Archive | Great Revaluing RSS feed for this section

Yale Environment 360: U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Catastrophic Risks, Report Claims

25 May

Of the 65,000 metric tons of highly radioactive spent fuel generated by U.S. reactors, about 75 percent is kept in cooling pools. According to Robert Alvarez, a senior policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Energy in the Clinton administration and co-author of the report, those pools were not designed for the amount of fuel — or the level of radiation — they are holding and are vulnerable to the type of events that crippled the Fukushima plant in Japan in April.

That is to say, the US nuclear establishment – industrialists, businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats – poses a catastrophic risk to the nation.

via Yale Environment 360: U.S. Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Catastrophic Risks, Report Claims.

Tags:

We Are All Green Consumers [?]

23 May

Are we looking at a major cultural change?

Green has gone mainstream. Not too long ago, just a small group of deep green consumers existed. Today, 83% of consumers (Source: Natural Marketing Institute, 2009) – representing four generations, Baby Boomers, Millennials, Gen Ys and Gen Zs – are some shade of green. Each in their own way, these generations are quickly transforming what used to be a fringe market that appealed to a faction of eco-hippies is now a bona fide $290 billion industry ranging from organic foods to hybrid cars, ecotourism to green home furnishings.

via We Are All Green Consumers — Now And For The Future | Sustainability Marketing, Eco Marketing, Environmental Marketing, The New Rules of Green Marketing Book | J. Ottman Consulting.

Living with Living Creatures: Will We Become the Apocalypse?

22 May

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.

S. T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”

Chet Wickwire was one of the most remarkable men I’ve known. He was Chaplain of The Johns Hopkins University in the third quarter of the last century. It’s in that capacity that I came to know him. He was central to both the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s; he established a tutorial program that worked with inner city children, and he organized a wide variety of programs that benefited Johns Hopkins students and the local community. I worked for him as a program assistant for two or three years in the early 1970s.

One day during a meeting in his office – it may have been the weekly staff meeting – someone pointed out a possibly injured bee on the floor. My impulse – this is what I thought – was simply to kill it and throw the body into the trash. Chet’s was different. He gently picked the bee up and set it on the window sill. It then flew away.

That simple act of kindness, to a mere insect, impressed me deeply. Every time I think to kill an insect, I think of Chet and the bee. Sometimes I refrain and do what little I can to help the insect along, though often enough I kill the insect. But not without a twinge of guilt and angst, which is distinct from any disgust over contact with squishy insect guts.

But why was Chet unwilling to kill the bee? It is, after all, only an animal, and a rather lowly one at that? The only reasonable answer to that question is that he respected the bee as a living being. And if you ask: Why that? Well, is that not a reasonable why for an adult human being to act?

Just how are we to conduct our relations with other living beings? What degree of respect do we accord to their life? The answers to those questions, of course, vary from one culture to another. One concern here – it’s lurking in the background – is that the answer of the industrialized West, the agribusiness factory farming West is: None. None at all. No respect for other life forms. Is that answer anything less than a suicide pact?

Let me retell a story about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.

Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they’d raised. I’m told that when Sue and her husband sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said “baaa” in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.

Continue reading →

Reactor Vents That Failed in Japan Are Used in U.S. – NYTimes.com

17 May

Why am I NOT surprised?

TOKYO — Emergency vents that American officials have said would prevent devastating hydrogen explosions at nuclear plants in the United States were put to the test in Japan — and failed to work, according to experts and officials with the company that operates the crippled Fukushima Daiichi plant.

via Reactor Vents That Failed in Japan Are Used in U.S. – NYTimes.com.

Rare Species Of Frog May Hold Cure To…Ah, Never Mind, It’s Extinct | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

15 May

Rare Species Of Frog May Hold Cure To…Ah, Never Mind, It’s Extinct | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

That title says it all. The lives of our children and their children depend on biodiversity. We need all the species, alive and well.

The People vs. Goldman Sachs

12 May

Here’s the kicker for Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone:

A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges

And here’s the first paragraph:

They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Yep. What’re the chances that they’ll get more than a slap on the wrist, if that? The answer to that depends, in part, on how much We the People kick up a fuss. And even then, it’s iffy if anything more than a wet noodle will be used to slap those wrists with the gold handcuffs.

Tags: ,

Truth and Traditions Defined

12 May

What do we mean by Truth with a capital T?

The Republican Party is based on a growing cluster of denials, distortions and outright lies that some of us will not forgive or forget. Dennis Kucinich put together a list of 35 impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors that included the particulars of lies that pushed us into very costly (in innocents killed and a trillion borrowed dollars) and unwinnable wars. Both the admitted and the unconfessed spying activities which invaded the privacy of millions of Americans, plus the manipulation of intelligence and intelligence gathering agents — go read the list of 35 articles and weep for the shredded Constitution and Bill of Rights, the lost 9th Amendment rights to privacy and to a clean conscience as a citizen. The Declaration of Independence was trashed too. In 8 years of Bush/Cheyny building up their personal wealth with war operations, we lost everything of quality, every virtue, that America ever stood for: morality, integrity, honesty, humility, rule of law., freedom, justice — all out the window.

That’s one inconvenient truth: our loss of everything good we ever stood for.

The inconvenient truth of climate change is another. The inconvenient truths of peak oil now, peak drinkable water now, peak everything on the horizon, as far as the eye can see. The many, many ugly truths of war and waste have been systematically unexamined by our corporate owned mass media who stand to profit by ignoring news unfit for them to print or speak.

Continue reading →

Green Branding: Authenticity Matters

10 May

Green marketing expert Jacquelyn Ottman remarks on a recent NYTimes piece reporting

… that green brands launched in recent years by mainstream marketers such as Clorox (Green Works) and S.C. Johnson (Nature’s Source), had experienced sharp sales declines during 2009 and that introductions of green brands were off during that period, too. And then I perked up. The article went on to report that, in stark contrast —even during the recession—brands like Seventh Generation and Method experienced double-digit growth and market share gains, too.

She goes on to observe: “It’s easy for consumers to tell that Green Works and Nature’s Source are made by the same companies that produce the ‘brown’ products consumers are trying to shift away from.” Perhaps the green community actually cares about deep company values and  genuine commitment to sustainability.

Tags:

Why the TNT Party WILL Make a Difference

6 May

The Truth and Traditions Party will make a difference because it stands on the side of history. A simple claim, but true. We do not claim we’re alone in standing on the side of history, not at all. But we do claim that, in their allegiance to Big Money, the Democrats and Republicans have consigned themselves to the dust bins of history.

In a searching and imaginative examination of American history from colonial times to the present, William Robert Fogel, economic historian and Nobel Laureate, has argued that our history is driven by periodic revivals asserting egalitarian claims over against social hierarchy that creates increasing gaps between the rich and the poor. His book, The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism (Chicago 1999), is built on anthropological work on revivalism and on religious history.

From the publisher’s blurb:

To understand what is taking place today, we need to understand the nature of the recurring political-religious cycles called “Great Awakenings.” Each lasting about 100 years, Great Awakenings consist of three phases, each about a generation long.

A cycle begins with a phase of religious revival, propelled by the tendency of new technological advances to outpace the human capacity to cope with ethical and practical complexities that those new technologies entail. The phase of religious revival is followed by one of rising political effect and reform, followed by a phase in which the new ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the political coalition promoted by the awakening goes into decline. These cycles overlap, the end of one cycle coinciding with the beginning of the next.

Here’s the four cycles laid out in brief form. As the blurb has notes each cycle of revivalist activity lasts a century or more and goes through three phases. The American Revolution happened during the second phase of the first revival cycle and the Civil War happened during the second phase of the second revival cycle. The third cycle gave us the labor reforms, civil rights, and women’s rights movements of mid-20th century America.

Continue reading →

Ghost Dancing in the USA

3 May

Or, Why the Old Myths and Magic Don’t Work Anymore

I originally published this in Buffalo Report on 1 March 2005. It’s about the collapse of the symbol systems that made the nation a coherent political body. As such, it remains relevant.

In 1889 a young Paiute Indian named Wovoka fell ill with a fever and, in his delirium, visited heaven. While there he talked with God and saw that all the Indians who had died were now young and happy doing the things they had done before the White Man had come upon them. News of the new messiah spread rapidly among the remnants of the Indian tribes. If they danced the right dances, sang the right songs, and wore their consecrated Ghost Shirts, not only would they be immune to the White Man’s bullets, but their loved ones would return to them, the White Man would vanish from the face of the earth, and the buffalo would once again be plentiful. Their fervor and belief were not rewarded and the Ghost Dance, as this last wave of revivals came to be known, soon passed into history.

That, however, is not the Ghost Dancing that concerns me. I mention it only to provide some comparative perspective. Anthropologists and historians have told that story hundreds if not thousands of times. It is the story of a people’s last desperate attempt to retain symbolic control over their world. Such revivals occur when a way of life has become impossible, for whatever reason, but the people themselves continue to live. In desperation they resort to magic to remake the world in terms they understand.

The Ghost Dancing that concerns me is not that of Stone Age people displaced and conquered by iron-mongering and coal-burning industrialists. My concern is the Ghost Dancing that has become a major force in contemporary American cultural and political life. Widespread belief in the impending Rapture – when all good Christians will be taken to heaven and all unbelievers consigned to hell – is the most obvious manifestation of the contemporary Ghost Dance. But it is hardly the only manifestation. Refusal to accept evidence of global warning is another symptom, as is refusal to attend to ground intelligence in conducting the war and reconstruction in Iraq.

For that matter, belief that the so-called Singularity is at hand – when computers will surpass humans in intelligence – is Ghost Dancing as well. This type of Ghost Dancing may seem rather geekish and harmless, for there aren’t all that many of these particular believers. Belief in the Singularity, however, is close kin to continued belief in the feasibility of the Star Wars anti-missile defense systems, in the Pentagon’s desire to develop a highly robotized military where the machines do the riskiest jobs, and in a more general belief that technology will fix everything.

Continue reading →

Tags:

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →