April 20, 2021 at 04:30PM In an earlier era, green referred to grass and trees and jealous eyes. But over the past half-century, green has taken on a life of its own. The Green movement deals with the collisions and contagions of the contemporary world—how to view them, and how to cure them. The book from which this essay is excerpted, The Spirit of Green , examines a wide array of social, economic and political questions from a Green vantage point. These questions include established areas such as pollution control and global warming . But they also involve new frontiers such as Green chemistry, taxes, ethics and finance. The example that follows concerns an approach to large corporations, or what is called social responsibility. One of the major developments in corporate management is corporate social responsibility , which is the projection of Green philosophy into the business world. The idea is that corporations are more than moneymaking machines that buy steel, ...
April 12, 2021 at 08:39PM Let’s stipulate one thing: there’s absolutely no reason for us to go to space. It does nothing to feed us, to clothe us, to protect us, to heal us. It’s dangerous and hideously expensive too, a budget-busting luxury that policy makers and administrators have spent decades trying to defend—always unsuccessfully because the fact is, there’s no practical defense for it. So stand down the rockets, take down the space centers, pocket the money and let’s move on. Still want the adventure of going to space? That’s what they make movies for. Now that we’ve established that, let’s stipulate the opposite: Space is precisely where the human species ought to be going. We accept that we’re a warring species. We accept that we’re a loving species. We accept that we’re an artistic and inventive and idiosyncratic species. Then we surely must accept that we’re a questing species. Questing species don’t much care for being stuck on one side of an ocean and so they cli...
April 16, 2021 at 04:30PM We heard about the storm a week before the rains. Manny figured they wouldn’t be a problem. Jae disagreed. The news called it a minor inconvenience—a flash flood at most—but we’d learned not to lean too deep into forecasts. In the morning, Houston felt sticky. Our heels slapped across the floorboards. We plodded around the house, yawning and stretching and tugging at our boxers. Manny went straight for the vegetable garden, but Jae took his time with breakfast, stirring a pan of eggs, slipping everything inside pieces of toast. Between mouthfuls of sandwich, he swore we’d end up packing everything growing out back anyway—there wasn’t really a point to tending them now. Our state’s seen 11 straight years of record-breaking hurricanes. Houston’s caught like eight of them. And even though the government calls it cyclical, locals know better. Rains start earlier. Winds only ever increase. If you’re in the Loop, then you’ll likely end up halfway und...
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