Forums: Ecology

There was a time when being a charity meant doing something real, something tangible. Operating a soup kitchen. Providing medical help to those in need overseas. Helping orphans here in Canada. Providing valuable goods or services. That’s real charity work. No longer. Now it appears that hyper-political lobbying can count as charitable work too. Yes, you can be a full-time whiner, and that counts as charity work! There’s actually a veritable industry of these professional moaners, these full-time nit-pickers. The green fundamentalists are perhaps just the most vocal example of this phenomenon. There’s no shortage of radical greens getting generous...

“Nature is almost everywhere. But wherever it is, there is one thing nature is not: pristine,” writes science journalist Emma Marris in her engaging new book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. She adds, “We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” Marris’ message will discomfort both environmental activists and most ecologists who are in thrall to the damaging cult of pristine wilderness and the false ideology of the balance of nature. But it should encourage and...

One of the most intriguing facts of the Nazi Party membership rolls is how many of its adherents belonged to what today would be considered the green movement. Even many ‘greens' who were not Nazi Party members, like Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), the infamous propaganda filmmaker for the Third Reich, became caught up in the new movement. Nazi biologist Walther Schoenichen asserted that National Socialism was the political fulfillment of more 100 years of German Romanticism. With its strong emphasis upon celebrating the authenticity of the German folk people (das volk) indigenously rooted in the natural landscape of their homeland in...

Human Achievement Hour 2011 (Competitive Enterprise Institute) http://cei.org/hah2011 Earth Hour's soft fascism http://www.financialpost.com/analysis/columnists/story.html?id=08eddc35-41ce-... Making light of the phony Earth Hour http://www.torontosun.com/news/torontoandgta/2011/03/24/17739806.html Resident shines his discontent on Earth Hour http://www.yorkregion.com/news/article/971930--resident-shines-his-discontent...

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A Purdue University researcher is leading an effort to create a new scientific field that will use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape and to reconnect people with the importance of natural sounds. Soundscape ecology, as it's being called, will focus on what sounds can tell people about an area. Bryan Pijanowski, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources and lead author of a paper outlining the field in the journal BioScience, said natural sound could be used like a canary in a coal mine. Sound could be a...

A panel on “Queer Ecology” was featured at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Four panelists provided their insights on the relationship between “queers” and the environment, coming to sometimes contradictory conclusions. In her lecture “Green Angels in America: Aesthetics of Equity,” Katie J. Hogan of Carlow University argued for “environmental justice,” and used as her vehicle the controversial play Angels in America. Hogan argued that Angels in America is a “contribution to this queer environmental effort” because it “links beauty, environment, and social justice” with an “esthetic of equity.” She argued that “minorities have the...

What can microbiologists who study human bowels learn from those who study the bowels of Earth? Jillian Banfield trades in hell holes. In September, she could be found wading through the dark, hot, sulphurous innards of Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, California, where blue stalactites ooze the most acidic water ever discovered, with a pH of −3.6. A year before that, she was pumping up a toxic soup of uranium, arsenic, molybdenum and other metals from underneath a decommissioned nuclear-processing site in Rifle, Colorado. From both sites she took samples back to her lab at the University of California, Berkeley,...

.Not surprisingly, vegetarians and environmentalists have largely downplayed the historical record of Nazi Germany’s green streak. Some have been quick to point out that Hitler apparently cheated on occasion with ham, sausage, and seafood dishes. Hitler was also inconsistent with regard to environmental preservationist values and practices, largely because of the need to place Germany on an all out war footing throughout the 1930’s in a vast economy busting arms buildup. Hitler was also a fond of grand building projects National Socialism style and was planning on exploiting the natural resources in the East as much as possible to win...

Spain's plans to have 2,000 electric cars on the road by the end of 2010 have been dealt a blow as figures showed just 16 have been sold. The government-backed REVE electric car and wind power project said 15 cars had been sold so far this year, in addition to one last year.

There are a number of things that are simply wrong about the carbon tax. Yesterday we had an article titled Hot Enough For You Yet? giving some overview of general reasons the carbon tax is bad for America. Today we will get into some particular examples where the carbon tax is just plain wrong. The first example will demonstrate how the carbon tax discriminates against small local companies. For our example, we have two companies that make, what else, widgets. The first company, let’s call it Wally’s Old Style Widgets in central Alabama, makes approximately 25,000 widgets per year using...