Just yesterday, I was perusing a map, from the Center for Effective Government, depicting five years of U.S. oil pipeline spills. This morning, the entire CEG website is gone! It could be that demand for the map simply overwhelmed their servers, but the blank spaces on other sites where the map used to be sure […]
The American tradition of rugged individualism traces directly back to the cowboy on the lonesome prairie. We Americans are wired for individual survival and progress. Of course, even the archetypal cowboy is part of an unbreakable natural system—a fact that undercuts the fantasy of complete independence. On the surface, immediately we observe the symbiosis of […]
Fifty years is a nearly negligible amount in the over 4.5 billion-year history of Earth. Yet some conservation-minded scientists are now reporting that, from 1970 to 2020—the blink of an eye, in the big picture—the world will have lost two-thirds of its wild vertebrate population. Even more alarming are the ecosystem collapses which would accompany […]
“Hog-waste lagoons”: They’re exactly what you think, and they’re part of the disaster For 17 years, the State of North Carolina has known about, and even marginally worked to abate, the horrific problem of hog-waste lagoons. These man-made “pig-poop” ponds, as National Geographic calls them, are supposed to hold the 19 million tons of hog […]