Political Ecology

Yet the composite Human Development Index, a widely used metric that incorporates measures of literacy, life expectancy, and income, has improved markedly since the mid-1970s in both rich and poor nations. The index correlates strongly with other measures of prosperousness. Some measures of personal security buck the upward trend, but the overall improvement in well-being [...]

I’ve been seeing a good deal of defeatist thinking lately along the lines of this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100824092408.htm.  This line of thought posits that the amount of warming already in the pipeline is unavoidable….so therefore we might as well give up trying and just deal with the consequences. This is a very dangerous and fallacious line [...]

An entertaining science writer comes up with this list: 1) Woolly mammoth 2) Dodo 3) Sabre Toothed Tiger 4) Thylacine (Marsupial Tiger) 5) Glyptodon 6) Irish Elk 7) Short faced bear Neaderthal 9) Giant sloth 10) Woolly rhino 11) Moa To these I would add: 1) Procoptodon goliah (Giant Kangaroo) 2) Auroch 3) Meiolania (Horned [...]

What is the environmentally sustainable approach to immigration and overpopulation? At root, immigration is a population problem: too many people are living in one geographical area and not enough economic production to meet their basic needs there. I decided to crunch some data to see what I could see. I started with a global statistics [...]

Many Washington observers have been wondering what’s happening to the Obama Administration’s greenhouse gas (climate change) agenda. In order to unravel all of this I have prepared a few tables that illustrate the problem. I think most of us understand that the Congress, and more specifically the Senate, has thus far been unable to send [...]

Apropos Mr. Mead’s post-mortem (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/), I would like to add another wrinkle to Mead’s Prohibition analogy that may shed some more light on the subject. Prohibition was heavily supported by the likes of John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil fame). Why would Big Oil be on the side of Prohibition? Because the Ford Motor Company [...]

Apropos Mr. Mead’s post-mortem (http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/07/12/the-big-green-lie-exposed/), I would like to add another wrinkle to Mead’s Prohibition analogy that may shed some more light on the subject. Prohibition was heavily supported by the likes of John D. Rockefeller (of Standard Oil fame). Why would Big Oil be on the side of Prohibition? Because the Ford Motor Company [...]