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Komanoff on wind

Don't miss an excellent piece in Orion on the fevered debate over wind power. It's by Charles Komanoff, who you know as a periodic Gristmill contributor.

To Russia with love, again

Seems another Chinese chemical spill is on its way to the Russian Far East (RFE). ITAR-TASS out of Moscow reported today that "a five kilometre-long benzol slick resulting from another dumping of chemicals into the Sungari river from a plant in the Chinese province of Jilin is expected to reach Russia's city of Khabarovsk on September 7-8." The story goes on to say that the benzol may evaporate before it reaches the Amur River, the same one that was poisoned last winter by a chemical spill from a factory in the same Chinese province.

Not everyone has a China environment guru to consult on such stories, but luckily I do. She is my colleague, Dr. Jennifer Turner, who directs the China Environment Forum here at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Here is an email where she puts the spill in context:

Top environment reporters talk about journalism vs. activism

With global warming, biodiversity loss, peak oil, and other environmental problems looming large, those who report on the issues face a dilemma: Do they report the facts dispassionately, or shift […]

Eating our vegetables

Apropos of David's random thought, Jeffrey Sachs has an article in this month's Scientific American in which he proposes four ways to reduce human population growth, and therefore reduce the burden on the Earth.

Water needed in Lebanon

Following up an earlier post on the oil spill off the coast of Lebanon, here is a VOA piece on a new UNICEF field assessment that highlights water availability as a particularly pressing need.

Where will we go now?

Well, there's one less option for planetary relocation.

Hu’s Fine Is It, Anyway?

China considers fining media outlets for disaster reporting Advancing their reputation as fun-loving goofballs, Chinese officials are considering a new law that would allow local governments to fine media outlets […]

Fear and environmentalism: still more

(Third in a series; first part here, second part here.)

Fear and anger can be invigorating, even intoxicating. It's worth thinking about why.

For all too many men -- and let's face it, the vast majority of violence, personal and political, originates with men -- the strong, stoic, squinty ideal of masculinity means that whole ranges of emotional experience simply go unacknowledged, unnamed, and unprocessed.

Some boys are purposefully taught to be ashamed of any hint of vulnerability. They're taught that empathy is a sign of weakness. Their affect is actively suppressed. This comes from repressed, repressive fathers who themselves had repressed, repressive fathers, and so on back through a genealogy of domination and displacement.

More commonly, though, boys simply aren't taught or encouraged to discuss their feelings. Even well-meaning parents can buy into the myth that boys aren't as "sensitive" as girls, and of course this myth is encouraged in a thousand ways by our culture. (When I found out I was having a boy, I read a ton of material on this stuff. See, e.g., Real Boys by William Pollack.)

By commission or omission, the result is the same: emotional illiteracy.

Random thought of the day

There have been several debates here on Gristmill lately about capitalism, consumerism, communalism, corporatism, and, you know ... The System. It's worth remembering some crucial context.

Somewhere in the early 1800s, the number of human beings on earth reached a billion. In the 1920s, it reached two billion. In 1960, three billion. Four billion in 1974. Five billion in 1987. Six billion in 1999.

By around 2045, there will be nine billion people on the planet.

‘Free’ trade plus nativism equals bad food policy on both sides of the Rio Grande.

In today's Victual Reality column, I note that California's organic farms are struggling with a labor shortage.

Farmers there claim that tighter security at the Mexican border is leaving them bereft of workers; in the nation's organic fruit-and-vegetable basket, produce is rotting unpicked on the vine.

If in California there aren't enough farm hands, in Mexico, there are too many. In an excellent recent San Francisco Chronicle story, Monica Campbell and Tyche Hendricks report that, "An estimated 1.5 million agricultural jobs have been lost since Nafta went into effect in 1994." And the situation is expected to get worse as Nafta strips away what's left of the Mexican government's protection for its corn farmers by 2008.

Where do I begin to tease out the ironies at play here?