..."

In my mind’s eye, I can see entire towns simply submerged under water, laundry still on the line. Of course this isn’t true. But during a drought, when the reservoir was dry my parents walked along the reservoir floor they found evidence of the towns, stone foundations, windowpanes, old plates. This might be an apocryphal story, the drought was before my time, but it is compelling nonetheless.

Sweeping it all away

Living the Life

Is it ironic that people drive thousamds of miles to and through National Parks?

Oh, a link: http://www.nps.gov/archive/crla/saf.htm

Adrift in a Moral Sea

From The Case Against Helping the Poor by Garrett Hardin, 1974

"So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts. We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being "our brother's keeper," or by the Marxist ideal of "to each according to his needs." Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as "our brothers," we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.

Since the boat has an unused excess capacity of 10 more passengers, we could admit just 10 more to it. But which 10 do we let in? How do we choose? Do we pick the best 10, "first come, first served"? And what do we say to the 90 we exclude? If we do let an extra 10 into our lifeboat, we will have lost our "safety factor," an engineering principle of critical importance. For example, if we don't leave room for excess capacity as a safety factor in our country's agriculture, a new plant disease or a bad change in the weather could have disastrous consequences.

Suppose we decide to preserve our small safety factor and admit no more to the lifeboat. Our survival is then possible although we shall have to be constantly on guard against boarding parties.

While this last solution clearly offers the only means of our survival, it is morally abhorrent to many people. Some say they feel guilty about their good luck. My reply is simple: "Get out and yield your place to others." This may solve the problem of the guilt-ridden person's conscience, but it does not change the ethics of the lifeboat. The needy person to whom the guilt-ridden person yields his place will not himself feel guilty about his good luck. If he did, he would not climb aboard. The net result of conscience-stricken people giving up their unjustly held seats is the elimination of that sort of conscience from the lifeboat.

This is the basic metaphor within which we must work out our solutions. Let us now enrich the image, step by step, with substantive additions from the real world, a world that must solve real and pressing problems of overpopulation and hunger.

The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become even harsher when we consider the reproductive differences between the rich nations and the poor nations. The people inside the lifeboats are doubling in numbers every 87 years; those swimming around outside are doubling, on the average, every 35 years, more than twice as fast as the rich. And since the world's resources are dwindling, the difference in prosperity between the rich and the poor can only increase.

As of 1973, the U.S. had a population of 210 million people, who were increasing by 0.8 percent per year. Outside our lifeboat, let us imagine another 210 million people (say the combined populations of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Morocco, Pakistan, Thailand and the Philippines) who are increasing at a rate of 3.3 percent per year. Put differently, the doubling time for this aggregate population is 21 years, compared to 87 years for the U.S.

The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become harsher when we consider the reproductive differences between rich and poor."

Check it out!!

Fun, eh?

Lil' Ella and the Ecofeminists

Sorry for the small size, click on the image and it will open full size in another window!

Cheers!

-ing

Hannah

"Its a conundrum!" -Hannah

Oh, those Greeks

Masculine and Feminine gender polarity...shout out to Aristotle, Hippocrates , and Galen.

I realize I should probably explain my train of thought here...

After each reading for Environmental Ethics (or during depending on how much my brain is boiling) I open my sketch book to help me mull over what I've read. Goodness knows what will end up on the page though. It often ends up being only partly related to the topic or in fact requires research of its own. This lasted post, after reading Victoria Davian, Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen , is from that bit of my mind that is fascinated by historical gender perceptions and Greek dudes and fed by a history classes.

The low-down:

Eco-feminism, in part, plays upon the shared domination over women and nature under patriarchy. Reading about the mutual oppression of Woman and Nature my little mind went straight to thoughts about gender polarity. Traditional theory per Aristotle says that male and female are fundamentally different. Opposite, in fact.

Female/Male

Cold/Hot
Left/Right
Circle/Line
Earth/Sky
Underworld/Heaven
Wet/Dry
Chaos/Order
Body/Soul
Opinion/Wisdom
Crooked/Straight

You get the idea...

Probably not what the eco-feminists had in mind? Not very "feminist" at all? And while some go to pains to remind us that the masculine and feminine are inherently related (patriarchy created the "feminine," etc.) there are voices out there that are exalting Women above Men in this polarizing fashion, simply in reverse to the traditional.

My favorite Teddy

Teddy Roosevelt is my favorite president. Not for his name, not for his cowboy image, not even for his gap toothed smile and khaki inspired fashion. I like him because he liked the outdoors, I like him because he is from New York. I like him because he gave us a national conservation movement. He represents a time period where the frontier was vanishing. Nature inspired nostalgia and those who could afford it would “return” to taste the freedom of the wild once again. After reading William Cronon (The Trouble With Wilderness) and G. Stanley Kane (Restoration or Preservation: Reflections On a Clash of Environmental Philosophies) I'm giving Teddy a second thought. Now, looking at his accomplishments and beliefs, seeing where we are now, and where we are likely to go, I have a few questions. What are we conserving? And what is the best way to go about doing it. There are so many things to think about. And only so much space.

Jumping off an insightful comment from geoeliot, “who loved [the wilderness] more than the People who had kept it well for thousands of years?” This is a really good point. Where is the legitimacy in our Government removing Native Americans from the land that was to become national parks, forest, etc. in order to “protect” it? This relocation of the native people is a perfect example of our dualist attitude towards the environment. As if we were visitors rather than part of the system, part of nature itself. I am not comfortable thinking of humanity as outside nature. I prefer Kane’s community model of joint responsibility and trust, how can you deny interdependence?

I want to go back to my last two cartoons a moment and the concept of the great American wilderness. There are two types of “wilderness” as I see it. (1) The Biblical wilderness, a savage, inhospitable wasteland that tested Adam and Eve, Moses, Jesus, a place where you can lose yourself very quickly. This is the wilderness humans have fought to tame, to farm, to mould to their purposes. This is the wilderness you find when you get lost in the woods, when the brambles get too thick and you don’t know where home is. Anyone who has ever truly spent time alone and scared in Nature knows this wilderness. (2) Post-Frontier wilderness. The ideal that civilized people have about a wilderness that in reality is no wilderness at all. It is the myth, especially ingrained in American hearts, of the wild frontier where men are true men unburdened by civilization, where truth and freedom reign. Was this ever the case? What a national park is is domesticated. It is policed. It is guided. It is created. I might even risk saying it is unnatural. For goodness sake, what kind of wilderness has boundaries? It merely embodies the myth of perfection, sanctity, and absolute truth. It is a purely romantic notion. So, what would we be conserving then, since these nationally controlled bits of land are fabricated? I think my problem with this is only a problem of definition. I am simply arguing that it is not wilderness. I’m not sure where there still exists true wilderness. But that is a inquiry for another time.

Look! John Muir and T.R. at Glacier Point in Yosemite!

Wilderness Idealism 101

Check out John Muir! He is fascinating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Muir

The All American Wild Frontier

Inspired by THE TROUBLE WITH WILDERNESS by William Cronon.