Yesterday, I tried to explain why pro-GM environmentalists had misconceived the perspectives of their anti-GM colleagues as simply 'scientific illiteracy'. In particular, I was amazed that Keith Kloor had turned a central tenet of environmentalism -- the precautionary...
Inconvenient Environmentalists
The issue of genetically modified food crops has resurfaced. This issue has a long history, and my last attempt to compile an account of it was back in May 2009, here. One of the things I've written a bit about is the differences between two parts of the environmental...
Unsettling Science
I'm a big fan of scientific videos and visualisation generally. Here's a wonderful recent example. There is a hazard, here though, in taking such images at face value, as is described at length on this blog. What we see in the above video is not just the planet; we...
‘The real enemy is humanity itself’
<em>Published on Spiked-Online at http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/12456/</em> Forty years ago, two ideas about humanity’s relationship with the natural world caught the imagination of the richest and most influential people. The first was that...
Rio + 20, Spiked
I have an article up on Spiked today, about the absurdity that is the looming Rio+20 conference. Forty years on, and those predictions of doom have not been borne out. The average life expectancy of a human has increased by 10 years, and the number of infants dying...
Mass Murdering Environmentalists on Billboards?
A lot of hand-wringing is going on about those billboards which depict individuals known for their psychopathic tendency and their comments on the environment. The use of the image of Ted Kaczynski (AKA the Unabomber) seems to have caused particular offence to those...