Deep Currents

I’ve just gotten around to reading The Green Collar Economy, which the social justice and environmental advocate Van Jones put out last fall as part of his Green For All initiative. (If you want a cheat sheet, check out the wonderful review over at TreeHugger.) His argument is sophisticated but fits comfortably in a nutshell: fighting poverty and fighting climate change are symbiotic political goals which are stronger when pursued together. In other words, if we’re going to use taxes or cap-and-trade to force decarbonization, why not emphasize the social justice benefits of employing millions of “green-collar” workers in the process?

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I was just in the middle of some reading up on sustainability when I came across a report from the Senate Minority called “More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims.” I’d just seen a TED talk denying climate change by the guy who invented PCR, so I was curious, and all the more so since the Council on Foreign Relations labeled it a “vital primary source underpinning the foreign policy debate.” …more

Somewhere, Michael Pollan is feeling vindicated. His book In Defense of Food makes an impassioned argument that America is eating wrong and proposes a simple set of guidelines for how to eat with the common sense that humans have had for millennia. As it says on the cover: eat food, not too much, and mostly plants. The book is a plea to join the movement of consumers who are adopting a new conservatism in their relationship with food, minimizing their reliance on the high-efficiency industrial food production that we’ve been expanding since the 1950s in favor of simple vegetables that are as fresh, local, and sustainable as possible. But how big is this movement he wants us to join? …more