Today, 2nd August, we have collectively consumed all of the planet's renewable resources. So said Nicolas Hulot, France's Minister of State for Ecological Transition, in a YouTube video published August 2 by Transition ecologique et solidaire. Sometimes people we assume are intelligent say things that are so blindingly obviously stupid we can't persuade ourselves to treat them that way, so we think, "Maybe I'm the blindingly obviously stupid one," and we dig hard to try to figure out the … [Read more...]
How Fossil Fuels Benefit People and the Planet
Indur Goklany is one of my favorite scholars on the interplay of people, resources, and our natural environment. Few are more thorough and careful to root their ideas in solid empirical research. And what his research reveals, again and again, is that people's creativity is making the world a better and better place to live, not just for people but also for plants and animals. In a day when Greens everywhere demonize people's use of fossil fuels as imperiling the planet, Goklany demonstrates, … [Read more...]
Sustainable Churches
How can the government use the Church to spread the gospel of saving the planet? The EPA has just funded a little project to study the Christian Church in the US to answer just that question. As an anthropologist might scan the habits and thoughts of natives, the EPA is concerned to try to understand how one might channel the spiritual energies of the Christian Church to service an environmentalist agenda. The Church of Jesus Christ is on the defensive in the Western world, silenced by a love a … [Read more...]
Campus Green Initiatives
College and university campuses are places to debate and experiment with new ideas. Unfortunately, a few of the “bright ideas” turn out not to be so practical, or ethical. Then we can be thankful that the consequences were limited to a campus and weren’t inflicted on society at large. One ivory-tower idea with less than ideal consequences is the popular “campus sustainability initiative.” The National Association of Scholars recently released a report showing that colleges trying to reduce … [Read more...]
