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The title phrase is a well-known book title as well, from Robert Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers of 1953. Both this article and Heilbroner's book, however, are talking about economics. These authors argue that economics has, over the last several decades, approached problems much like dentists, "modest people who look at a small part of the body but remove a lot of pain." For all its virtues, this approach provides no nuance nor guidance when everyone plainly realizes that our economic system is a mess, and we need informed people to ask big questions about it. They see the Occupy movement as asking these questions, and call on economists to offer answers. This recommendation rings at the heart of a liberal arts education, and is why in ENVS 220 we collectively struggle to connect the data and methods we work with to larger theories and frameworks, larger philosophical stances that remind us there are choices to be made in how to understand and fix this world.

Fungi grow on coffee ground "waste," produce large edible mushrooms, and leave behind rich fertile soil for your gardens. Sound too good to be true? Incorporating and working within pre-existing energy cycles, and keeping the whole system in mind when addressing issues of "waste" and "resources" can result in some surprisingly beneficial and efficient solutions! The even more exciting news? We're doing this too! There's a large bin in the basement of Juniper, full of the Bon's coffee grounds, now sprouting several pounds of oyster mushrooms. Take home message behind inspirational change? Follow the ideas that excite you, and bring them to life in your framework of time and place.

After getting some fairly audible gasps in class after questioning Silent Spring today, I wanted to justify myself a little bit lest I be burned at the stake as some sort of heretic. The paper above is a brief and neat explanation of American academia's role in legitimizing ecology as a science, and touches on how Carson (and other's) pushed it back towards being a values-oriented natural history built heavily out of ideas that one could perhaps fit under the framework of "romanticism." Just to back myself up further, here (http://onlineethics.org/CMS/profpractice/exempindex/carsonindex/kroll.aspx) is another article highlighting Carson's work as "subversive silence", i.e. very value/advocacy driven. Also highlights her focus on critiquing a certain type of laboratory science for being controlling - notably, one of romanticism's main tenants is a criticism of the rationalization of nature. Neither of this takes away from the fact that Carson was a) a decent scientist and b) wrote a book that did a lot of good. I'm not trying to dive into the "we could've stopped malaria" arguments she gets a lot, because I think that is a straw man argument. Nor do I think that it is bad to combine knowledge and values - quite the opposite. I simply think that a work that forced scientific depictions of its subject to change in response to public frameworks of thinking should be regarded as a great political work, not a great scientific one. I think it may be time to move beyond Silent Spring, certainly as a work of science, and perhaps even as a work of politics, and place it on the pedestal of history that it rightly deserves.

Just bumped into this TOE (Theory Of Everything) related to environmental studies...what do you think of it??

Energy policy doesnt need to take environmental concerns into account because God will decide when the world will end. He cites these biblical excerpts as the infallible, perfect word of God. Yet let me also note that in his excerpts, God also declares that all inclinations of man's heart is evil from birth. Hmmm.... what, then, must this say about his motives? Obviously, I'm kidding, but I just wanted to share and highlight some of the absurdity I see. Yes, we can write this off as absurd and clearly not logical, so why prod so much at things that are clearly not worth our time? It's an important reality check to remember that this is happening in the world outside of LC's progressive bubble though, and despite how obviously absurd this seems, somehow it's still here, has power, and it is being taken seriously... by someone at least.

"There is a theological debate that this is a carbon starved planet." Like many, I'm tempted to simply poke fun at this guy and laugh at his obscenely ridiculous propositions (I'd wager to say that not too many priests or pastors would agree with the quote from Rep. Shimkus above), and to dismiss him as uneducated and spewing the same sort of tired "job-losing" rhetoric that seems to be the platform of conservatives in America these days. Yet -- he was elected. Maybe this is a flaw of our electoral process. Or maybe it truly does underscore how conflicted our country is ideologically. Somehow though, I don't buy the reliance on the Bible silliness that these guys spew out. It's really just another sentimental framework to hide their utmost faith in the actual religion of the 20th century -- the citadels of free-markets. An important reality check for sure.

Lengthy thoughts from me again, apologies: https://sites.google.com/site/economicresponse/a-thought-experiment

So, we can (and should) address domestic poster-child coal issues such as mountaintop removal, but let's not get complacent about the larger coal market: this article talks about the role China will play as a huge source of consumption.  What to do?

I'm not going to lie, I didn't see this coming. I'm sure many analysts did -- the U.S. makes tighter coal related regulations, but there is still tons of coal under the ground to be mined. Consequently, it should only make sense to the king of market economy countries that we would export the resource we can't use to a country that can. For all members of groups that have been working against coal domestically, this represents one of the biggest losses they can imagine. After making strides on regulation, one person quoted in this article said that it was one step forward (at home), but ten back (for the world). I've at least operated under the idea that if we can make coal unpalatable enough, we would stop burning it. We're working towards that, as is Europe. But the fact remains that there are "jobs" to be had mining, money to be made exporting, and so the story goes. And even if the U.S. were to regulate coal exports (which is something the free trade maniacs of the new Congress will never, ever let happen), China would turn to Australia, or Canada, or Brazil. This dilemma is crying out for a comprehensive strategy of global cooperation on climate change. But, as is most likely the case, Cancun will slide by, no new agreements will come out of it, and this new coal challenge will become just another part of the mired story of the inability of the world to stop burning all that it is burning. One of those rare and terrifying articles that asks serious questions about how we are to subvert a framework that encourages coal burning and other major externalities.