Cigarette Litter as Environmental Pollution

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, there appears to be a gap in the official rule about smoking on campus. This environmental pollution from littered butts is an indicator of both the environmental and health costs of smoking. Right behind the building where I work, I...

Downstream trashiness

If you’ve been keeping up with my work, I’m into upstream solutions. Here’s an example from The Ocean Cleanup which is a very necessary, but very downstream solution. While I applaud such actions, why do these get so much airplay (and funding)? While...

Designed to Break: planned obsolescence as corporate environmental crime (new paper)

smartphone tombstones Is programming premature product lifespans a form of corporate crime? This the question that Lieselot Bisschop, Jelle Jaspers, and I address in our new publication in the journal of Crime, Law and Social Change. Planned obsolescence is a core...

How Science can be Manipulated by Industry Podcast

In a 90 minute interview with Ari Whitten, we explore philosophy of science and public health, focusing on how industry can undermine the quality and public trust in sincere science. I reference the @justsaysinmice twitter handle that addresses the harms of...

Platforming Anti-Eco Trolls is Stochastic Terrorism

You would think that at Erasmus University, that those trolls wishing the end of the world so that they don’t have to examine their own lives would have the good sense to keep their mouths shut. Unfortunately, that seems to be an unfounded belief. The me-first...

Okay, so it’s an oligopoly, not a monopoly or duopoly

So, I came across this brilliant comedian on Facebook the other day, and Facebook, in all of their infinite wisdom censored it from me, according to their factcheckers (who have done absolutely nothing to curb climate change, by the way). Toni Bologna claims Vanguard...

Why I don’t buy carbon offsets

From Eric Holthaus’s newsblog interview with Ketan Joshi in The Phoenix: What I’d love to see is a major company, instead of buying offsets and greenwashing us, is to be up front and unambiguous and say: “We are not going to fully reduce our...

Chemical Colonialism: Environmental justice and industrial epidemics

Chemical Colonialism: Environmental justice and industrial epidemics I’ve got a new blog in the Environment & Society blog loosely connected to my 2021 paper in their journal. It builds on my interest in environmental history, particularly having read Fabian...

The Pantheon

A collection of some of my favorite humans who have ever enlarged our imagination: (in no particular order, last date updated 5 March 2022) Alexander F. Skutch – ornithologist and naturalist Hannah Arendt – chronicler of the human condition Kalevi Kull...

The tobacco industry’s endlessly “new” tactics: find a loophole in the law, and f%$# it until it’s gone

One of my old colleagues, a lawyer at UCSF once said that the tobacco industry finds loopholes in the law and exploits them until someone closes them. And then moves onto the next one. Our new Open Access paper in Tobacco Control discusses some of these problems....

Climate Change (Finally) Enters the Therapy Room (for the Rich, who can afford Therapy)

(Background NYTimes Article for Reference) As I’ve always said, the NYT is 5-10 years behind the times (their feedback loop doesn’t extend beyond New Yorkers making 5M+). This has been a subject psychologists have been dealing with for at least 20 years in the west,...

Fractal Instrumentalism

When we farm fish, do we think that, perhaps, we’re being farmed as well? If not? Why not? When we bind life to fulfilling one function: delivering to us what we think we need; do we ponder whether our life also is bound to what someone else desires? When we...

The push and pull of ecocide

Planned Obsolescence is just the verso side of perpetuating fossil fuels. GM’s buying up and then sitting on patents for electric cars in the 1960s is but an example of how the fossil fuel industrial complex has retarded energy evolution. The fossil fuel...

Jan 6 2021 and Sept 11 2001

Predictably, more surveillance and bigger data is the answer to dealing with terrorism, this time domestic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/white-house-jan-6-lessons/2022/01/04/10970c9c-6cd2-11ec-a5d2-7712163262f0_story.html In many ways, this is...

International Institute of Social Sciences Development Research Seminar

The Chemical Anthropocene as Devolution

My recently published paper in Environment & Society “Surveying the Chemical Anthropocene: Chemical Imaginaries and the Politics of Defining Toxicity,” draws on Sheila Jasanoff’s notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” to describe how...