Media & Communications

Food and Population

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Farmers are invisible people, and middle-class city dwellers choose to pretend that the long lines of trucks bringing food into the city at dawn every day have nothing to do with the white-collar world. Perhaps it is a mark of the civilized person to believe that the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter have no relevance to daily life. Yet if the farmers stopped sending food into the great vacuum of the metropolis, the great maw of urbanity, the city would soon start to crumble, as Britain discovered in the year 2000 [5]. The next question, then, is: Where does all this food come from?

Washington, You Have Been Warned

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Two Brits are duking it out over the fate of the United States. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, a Scot who believes that America’s Imperial Magnificence is fading fast, fired the opening salvo in A Greek Crisis Is Coming To America…Financial Times editor Martin Wolf weighed in to counter what he calls Ferguson’s “hysteria” in How to walk the fiscal tightrope that lies before us.

Thinking About the Unthinkable: A U.S.-Iranian Deal

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The United States apparently has reached the point where it must either accept that Iran will develop nuclear weapons at some point if it wishes, or take military action to prevent this. There is a third strategy, however: Washington can seek to redefine the Iranian question. As we have no idea what leaders on either side are thinking, exploring this represents an exercise in geopolitical theory. Let’s begin with the two apparent stark choices.

Independence Days Challenge

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Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting – and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change – for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where our food comes from. We’d like to live in communities with a greater measure of food security, we’d like to know more about what we’re eating. We’d like to have more contact with nature, we’d like to be more self-sufficient. We’d like to have better food at lower cost, we’d like to have a reserve for an emergency or to share. We’d like to do more in our community and to eat with one another. We’d like to sit down to a home cooked meal more often.

Elinor Ostrom Wins Nobel for Common(s) Sense

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Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.

People power trumps corporate power: R.I.P. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant

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Last week I had the honor of speaking with Kathleen Krevetski of Rutland, Vermont who has worked hard to publicize the adverse effects of radiation from nuclear power plants on people’s health, especially on women and children who are the most vulnerable…Thanks to these dedicated activists, the Vermont Senate voted to close Yankee on February 24.

Dispersion, Diversity, and Resilience

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If we want to have any hope in controlling our destiny we have to understand our environment. In one sense, if we treat our environment as a control system, capable of responding to a stimulus, we need to understand not only its behavior, but how it will respond to the stimulus. One can ask: will it collapse in response to dwindling resources? Or will it rebound and stay resilient? For that we require a good model of the system. And of course, the simpler the model to describe, the better.