By the end of October 2011, the Earth’s human population had reached 7 billion. It was half that in 1968 when Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. In the book’s opening pages he proclaimed that too many people in the planet’s underdeveloped countries made mass starvation inevitable, that a minimum of 10 million people — “most of them children” — would starve to death every year in the 1970s, and that it was too late to do anything about it. Plenty of experts agreed with Ehrlich; the press ran with the story, it was apocalypse now. Except he was wrong: ... Read More
A Perennial Epicenter, Now for Same-Sex Marriage
February 8, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District upheld Chief Judge Vaughn Walker’s 2010 decision that California’s Proposition 8, banning all same-sex marriages, was unconstitutional. Does this mean that gays and lesbians can go back to San Francisco City Hall now to say their “I do’s?” Not yet. For decades, San Francisco’s City Hall, the building at the epicenter for gay marriage (and itself one of the most beautiful structures in the land) has been alive, from Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with brides floating around San Francisco’s City Hall like ... Read More
