Only a Blockhead

Unhappy truth?

I write this in front of a wood-burning stove. It generates warmth, and the flames play and dance. I chose this way of heating at no small expense to put my money where my mouth is: to live a life more beneficial to the planet. The same motivation I had for installing solar panels.

 I know there are downsides to solar panels—pollution upon manufacture for example—but on balance, and when compared to the costs and dangers of conventional nuclear power generation, the best information I have is that they’re an almost unequivocal good.

 The wood stove? I’ve just found out that I may be unwittingly poisoning my neighbors.

 The general consensus is wood burning = green. But this may be too much of a downside.

--Julian

Whole Earth Meltdown

Stewart Brand is an ecologist with more street cred than most. In 2009, he published Whole Earth Discipline, introducing fact-backed arguments supporting, among other things, nuclear power, genetically modified crops, and a bottoming out of population growth. I bought his logic with a sigh of relief, but as the months go by I’m getting worn down by the counter evidence. 

 Population

Brand: "I think a… probable peak will be 8 billion" (Whole Earth Discipline, p. 60).

Counter evidence: "The United Nations will warn this week that the world’s population could more than double to 15 billion by the end of this century" (The Guardian, October 22, 2011).

 Nuclear Power

Brand: "Reactor safety is a problem already solved" (p. 91).

Counter evidence: Several independent reports indicate that the multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in March 2011 caused higher than reported radiation contamination (Nelle Maxey, Pacific Free Press, November 1, 2011).

 GM Crops

[Bt crops are plants genetically modified to include Bt, a natural insecticide.]

Brand: "The main ecological effect of Bt crops has been a drastic reduction in pesticide use" (p. 137). [In India] "Bt cotton increased yield by 50 percent and diminished pesticide use by 50 percent" (p. 141).

Counter evidence: "Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop…. A survey by Navdanya International, in India, showed that pesticide use increased 13-fold since Bt cotton was introduced" (John Vidal, Common Dreams, October 19, 2011).

I suppose with the ongoing discussions over climate change and its likely effect, I shouldn’t be surprised at these differences in reportage and interpretation. The debate goes on.

--Julian

More on Summer

Shocking News!

—David

Gender is Dead! Long Live Gender!

Perhaps this summer, while munching your edamame and sipping your Suruga Bay (or the local equivalents) you'll enjoy reading Alva Noë, a philosopher who writes on NPR's Cosmos and Culture blog.  I always find what he has to say stimulating.  From his most recent entry:

If biology is the measure of all things, then many of the categories we use to group ourselves into kinds of person — man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, professor, cheerleader — are, in fact, unreal. You don't find them in nature as it is apart from our attitudes and beliefs about that nature. At the same time, what could be more real than the way we experience ourselves as being?

Question: Would you want to free yourself from your self-categories, if you could?

Read the whole post here.

—David

BA FA

--David

Oh Wow, Man

—David

Science

—David

Kyoto Journal #75: Biodiversity

The new issue of Kyoto Journal, a theme issue devoted to biodiversity, is out.

This richly informative and lavishly illustrated edition features wide-ranging contributions by more than 50 writers, photographers and artists, specially prepared for distribution this fall at COP10 in Nagoya, the UN’s 10th Conference of Parties to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). An extensive 22-page section explores the ideal – and troubling present-day reality – of Japan’s satoyama: rural areas where people have lived with the land and on it without spoiling it over many generations, preserving and even promoting biodiversity. Plus over 30 diverse exclusive online reports — all downloadable.

The issue includes a review, by Blockhead's own Julian, of Azby Brown's Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan.

More information here.  And don't forget to subscribe.

—David