|
||||||
|
|
By Nancy Myers My granddaughter, born in the summer of the great Gulf gusher, faces a tumultuous world. I do not know what the world will look like when she is my age. Dianne Dumanoski’s latest book, The End of the Long Summer, begins with this paragraph: The future in the modern imagination has always stretched [...] By Nancy Myers I’m an expectant grandmother. I feel the joy of this in my heart region, just about six inches above where I feel the pain of the ongoing hemorrhage of oil into the Gulf. Heart joy vs. sick feeling in the pit of the stomach. Contradictory but related. Warren Levy puts these together in an [...] By Carolyn Raffensperger and Nancy Myers But a renaissance, a rebirth occurs not just because there is a rising of images and archetypal symbols. A renaissance happens because the soul is breached, the psyche unlocked, and a flood of new questions are released as to who we are and what we contain. – Jean [...] By Nancy Myers Lots of news stories can tempt environmentalists to say “I told you so” because, unfortunately, our worst predictions tend to come true. Today’s biggest case in point is the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico but here are two more: 1. Fields planted with genetically modified crops are beginning to produce superweeds. [...] By Nancy Myers There is an ecology of roadsides. Right now it’s lovely in southwest Michigan. Cutleaf toothwort, a small white ephemeral, spills out from the woods into the ditches. The grass is fresh. The poison ivy hasn’t shown up yet. Garlic mustard is just starting to raise its bushy, invasive heads. Deer graze the ditches [...] By Nancy Myers I’ve been thinking about cumulative impacts. This is not my choice. I’d rather be thinking about my coming grandchild than about this lumpy, awkward term, “cumulative impacts.” But my work at SEHN points me to this, and I do this work for that grandchild. Jargony as it may be, “cumulative impacts” is descriptive. Impacts are [...] By Nancy Myers My colleagues and I at the Science and Environmental Health Network often focus on the problem of complexity in environmental health: the fact that multiple factors figure in health and disease, that these diverse factors often work together and create multiplying effects, that small assaults have cumulative impacts, that genetics and environmental exposures [...] By Nancy Myers I run across a lot of ad hoc definitions of the precautionary principle when I’m putting together one of our publications, Rachel’s Precaution Reporter. First let me make clear that the principle is no mystery. There are several official definitions of the precautionary principle—Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio declaration and the more positive [...] By Nancy Myers I’ve been reading Stewart Brand’s latest book, Whole Earth Discipline. Before I even got to the controversial parts—he endorses nuclear energy and genetic engineering among other urgent fixes to address climate change—I ran into a snag. On page 11 Brand reports a 2007 phone conversation with James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, in [...] By Nancy Myers I receive daily email invitations to put my name to an appeal: Reform health care. Slow climate change. End poverty. Save a species. Easy enough, just hit return. You don’t even have to give money although you are always asked. I’ve been calling this “slacktivism” for some time and thought I may have invented the [...] |
|||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Science & Environmental Health Network - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
