Articles by Yolanda Crous

Reductionist science is killing us

In my grad program, we've spent a lot of time talking about Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren's IPAT equation. It's pretty simple:

Impact = Population x Environment

English translation: A society's environmental impact is proportional to its population, its wealth, and its technological capacity to mitigate the impacts of its population and its wealth.

So how do you reduce impact? Well, it's too ethically and politically dicey to do a whole lot about population -- at least beyond educating women. Affluence? Let's put it this way: How would you like to be the one to tell El Salvador or Namibia to stay poor because the world has all the rich countries it can take?

Jeremy Piven gets caught out

I admit it -- the vestigial high school girl in me loves celebrity gossip. Still, I can't help but cringe in sympathy every time the tabloids metaphorically draw and quarter some poor, stylistically challenged starlet for mismatching her bag and shoes or stepping out of her house in sweat pants on a Sunday morning. I happen to be a major fan of sweat pants on Sunday mornings. In fact, if I had the eff-you fortitude to walk down to my local coffee shop in pajama bottoms, I would.

No, not that

Talking about climate change, that is. More evidence that it's the hot political topic of the moment -- even the muckety-mucks at Davos are all abuzz over greenhouse gas emissions:

No, really

Um ... literally.

Come to think of it, this little gizmo (scroll to the bottom of the page) might just come in handy during my nightly 3 a.m. stumble to the bathroom.