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
Explaining Liberals to Conservatives, and Vice-Versa
February 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Pleas to tone down the heated political rhetoric in America tend to suffer the same fate as sensible-eating guidelines: endorsed in principle and ignored in practice. It’s clear enough why. The views of liberals and conservatives rest on fundamentally different foundations, making it difficult to locate common ground. Lacking a basic understanding of their opponents’ motivations, partisans view those on the other side of the ideological divide warily, often assuming the worst. In his essential new book, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers no easy way out of this ... Read More
Does Black History Need More Than a Month?
January 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Last February, Nike marked the annual celebration of all things African American with the limited release of four separate sets of sneakers. To quote from the company’s marketing copy describing the shoe: “The predominantly black upper of this Black History Month Air Force 1 is a nod to the past, because in the early days of the sport of basketball, shoes on the court were almost always black. The hints of gold all around the shoe are reminders of the golden moment we all are striving to achieve.” And here I thought the gold was a subtle reference to the mercenary nature of the slave ... Read More
PBS to Show ‘Where Soldiers Come From’
November 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The upper peninsula of Michigan is a sparsely populated place with its own sense of identity — something it has in common with Afghanistan. The young men at the center of the moving documentary Where Soldiers Come From — all proud UP natives — never discuss this duality, but it helps explain the perceptiveness and compassion they display when their National Guard unit is deployed to fight in America’s longest-running war. When Dominic Fredianelli’s team finds weapons on an Afghan landowner’s property, and the man is taken away in handcuffs, Dom, a promising artist from Hancock, ... Read More
‘If a Tree Falls’ Revisits the Earth Liberation Front
September 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The trajectory of Daniel McGowan's life is a familiar one: A young man from a conventional background finds meaning in a cause greater than himself. Thanks in part to overreaction by the authorities, he gradually becomes radicalized, dedicating himself to violent resistance — a course of action that grabs attention but ultimately backfires on him and his movement. An Islamic radical? White supremacist? Perhaps an anti-globalization anarchist? None of the above. McGowan was one of the key figures in the eco-terrorism of the 1990s, a man who used arson as a weapon in the fight to ... Read More
Teaching Kids to Love Nature (and Buy Less Stuff)
August 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In their eloquent preface to The Failure of Environmental Education (And How We Can Fix It), Charles Saylan and Daniel T. Blumstein wistfully recall how freely they roamed an immense wilderness when they were young, only to find, as adults, that the "unexplored places that inspired us so deeply are now mostly gone." They had lived through a doubling of the world's population, initially with "a sense of pride and wonder at technologies that seemed like something out of science fiction" — among them, the green revolution that seemingly averted a Malthusian catastrophe. But then came the ... Read More
Invasion of the Unregulated Chemicals
June 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Let's say you want to live a healthy life. You eat organic food to avoid pesticides, and you buy free-range chicken to steer clear of antibiotics. You stay away from swordfish because of the mercury warnings. You move out of the smoggy downtown. But hard as you try, you will not be safe, says Carl F. Cranor, author of an unnerving new book, Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants. Since 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has measured 219 environmental chemicals in the bodies of Americans. Most of the population carries around measurable levels of lead ... Read More
Welcome to Shelbyville: Loving, Fearing Thy Neighbors
May 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In news headlines and broadcast bulletins, the word "Somali" is inevitably followed by a dread-inducing plural noun: "pirates" or "warlords" or "terrorists." So it's no surprise that natives of the war-ravaged East African country of Somalia are viewed with fear and suspicion by many, if not most, Americans. When significant numbers of Somali refugees moved to Shelbyville, Tenn., (population 16,000) to work at the nearby Tyson Foods processing plant, the town's residents reacted with deep suspicion. "We don't know what diseases they have," a former mayor frets in the opening minutes of the ... Read More
Mentally Ill Homeless Improve With Group Living
April 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In 1990, a research team in Boston launched an ambitious experiment with some of the city's sickest residents — the chronically homeless and severely mentally ill. With $13 million in federal funding, the team recruited 118 volunteers from the shelters and randomly placed them in group homes and independent apartments. The group homes were envisioned as a kind of utopia, in which the mentally ill clients — up to 10 in each of six homes — would become "active agents in shaping their future." By the end of 18 months, they were supposed to replace the paid staff. The project team, led by ... Read More
