Miscellany

1) Bill Maher has a short interview transcript posted at the Sierra Club's newsletter, "Planet." Maher's precious perspectives and anti-rural bias often find him championing anti-management stances and making fun of "country boys," neither of which ingratiate him to someone like me. In this interview, though, we are on common ground. He boils down the lack of American environmental responsibility to the following observation, "People are just going to have to wake up."

2) In another interview transcript, Grist Magazine sits down with Edward Norton to talk about environmental activism. I respect Norton a great deal, both for some of his more impressive acting turns and for his intelligence. Unfortunately, he sometimes comes across as an arrogant prick - listen to the "Fight Club" commentary if you want to realize just how very much this guy loves waxing poetic about his own abilities - but some of his arrogance confidence is warranted.

3) James Howard Kunstler forecasts extremely dire futures for the First World, particularly our own country (and parts of neighboring Canada), but this recent adaptation of the introduction to his new book, The Long Emergency, is a very important read. It can be married to the excellent Stephen M. Meyer article (about extinction and wildlife conservation) to make you feel really good about the 21st century. I try to remain as optimistic as I can, but I find myself agreeing with Kunstler when he writes,

"It has been very hard for Americans - lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring - to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. [...] Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

Kunstler predicts, as the Pentagon did in their 2003 forecast, a complete economic collapse of the United States by 2050. The result will be a country in which train travel is the only economically feasible option and the southern 1/2 is torn apart by drought, disease, and racism. He thinks the northern half of the United States will fare better, but he neglects to address the "white flight" that would surely follow such a "long emergency."
Read it here.