Media & Communications

African American Farmers Go Organic, Bring Healthy Food to Southeast

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At a recent Saturday market, Mary Curley sat at her table, displaying at least two dozen varieties of herbs, fruits, and vegetables. At 70, Mary is the oldest of these African American farmers, and has the smallest farm among them, a quarter-acre. A beatific smile lights up her face as she recites the names of her organic offerings, urging customers to sniff and taste each one: Japanese orange, Thai basil, lemon grass, Cuban oregano, pineapple sage, and serrano, habanera, and banana peppers.

The breakdown of politics, continued

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One of the pleasures of blogging is that the dialogue which it sometimes provokes, and my recent post reflecting on the health care vote and the apparent breakdown of ‘normal’ political processes produced a couple of thoughtful responses which seemed to me to take the discussion on.

Stunner: Nature’s review of 20 years of field studies finds soils emitting more C02 as planet warms

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One of the single greatest concerns of climate scientists is that human-caused warming will cause amplifying feedbacks in the carbon-cycle. Such positive feedbacks, whereby an initial warming releases carbon into the air that causes more warming, would increase both the speed and scale of climate change, greatly complicating both mitigation and adaptation.

Implications of Unmeasurable Capital

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I was very struck by a piece by Steve Randy Waldmann at Interfluidity yesterday, entitled Capital Can’t be Measured.  He is basically arguing that modern financial institutions are sufficiently complex that the concept of their “capital” is subject to measurement errors of the same order of magnitude as the capital itself.  This rang true to me, and put into words something that had nagged at me in reading about financial reforms, but had not come clearly to the surface of mind.

Make It Forty-Four Shades of Green

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Last month in “Forty Shades of… Less Brown?,” I described the principle of increasing marginal brownness. This principle establishes that the process of economic growth invariably entails an environmental “browning,” even though some growth regimes are less brown than others. The idea is to use the brown portion of the color spectrum in framing discussions of economic growth. Otherwise it is too easy to fall for the seductive and dangerous rhetoric of “green growth.”