Reading I.F. Stone on Earth Day: Why we still won’t get anywhere unless we connect the dots

It is in this joyous and self-congratulatory atmosphere [of the first Earth Day] that a curmudgeonly I.F. Stone, by now a full-fledged icon on the left, takes the stage. And he unapologetically rains on the parade, accusing Earth Day of providing cover for escalating war and calling for a movement willing to demand “enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution.”

Obama’s new oil wars

Washington is now the key country brandishing the oil weapon, using trade sanctions and other means to curb the exports of energy-producing states it categorizes as hostile. The Obama administration has taken this aggressive path even at the risk of curtailing global energy supplies.

Afghanistan, Ecology, and the End of War

Working with school children in Afghanistan, one experiences the great sweetness of the people there and the commonplace lack of ecological understanding of how the physical world works.  This absence of understanding is magnified by the striking deterioration of the Afghan land and the American effort to address these pressing problems with bombs and bullets.