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Spaceship Earth: A new view of environmentalism
Posted by Washington Post: Joel Achenbach on January 3rd, 2012
Washington Post: Spaceship Earth enters 2012 belching smoke, overheating and burning through fuel at a frightening rate. It’s feeling pretty crowded, and the crew is mutinous. No one’s at the helm.
Sure, it’s an antiquated metaphor. It’s also an increasingly apt way to discuss a planet with 7 billion people, a global economy, a World Wide Web, climate change, exotic organisms running amok and all sorts of resource shortages and ecological challenges.
More and more environmentalists and scientists talk about...
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Hurricane Irene: It’s the rain
Posted by Washington Post: Joel Achenbach on August 31st, 2011
Washington Post: Precipitation is the underestimated, mundane, unexotic hazard of a tropical storm. No one fears rain. It is familiar, unlike a gale that gusts to 110 miles an hour or a sea that foams and rages. But floods can be killers, their effects felt far inland. That fact was demonstrated this week as Irene, a hurricane that on paper had dwindled to a tropical storm, inundated the steep valleys of Vermont, the farmland of Upstate New York and many other places nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean. “People aren’t...