ON MATTERS OF DUBIOUS INTEREST
The reviews of Amitav Ghosh’s new book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, have not always been positive. Some have declared it to be anti-science. Yet others, like Roy Scranton, found that it “elegantly and audaciously reconceives modernity as a centuries-long campaign of omnicide, against the spirits of the earth, the rivers, the trees, and even the humble …
I came home from a week’s vacation to find that cockroaches, at least four or five, had taken over my kitchen. Cursing and swatting them ultimately makes no difference, since they will thrive no matter what you do. Just stay out of the kitchen at five a.m. Similarly, despite your insistent urge to scratch mosquito …
Our concept of time constrains, to one degree or another, everything we do. Delay frustrates the best-laid plans, stresses every outcome, and makes for bad decisions. Look at the climate crisis. We still can’t comprehend the magnitude of its unfolding. The remedies proposed are insufficient and politically impossible, even if we had the time and …
Continue reading “By the Time I Retrieved My Fly Swatter,
the Fly Had Flown Off”
How Climate Change Is Contributing to Skyrocketing Rates of Infectious Disease The Covid-19 ‘Infowhelm’ There Is Still No Plan This is a picture of plastic on the sea floor, a rape of nature and another instance of hubris—that ultimate kind of human arrogance—here putting the stuff out of sight, out of mind. Some of our …
The Challenging Politics of Climate Change How the Climate Crisis Is Killing Us, in 9 Alarming Charts Americans Increasingly See Climate Change as a Crisis, Poll Shows Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution leads off her piece on climate and politics with a great quote from Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live (10/13/18): We don’t …
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? For many of us, climate change is simply beyond imagining. These two excellent books offer quite different ways of understanding what it is, how the threat grew, and what if anything we can do about it. Ghosh is …