EcocentricWildlife
We live in the Anthropocene, as some scientists have come to call our new geologic era. The term acknowledges the fact that human beings—nearly 7 billion strong and growing—have so much influence over the life, geography and even chemistry of planet Earth that we’re now essentially responsible for the whole show. For good and for …
EcocentricRegulation
Over 950 pounds of beef contaminated with radioactive cesium above the legal limit has been distributed and eaten in at least eight prefectures across Japan, Tokyo city authorities have announced. The beef, which came from cows raised on a farm in Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture, contained cesium at a level of 3,240 becquerels per …
EcocentricSolar Power
Ah, solar panels: so clean, so elegant—and so bloody expensive. Covering your roof with photovoltaics may save you money in the long run, but it requires the installation of a lot of heavy and expensive equipment up front. Thin-film solar panels, printed on sheets at industrial scales, are slowly making inroads, but suppose you …
EcocentricUncategorized
Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said the phrase in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” It, in this case, was obscenity, and Stewart was making a point about the trickiness of properly defining the term. How do you have an argument about pornography if you can’t quite say what it is?
For the past several years, …
EcocentricUncategorized
Temperatures in New York City today, where I live, breaching 90 F and feeling more like 100. And New York is not alone—this map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that nearly every corner of the country is suffering from unusual heat:
Pretty disgusting. And the bad news is that should climate models hold,
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EcocentricEcocentric
Though he’s the single person most associated with climate change, over the last couple of years Al Gore had kept a somewhat lower public profile on the issue. It’s not that the former Vice President disappeared entirely—he continued advocacy work through his Alliance for Climate Protection, testified on climate science at Congress and …
EcocentricWildlife
With all the climate conversation currently littering the Internet, and the myriad ways that extreme weather is linked to global warming, it’s hard not to get confused about climate change sometimes – and given the sheer volume of muddled information out there, you might even be forgiven for being unconvinced by the arguments …
EcocentricUncategorized
Nobody likes a 40-year heat wave, but a 40-year heat wave in the midst of national drive to conserve energy seems particularly cruel. Last month, residents of Tokyo and other parts of Japan, where electricity is in short supply after March 11, endured highs of 95 degrees — and pangs of guilt when they reached to turn the …
EcocentricOil
Even if you aren’t near the Yellowstone River oil spill right now, the scene is disturbingly familiar. It looks so much like its 2010 cousin in the Gulf of Mexico that it’s almost spooky – the gross underestimation of how much oil is out there, vague reassurances to residents about their health and property safety, and the …
EcocentricOceans
As I write in the cover story of TIME this week, we’re in the middle of a seafood transition. Once nearly all of our fish were caught wild—indeed, as Paul Greenberg has written, fish are the last wild food in a world where nearly everything else we eat comes from a farmer’s labor. But that’s changing—around half of the seafood …
