Author: jehren

It is always a pleasant surprise to read an article by a leading economist who doesn’t claim to know all the answers. More often it’s one economist arguing that all the rest of his profession has missed some critical item. Paul Krugman, [writing in the New York Times Magazine](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?_r=1&sq=paul%20krugman&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all), is somewhere between these cases. He asks and answers the question, “Why economists from all parts of the theoretical spectrum missed seeing the arrival of the financial collapse and the recession?” Nobody, except for a handful of academics, foretold of the coming disaster, the parts of the article that argue for… Read More

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We’re still up in Maine enjoying a late burst of summer after a very disappointing season. The mail comes once a week being forwarded by our home post office. Today two boxes arrived with lots of throwaway items, mostly without even opening them. One letter stood out from the pack so I opened it and found an invitation to apply for a credit card. Most are easy to spot and go directly into the wastebasket. This one was carefully disguised in a sleek black envelope. My first thought after figuring out what the contents were was, “so much for the… Read More

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Dot Earth, the NYTimes environmental blog, has published a series of posts asking whether the recession-induced drop in consumption can be maintained as we climb out of the hole we dug for ourselves. Three successive posts, featuring a Nobel prize winning economist, Kenneth Arrow, an iconoclastic economist, Herman Daly, and an MIT systems dynamicist, John Sterman, leave this question largely unanswered. Arrow gives the standard economist’s response, that growth is good and the current increase in savings will provide the capital to enable future growth without mucking up the world. Daly, who has championed a steady-state economic model that recognizes… Read More

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I don’t think what I write here has anything much to do with sustainability, but the coincidence is too strange to pass over without noting it. For all Apple Macintosh computer users, as I have been forever in computer time, yesterday, August 28, was the official publication of Apple’s latest operating system, OS10.6, known better by its nickname, Snow Leopard. I made sure my copy would arrive on this very first possible day. I have been planning to wait a few days to install it while I read all the reports pouring in from people who have gone ahead, as… Read More

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I have been posting an entry about happiness periodically whenever I read something worthy of comment or have new thoughts about the subject. (Stealing a line from Paul Krugman, this post is wonkish.) Today’s blog entry was triggered about the front page essay in the Sunday Boston Globe’s Ideas section. The theme is that “[m]oney can improve your life, but not in the ways you think.” The argument begins with data showing that money spent for other people is valued higher on a happiness scale than money spent on oneself. Psychologists now say about this apparent contradiction to the old… Read More

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A [recent dialogue](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change) in the Guardian between Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot has garnered a lot of attention. Both agree that the present course of industrial societies is unsustainable, but disagree on what to do about it. I do not know much about either person. I am not a regular reader of the Guardian where Monbiot writes, nor have I read the work of Kingsnorth. But the dialogue stands on its own. The argument weaves back and forth with each responding, in turn, to a statement made by the other. It is easy, but misleading, to summarize the positions in… Read More

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The availability of the paperback makes its selection as a course reader more attractive. Consider using it this academic year to introduce the subject. There is still time to do this. If you are interested, contact the Yale University Press for a review copy.

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Green campuses were all over the news today. Maybe it’s because summer is coming to a close and going back to school is on our minds. The Princeton Review recently released its ratings for some 691 schools as part of its general guide to colleges. In their own press release they called the ratings: a measure of how environmentally friendly the institutions are on a scale of 60 to 99. As I have written on numerous occasions, this way of talking should send a signal to the reader to be cautious in interpreting and accepting the results. Nothing is ever… Read More

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Some time ago I picked Fiji Water as the Number 1 example of greenwashing from a list of the most egregious examples of 2008 prepared by the Greenwashing Brigade. Now more than half a year later, it shows up again in an exposé in Mother Jones, by Anna Lenzer. Lenzer spends much of the article commenting on the dreadful state of the Fijian community and the dictatorial behavior of the current ruling junta. She contrasts this to the marketing line of Fiji Water Company LLC. If, as the article claims, this brand is so popular among the glitterati, including President… Read More

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I wonder how many people could identify Linnaeus, the father of our taxonomic system for classifying all the species on Earth. I even wonder how many would know the meaning of taxonomy. Are these questions merely examples of esoterica that mean little to daily life. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, [writing in the NYTimes](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/science/11naming.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all) says no. Bemoaning the loss of interest in taxonomy, she writes: > Despite the field’s now blatant modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences, sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists continue to be in steady decline. The natural history collections… Read More

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