Letters to the Editor
JackSparx
Published Letters: 429 Editor's Choice: 16
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Some of my best friends are white
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Nalgene bottle thing has made me laugh lately. I endured some stern lectures about why I needed "unbreakable" Nalgene bottles when camping etc, even though the cheap water bottles I used had never broken. In my circles, though, bottled water is a no-no, even if you buy it once for the bottle and refill it. When one dude told me I should buy Nalgene because bottled water was wasteful, I promised that I didn't drink the water, but recycled it by pouring it back into a lake.
Now that Nalgene is evil incarnate, and sold for pennies, I've bought a few of the bottles.
You see, they're unbreakable.
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Gee Wally, no need to get so excited
[Read the article: A biofuel food-price bombshell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Rodian, if you'd read my other postings, you'd know that I'm arguing for economically rewarding poorer people for living with less environmental impact.
My issue with alternative fuels is that it has done just the opposite. It punishes poor people by pushing up food costs in order to fuel the cars of the relatively wealthy.
I think the onus is on you, actually, to explain how the poor benefit from these alternative fuels. Or are they just excess rats who should accept their fate?
I think it's time to critically rethink alternative fuels using inclusive economic reasoning. There may be ways that these fuels can be incorporated as part of a reasoned global warming strategy.
But right now some nations with poor populations are reacting by closing off their food markets to protect their food-purchasers. That approach is hurting other, even poorer nations without adequate domestic food production, and is probably not in anyone's best interest in the long run. Politically, the alternative fuels movement has run into a PR disaster that could hurt other efforts to combat global warming.
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Goring sacred cows
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whole Foods is notoriously anti-union. Even if it weren't off the top of the fru-fru meter and expensive, the union-busting alone would reason for white and all folks to boycott that place. Those are some truly nasty, nasty people in Whole Foods management. And white people like nice behavior right?
The jury is still out on the real environmental impact of the Prius. It fits the general pattern that (elite) white environmentalists think that environmental correctness is a consumer item. That leads to the idea that people who can't afford these environmental consumer items are bad environmental actors, when those who can afford less are likely better environmental actors.
Otoh, attractive to whitey or not, bicycling that replaces car miles has to be a good idea. I note though that I see Mexicans biking around all the time without much fanfare, and considerably less Lycra.
And by God, it is good to be outside. Unless, of course, you have to labor there.
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Wait, Samantha Power is no longer single?
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Now I am depressed. Excuse, I'm off to Whole Foods to buy some kambucha with St. John's Wort.
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@JackHorner
[Read the article: A biofuel food-price bombshell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I get it Rodian. You can use numbers (population), but I can't use numbers (consumption). You can use analogy (humans on earth = rats in a cage), but I can't critique the analogy.
Paul Ehrlich should get some sort of medal for closing so many minds, and allowing the biggest culprits in ecological disaster to shift responsibility to the most vulnerable--and least culpable--members of society.
I guess justifying class ideology beat classifying butterflies. But it's unfortunate that the misapplication of population studies through analogy set back the environmental movement by decades.
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Say it loud
[Read the article: The unbearable whiteness of being]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Allie's post reminded that the chorus of kids shouting "I'm black and I'm proud" on the James Brown recording were mostly white and Asian.
The word Caucasian is also used to refer, naturally, to people from the Caucuses, such as Chechens. Russians think of Caucasians as a darker-complected Muslim minority group linked to terrorism.
Hey! Maybe that's why American Caucasians secretly like Obama.
Just joking. Really.
I'm off to eat a mayonnaise sandwich.
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It's funny that people ignore total consumption, itakto.
[Read the article: A biofuel food-price bombshell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]China has drastically lowered its rate of population growth, but the rate of growth of its CO2 emissions continues to climb.
China and the US are neck and neck in CO2 emissions, but have substantially different populations.
Policies target countries like India for population reduction, and ignore the US. But US CO2 emissions are 20 times per capita India's. Why not reduce the US population instead? Or that of Qatar?
Total human resource consumption (including pollution emission) does not have a one-to-one relationship with population. There are absolutely NO statistics that prove that such a relationship exists (not even for food or shelter). People who argue that there is such a relationship INVARIABLY refer to animal studies by analogy. Paul Erhlich's projections have long since been discredited, but still have a dangerous lock on discourse.
In the real world, population growth routinely UNDERESTIMATES growth in resource use. Humans are not rats. We can actually decrease population and at the same time increase demands on the environment. Population is simply an inadequate indicator of most environmental harm.
The argument that having less people means more for each person remaining may be true (or not), but it is not an environmental argument. The environment only reacts to how much total pollution is released, not to how many people released it.