A detail from “A History of Parrots, Drifting Maps and Warming Seas”, by John Wolseley (2005). Born in England just before World War II, Wolseley didn’t move to Australia until he was 38. But over the subsequent three decades, the immigrant has made the continent his own, travelling extensively through its length and breadth, and [...]
Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category
Banner image: John Wolseley
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Environment, tagged Australia, John Wolseley on August 10, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Banner image: Bruce Haley
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Environment, Foreign affairs, tagged Bruce Haley, timber industry, war photography on June 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A detail from a picture in Bruce Haley’s “Timber Industry” project, shot in Oregon in 1999. Haley is a former Army paratrooper and S.W.A.T. team member who became a dedicated and extremely successful war photographer, capturing images of conflict in places like Afghanistan, Somalia, Northern Ireland, and Croatia, and winning the prestigious Robert Capa Gold [...]
Cleopatra’s Dessert and Shark Fin Soup
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Asia, Environment, Foreign affairs, History, Japan, Personalities, Philosophy, Uncategorized, tagged black swan, Cleopatra, discount rate, humility, intergenerational equity, nuclear waste, Ramsey, shark fin soup, Taleb on June 21, 2009 | 1 Comment »
At a Brussels nuclear law conference in 2007, I gave a technical paper on intergenerational issues in nuclear waste economics. I argued for the prudence of applying a conservative discount rate when setting aside funds for future nuclear waste management so as to guard against contingencies. Recently I had the chance to look at my argument again with fresh eyes [...]
The most apropos news photograph never taken
Posted in Animal rights, Environment, Media, tagged dead whale, ExxonMobil on June 4, 2009 | 1 Comment »
June 3/09 (Reuters): “Dead whale found on bow of Exxon tanker in Alaska”
Oh, how the entire PR unit of ExxonMobil must have gone to bed on Monday night praising God that no photographer happened to be hanging around the terminal the day that tanker came in. But while this particular image-as-metaphor will apparently have to [...]
In the keep of the tree
Posted in Environment, Literature, tagged brig o' turk, robert selby, sycamore on March 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Plants, it is well known, have a remarkable ability — born, perhaps, of their immense patience and gradualism — to physically merge themselves with elements in their environment. Ivy will bind fast to brick, beans will curl around poles, and trees… well, consider the iron-eating sycamore of Brig o’ Turk, a village in central Scotland [...]
Old Jews Telling Jokes
Posted in Environment, Film and documentary, History, Personalities on February 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Via the great Katha Pollitt, an immensely enjoyable website: Old Jews Telling Jokes.
Global Zero
Posted in Environment, Foreign affairs, Personalities, Philosophy, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized, tagged disarmament, Global Zero, nuclear weapons on January 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Following my recent thoughts on nuclear energy expansion and disarmament, I was heartened to run across Global Zero. In December 2008, one hundred global leaders met in Paris and launched an effort to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide. The idea is to phase out the world’s 27,000 or so weapons over the next 25 years (96% of them [...]
Obama’s Energy
Posted in Environment, Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized, tagged energy, Obama policy on January 1, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Happy New Year!
I have been away from this wonderful blog for far too long. Thanks to A.M., Ian and Jeet for carrying the ball in the latter half of 2008, and 2009 will see me blogging at Sans Everything once again.
Let me start by sharing some energy policy suggestions I offered to President-elect Obama recently on [...]
Comparing apples and oranges
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, Asia, Environment, Philosophy on February 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »
We’re not supposed to compare apples and oranges – or so the saying goes. But as H.P. Glenn, erudite author of Legal Traditions of the World points out, we can compare apples and oranges: “[t]here are obvious criteria of roundness, acidity, colour, sweetness, price and so on. “ As Glenn goes on to ask, “Why [...]
