August 2009
6 posts
Collective Responsibility
From The Way We Live Now in NY Times Magazine
“…The question of personal responsibility, then, ends up being more complicated than it may seem. It’s hard to argue that Americans have collectively become more irresponsible over the last 30 years; the murder rate has plummeted, and divorce and abortion rates have fallen. And our genes certainly haven’t changed in 30 years.
What has...
We are not raising citizens, we are raising...
BY KURT MICHAEL FRIESE
There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollanrecently addressed this...
Debunking the meat/climate change myth
Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question is a 2007 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture...
How to lick a slug
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MOUNT HOOD, Ore.
While backpacking here with my 11-year-old daughter, I kept thinking of something tragic: so few kids these days know what happens when you lick a big yellow banana slug.
My daughter and I were recuperating in a (banana slug-infested) wilderness from a surfeit of civilization. On our second day on the Pacific Crest Trail, we were exhausted after nearly 20...
Dr.Seuss's The Lorax
Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment have teamed up to bring Dr. Seuss’s environmental tale, The Lorax, to a big screen near you on Seuss’s birthday in 2012.
If you’re unfamiliar with the story (for shame!) the story is told by a selfish entrepreneur who clear cuts the forest of all of its Truffala trees leaving no homes for the animals. It’s often referred to as a parable about...