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...

Organisms and Agency

Responding to an article in The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/01/wuhan-coronavirus-lab-leak-covid-virus-origins-china the medical ethnobotanist and philosopher Stephen Buhner had the following astute observations (posted in Facebook):...

Review of The Good Hand excerpt

I just read the New York Times excerpt of Michael Patrick F. Smith’s (names don’t get more American, or Irish–his middle, middle name is Flanigan) book The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown. What...