Housekeeping

After a long dry spell, we’re posting again.
Here’s something we meant to post earlier:  It seems that the US government shares our worries about the  environmental impact of solar power projects on desert environments.  Not that we’re against them completely — just that it’s good to know what costs you are imposing on the planet, [...]

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- gardening, as well as eating, like we’re at war

The ‘Victory Garden’ idea is getting a lot of play these days.  We’ve already noticed appeals for us to ‘eat-like-there’s-a-war-on.’
Now the UK Independent is excited by the same idea — hooking its version of the story on a new exhibit, ‘Dig for Victory: War on Waste,‘ at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms.

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- let’s eat like there’s a war on!

That’s apparently the idea behind British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s new project.
Oliver’s idea, explains today’s Guardian,takes “inspiration from the Ministry of Food’s campaign to encourage families to Dig For Victory, grow their own food and make the most of their wartime rations.”
While it’s a gimmick, the notion also makes some sense.  Second World War rationing [...]

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- grow your own (ditch the lawn)

Climate change threatens to destabilize our lives, for both ill and (perhaps, even) good.
One mark of that instability will likely be a disruption in the way we produce and distribute food.
Could this be why the UK Independent finds the world suddenly ‘going crazy for allotments‘ — those small plots of land that cities lease their [...]

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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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- a global warming upside: more ivory

It’s not from elephants, though, and no animals are killed for it.  Mammoth ivory, the NY Times tells us, is a commodity in increasing abundance as the arctic tundra of Siberia is melting.
There’s a lot of it out there to be found, apparently:
The Siberian permafrost blankets millions of square miles, ranging in depth from a [...]

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- the biofuel backlash grows

Many people feel that biofuels are not exactly the solution to climate change that others — especially in the current US administration — are claiming them to be.
They were joined by a number of European ‘top scientists’ this week, the Guardian reports.
In particular, says the article, Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s [...]

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- we’re too late, says James Lovelock

Proponents of sustainable living, recycling, ethical consumption and carbon offsets may be dismayed to hear that an environmental hero, James Lovelock — he of the original ‘Gaia’ hypothesis — thinks that all those ideas are pointless.
We have about twenty years left to enjoy life as we know it and then we’re essentially doomed to global [...]

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- bad news for bats, mammals, frogs . . .

“Australia already has the worst record in the world for conserving its beautiful and unusual wildlife,” says the UK’s Independent in what’s already become a gloomy week for the world’s fauna and flora — and it’s still only Tuesday here in California.
Some 40% of all the mammal species that have become extinct over the past [...]

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- Malthus: he’s back!

. . . and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, no less.
Commodities and basic resources (like water and good arable land) are in increasingly short supply worldwide, notes the Journal. And while we’ve managed to avoid the wholesale disasters Malthusians have regularly warned against in the two centuries since Thomas Malthus [...]

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