Blog
Stanford Talk on Industrial Epidemics
Today I gave a talk at the Stanford History of Science and Technology Workshop on Industrial Epidemics. It was a pleasure to discuss the ins and outs of public health, corporate malfeasance, and glyphosate in particular with the students and professorate of the...
National Geographic and Guardian Articles about Ecigarette Waste and EPR
In the flurry of the semester starting, I've been remiss in updating this blog with a couple important articles that have come out in the press discussing the environmental harms of electronic cigarette (ecig) electronic waste (ewaste). Both The Guardian and National...
Fuel emission standards
Who is fueling the Alice in Wonderland media world which slowly is infecting and deceiving people around the world, spreading the ignorance virus? Let’s take the way that Trump wanted to roll back the Obama-era federal fuel emission standards as an example. While...
Hypocrisy at the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology
The ISEE, or the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, is an organization that one would expect to walk its talk. After all, it has been around for 31 years with its annual conferences, and is one of the most sophisticated and cutting edge of the...
Resources
Many colleagues and students ask me what books or authors I would recommend. So, I've decided to start an archive of the best tools on the web, and the most impactful books I know of for social and personal evolution. (this is a work in progress, that I will be...
San Francisco BART’s Unpleasant Design
Introducing: The inverted guillotine Having lived for the better part of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have put in my time on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. From it's loud, overcrowded, clunky, and infrequent trains, to the spate of BART police...
Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Vape
About a decade ago, the "American Vaping Association" railed against RJReynolds (later RAI, now part of British American Tobacco (BAT)) for attempting to persuade the FDA to "ban the sale of open-system e-cigarettes, including all component parts." Now that pretty...
Rearranging Glaciers in the Anthropocene
The Rhone Glacier has been wrapped in blankets for the past 8 years by the Swiss. For the last 8 summers, Switzerland has been wrapping glaciers in blankets to stop them melting. These desperate strategies are increasingly becoming more common as our ecosystems...
Talk: Berkeley-Tartu biosemiotic summer seminar July 11 2019
After a successful 2019 Biosemiotics Gathering in Moscow, I'm happy to be sharing a deeper look at my project at the University of Tartu, in Estonia, giving a talk on Multi-level semiosis – and the impact of supernormal stimuli in the human superorganism and...
Environmental Philosophy on Let’s Talk Trash Podcast
https://www.eshub.nl/podcast-2/ I gave a talk a few weeks ago for the Erasmus Sustainability Hub which is now online. I had a great time being interviewed by Wallerand Bazin. They did a great job too in assembling a set of links to some of the major themes I covered....
A semiotic analysis of WSJ article on Bayer’s glyphosate problems
The original article, published here, takes a rather pro-industry "we'll engineer our way out of this" approach. Rather than observing a fundamental problem in putting artificial inputs unsustainably into agriculture, the article plays to the upbeat agribusiness...
New Publication: Financial Conflicts of Interest and Stance on Tobacco Harm Reduction: A Systematic Review
My colleagues Manali Vora, Jesse Elias, and Pam Ling and I at the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco just Financial Conflicts of Interest and Stance on Tobacco Harm Reduction: A Systematic Review. (Also...
2018/19 Biosemiotics Gatherings
My review of the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering that Terry Deacon and I organized at UC Berkeley is now a Featured Article and Open Access at the Journal of Biosemiotics. The Biosemiotics Gathering this year will be in Moscow.
Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense
In doing some background research for my book, I remembered that I had read about a year ago of a US Congressman who was working to get rid of the imperative for US health insurers to take patients with preexisting conditions, who shortly thereafter was diagnosed with...
Islands of unsustainability
John Rawls's (1971) notion of national self-sufficiency in terms of resources is about as far from our current globalized world as we can get, in terms of theory aimed at non-ideal applications. Globalization is a fact of life. And yet, with each displacement in our...
Lunchtime Talk at Erasmus School of Philosophy on Advertising and Agency
Advertising and Agency: An ethological account of how social infrastructure compromises or sustains our autonomy May 16, 2019 12:00 - 13:00 Bayle Building, J5, Erasmus University RotterdamHumans like to think of ourselves as autonomous agents, freely making our own...
Smoking as Acceptable Rebellion.
Notes from a debrief of Philip Morris’s 1998 Litter Focus Group read: “Non-smokers tend to give smokers a lot of slack about throwing down a butt,” claiming that “throwing it on the ground eliminates fire risk,” and that litter is a “natural result of outdoor smoking...
Aphorisms
With research, be as exhaustive as possible without it becoming exhausting. (March 13, 2019) Superstitions are killing the planet. (Viz., the idea that we need x in order for y to happen or not to happen; that we need more bunkers, armor, weapons, food, etc., in order...
Every day should be Sustainability Day
In Erasmus University Rotterdam's weekly online magazine Erasmus Magazine, a condensed version of my speech I gave Monday March 4th, 2019 for the Opening Ceremony of the Erasmus Sustainability Days is now published. It's also available in Dutch [in Nederlands].
Erasmus Sustainability Days Keynote
March 4th, 2019, I'll be giving a keynote to 1500 or so students at my home university, Erasmus University Rotterdam, as part of their Sustainability Days. They asked me to be fiery and inspirational, so I'll try my best. The paper will be put online afterwards on my...
Science and Politics of Glyphosate Workshop June 6, 2019
My Erasmus University Rotterdam colleague Alessandra Arcuri and I are organizing a day-long workshop on the most used pesticide in the world: glyphosate. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, Monsanto's flagship herbicide, has been linked with cancer by the...
Welcome Lecture at the Erasmus School of Philosophy
I'm pleased to be giving my welcome lecture to the students and faculty of the Erasmus School of Philosophy, where I have been an Assistant Professor since November 2018, on March 13, 2019. In this lecture, I will survey my research career thus far, in light of the...
Disposable is NOT Environmental
I was perusing Kickstarter when I happened upon a solution to a problem that I didn't know was that big of a deal: spices going bad. As it turns out, it's not that big of a deal, it's what could easily be classified as a "first world problem." Spices, because we live...
Thoughts and Prayers and Regulations
There is an epidemic of thoughts and prayers in America. It seems the more politicians think and pray, the more school shootings happen, the more places of worship get gunned and burned down, and the more people die. Maybe to reverse this trend, politicians need to...
New Article in Biosemiotics: I am a Fake Loop
My article, "I Am a Fake Loop: the Effects of Advertising-Based Artificial Selection," just appeared in the journal Biosemiotics. You can read it here for free. In this piece, I explore Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz's ethological understandings of the human animal,...
E-cigarette e-waste litter is an environmental health harm that can be stopped before it metastasizes
My op-ed in the American Journal of Public Health that appeared this week discusses the new tobacco waste stream of electronic cigarette waste. Electronic waste is already the fastest growing waste stream globally. Creating a new product that has no current...
UCSF Chemical Industry Documents
A couple weeks ago, UCSF launched our newest collection of industry documents. The UCSF Industry Documents archive is a repository of almost one hundred million pages of previously secret industry documents now searchable for the public due to discovery and legal...
Whither the Relevance of Print Media?
The great American newspapers have shot themselves in the foot. In the race against online media and decentralized user-based content, when they haven’t been bought up by conglomerates with the intention to destroy them or use them as organs of ideology, newspapers...
The Elon Musk of E-waste
My new article, "Is This Man the Elon Musk of E-Waste?" in my favorite popular science online magazine Nautilus, describes the Right to Repair movement, and the necessity to move from a linear manufacturing process built on planned and perceived obsolescence to a...
New Article: Environmental Justice as a Potentially Hegemonic Concept
As part of my project on land rights in Latin America, a recent paper titled "Environmental justice as a (potentially) hegemonic concept: a historical look at competing interests between the MST and indigenous people in Brazil" appears in Local Environment. Local...
Biosemiotics Gathering Schedule
The 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering at UC Berkeley organized by myself and Terry Deacon takes place June 17-20 at the International House. Please see www.biosemiotics.life for more information. The Biosemiotics schedule can be found here.
New PLOS Medicine Article on Addiction
PLOS Medicine just published an article I wrote with Jesse Elias and Pam Ling at UCSF on "Public versus internal conceptions of addiction: An analysis of internal Philip Morris documents." This article discusses previously secret industry documents pointing at the...
Euphemisms and Dysphemisms
Here I will attempt to gather and decode euphemisms (saccharine words covering up the dismal reality, e.g., climate change for global warming) and dysphemisms (derogatory terms for neutral ones, e.g., warmist for people who acknowledge the facts of global warming) of...
Fungi Ethics
My new lexicon entry in the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics on "Fungi Ethics" is online. It can be accessed here. Fungi ethics, which is closely allied to plant ethics, describes how fungi--both for better and worse--are forever imbricated in our food...
Electronics reuse or recycle?
I am inspired by recycled electronics. IT Asset Partners (ITAP) recently posted a video about it's ragtag recycled electronic car surpassing in range the major three manufacturers' (Tesla, Chevy Volt, and Nissan Leaf) top vehicles. ITAP director Eric Lundgren stresses...
Party Foul: The semiotics of advertising and subliminal messaging
In the Bay Area, and probably all around California, I have been seen at bus stops and on buses a very disturbing ad. What is disturbing about this advertisement, is that whoever made it failed to understand adolescent psychology. The ad says: Underage drinking and...