Earlier this week, several media outlets chose to dip their hands into the sensationalist journalism cookie jar a second time, and for all of the wrong reasons. About a month ago, an exciting story broke about how photographs of an uncontacted tribe living near the Brazil-Peru border had been taken for the first time. Now some media outlets, following the lead of the British newspaper The Observer, are calling the story a hoax.
I’ve always thought that many of the issues I am concerned about—the environment, human rights, peace, overconsumption, animal welfare—are all really one big issue. Everywhere I look I see countless connections between many social, political, and environmental issues. I may be involved in many separate causes, but they overlap so often that I feel that I’m really just part of one big movement. Which is why when someone asks me why I’m vegetarian, I am so overwhelmed with reasons that I don’t know where to even start explaining. The top ones are the environment, animal rights, and health, but no matter what you call them, they’re all one big issue to me.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this overlap, of course. And rarely have I encountered such a thorough examination of the connections between animal welfare and just about every other issue that concerns me than in the book Why Animals Matter by Erin E. Williams and Margo DeMello. Read the rest of this entry »
Note: This is second part of a two-part series. The first part ended by asking: “just what is the ‘intended effect’ of Inherit the Wind?
The play, as the one professor suggested, is trying to get people to think. It specifically wants them to think about and consider the possibilities of evolution and creationism, even if they are inclined to believe in one more than the other. Personally, I think that this is a great goal. I think that toleration, and perhaps even acceptance of both views is necessary for achieving positive progress in the world and in the sciences. Thus, as this website is named Planetsave, I think it’s necessary that people be able to appreciate both perspectives if we are in fact to save the planet.
An understanding of biology and its essential driver, evolution, is probably a necessary precursor for truly beginning to understand that species and resources are not renewable. The discovery of evolution makes me believe that we can to some extent understand how the world works through science. On the other hand, for me personally, it is utterly arrogant to outrightly deny the possibility of there being a god or some other kind of higher power. Read the rest of this entry »
Note: This is Part 1 of a two part series. Click here to go to Part 2.
Occasionally I receive emails from publishers who are advertising a new academic journal that they think “will be a good match for my interests.” How kind of them to think of me. In one of these recent emails, free preview access was granted to me for several of these new journals. Even though the Annals of Dyslexia was tempting, the one that really tapped into the nerd inside of me is called Evolution: Education and Outreach. After perusing the table of contents, the one article title that stood out was “Inheriting Inherit the Wind: Debating the Play as a Teaching Tool.” I dove in. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a person who’s columns I regularly read, because I often find it fun to disagree with him. This person is George Will, conservative commentator and phony-baloney. I call him a phony-baloney, because it seems to fit with the old-fashioned bow tie he sometimes chooses to wear on television programs like Sunday’s political talk show on ABC, This Week. Why is he a phony-baloney? Well, most of all because he is one of the few members of the mainstream press who still perpetuates the myth that global warming might not exist, even though approximately 99% of the scientific community agrees that it is occuring and that it is most likely a phenomenon urged on by the human race. My primary case in point against phony-baloney, is his attack today in The Washington Post on the listing of polar bears as a threatened species. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past few years, Witold Rybczynski has penned some of the more fascinating pieces that I have read online. He writes about a range of urban planning, architectural, and landscape design topics with an acute sense of how these fields are intrinsically connected to social and environmental issues. Rybczynski publishes many of his pieces in Slate. They often come in the form of well-crafted “slide-show essays” that use photographs to expertly illustrate the themes and ideas that he chooses for discussion.
Several of my favorites have included his essays on “Central Park South: New York Selects a Design for Governor’s Island” and “The Spire of Dublin: A Modern Monument That Points Up What’s Wrong With the World Trade Center Memorial.” Unlike his other pieces, his latest slide-show essay, “If You Build It: Two Visions of the Ideal City Rise in the Persian Gulf,” was his first that left me disappointed. Read the rest of this entry »
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