EcocentricPsychology
The Midwest has every reason in the world to be sick of tornadoes by now. In April alone, there were a shocking 600 of them, and in the past two months more than 400 Americans have been killed by the storms. At least 116 more were added on May 22 in the massive twister that cut a 6-mile (9.6 km) swath across Joplin, Mo., generating winds …
EcocentricCoal
It’s not likely that a book called Harry Potter and the Mountaintop Removal Project would have much appeal to middle-schoolers. And have fun trying to get the pre-K crowd interested in Clifford the Big Red Strip-Mine Operator. The good news is you’re never likely to see such literary nasties. The bad news is that Scholastic, …
EcocentricWildlife
The last place you’d expect to see the folks from CSI sleuthing around is the bowl of soup you’re having for lunch — unless, of course, you’re having shark fin soup. In that case, you may be enabling an environmental crime, and now there’s DNA evidence that can give you away.
People who grew up on shark fin soup insist the stuff is …
EcocentricWildlife
For smokers, the world has always been one big ashtray, with cigarettes flicked away pretty much anywhere. That’s especially true now, since smokers are increasingly forbidden to light up in restaurants, office buildings and even new no-smoking condos. In the great river of litter human beings create each year, so tiny a thing as a …
EcocentricRegulation
Better hope you’ve got a little extra closet space. Sometime today, American industry will manufacture or import 250 lbs. of chemicals just for you. There will be another 250 lbs. tomorrow and another the day after that — every day, in fact, throughout the year. That’s a pretty big mountain of chemistry, but if we’re going to …
EcocentricWaste
There aren’t a whole lot of scientific disciplines that haven’t had something to say about climate change over the years — and with good reason. When a problem is global in scale there’s a universe of specialists and subspecialists who have to pitch in to to fix it — meteorologists, chemists, geologists, physicists, zoologists, …
EcocentricEndangered Species
[This is a guest post by my colleague, TIME reporter Katy Steinmetz:]
One of the collateral matters riding on the budget vote this week was the removal of gray wolves from the endangered species list. While some of the sound bites in the news were dramatic — “So Congress will be voting Thursday on the fate of more than 1,600 gray …
EcocentricWildlife
There’s no accounting for musical taste — particularly when the kind of music you’re talking about doesn’t even originate in your own species. Bird songs may be lovely, but whale songs? Say what you will about the combination of whoops, clicks groans and faintly flatulent rumbles that whales use to communicate and woo, the odds are …
EcocentricCoal
The Earth as one great organism has always been one of the most appealing metaphors of the green movement. From the moment environmentalist James Lovelock first articulated his so-called Gaia hypothesis—after the Greek goddess of the Earth—in the 1970s, the theory has continued to charm environmentalists.
It doesn’t stand up to …
EcocentricCoal
Want to save the Earth? Easy, just buy a couple of ice trays. To the long list of human inventions that are wrecking global climate—the internal combustion engine, the industrial era factory—add the automatic ice maker.
Climate modelers have long known that households are far bigger contributors to global warming than most …
