- ‘culdesactivism’ — engaging at micro-neighborhood level

A great story about the accidental birth of a grass roots environmental activist and a great new coinage — culdesactivism — from James Glave today in Salon.

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- a distopian Earth Day

Gloom — appropriately perhaps — seems to be the theme this Earth Day.
Joseph Romm in Salon thinks it’s already too late to save much of the flora and fauna on our planet. It’s time to worry out ourselves, he says.
Over at Alternet, Michael Klare worries at length about a ‘new world order in energy.’ [...]

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- unhappy? so do you take a pill, or change your life?

Mental health issues are a bit off-topic for us here at EarthQuaker. But we are interested in ideas that, to quote the Preamble to the US Constitution, ‘promote the general welfare.’
So here’s an interview with Charles Barber, author of the new book Comfortably Numb, which argues that too many American doctors now view mental [...]

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- is ideal parenting all about consumption?

Here at EarthQuaker’s suburban world headquarters we like to keep in touch with the world of hip, urban parenting, so we receive a daily email digest from Babble.com, the New York-based online parenting magazine.
That’s how we learned recently that even hipster parents find parenting a costly business these days.
Quoting parent Allyson Mazer, writer Melissa Rayworth [...]

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- more on behavioral economics

We’re glad to see that John Tierney gets what we were saying about climate change and behavioral economics the other week.
In his ‘Findings’ piece this week, Tierney points out that:
“We’re not good at making immediate sacrifices for an abstract benefit in the future. And this weakness is compounded when, as with climate change, we have [...]

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- all hail Rebecca Solnit

Here at EarthQuaker, we have a lot of time for Rebecca Solnit. She’s a Bay Area neighbor of ours and simply one of the most interesting authors currently writing on the history, mythology, economics, politics and ecology of the American West — and how they all intersect.
But Solnit’s interests, and abilities, range more [...]

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– on the environment, Southern Baptists get religion

A group of prominent Southern Baptist leaders today declared that their denomination has been ‘too timid’ on the issue of climate change.
The authors take pains to note that they’re not necessarily saying that humans are responsible for Global Warming. But they do make the following observation:
“There is undeniable evidence that the earth—wildlife, water, [...]

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What this is

is a start, really. It’s about beginning to rethink the fundamental question of how we should live now.
It’s a place for asking what we need to do to recalibrate our lives, our expectations, our ideas of what will — and what can — make us happy in the face of the reality that [...]

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