A New Francis of Assisi?

The world could use a pope who is a tribune of Earth

I don’t go much in for Vatican Watching (all that particulate matter from the smoke signals, you know), but I’ll admit that I felt a little thrill of hope when Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio took the name Pope Francis. Photo by…
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by: Jason Mark – March 14, 2013

Major Universities Come Out in Support of Monsanto in Supreme Court Case

Research institutions eager to protect their lucrative patent income

Two weeks ago the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Vernon Bowman vs Monsanto Company, a dispute over how long Monsanto’s patents last for and whether farmers should be able to save genetically modified seeds and replant them.…
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by: Jason Mark – March 5, 2013

Some Thoughts on the Respectability of the Environmental Movement

We don’t need no Michael Grunwald

Environmentalists on Thursday were electrified by an essay by TIME national correspondent Michael Grunwald offering his support for the campaign against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. After suffering a week’s worth of slights from armchair quarterbacks dissing the Keystone opposition as…
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by: Jason Mark – March 1, 2013

Oil Drilling Could Be Coming to the Doorstep of the US’s Newest National Park

Firm plans to explore for heavy crude on the edge of Pinnacles National Park

On Monday, February 11, hundreds of people — including Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and Congressman Sam Farr — gathered together to celebrate the creation of the United States’ newest national park, Pinnacles. An unusual outcropping of volcanic rock spires rising…
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by: Jason Mark – February 28, 2013

Wild Kingdom USA

Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds

By Jim SterbaRandom House, 2012, 336 pages In 1750, not a single beaver lived in Massachusetts, the animal having been wiped out of the colony by the trans-Atlantic fur trade. Fast-forward to today, and Massachusetts is home to an estimated 70,000 beavers. The story is much the same for a variety of other birds and animals that were once on the brink of extinction. There at least 25 million white-tailed deer in…
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by: Jason Mark – Spring 2013

Alex Steffen

On the list of best job titles ever – explorer, inventor, superstar architect – “planetary futurist” must surely be near the top of the pile. Writer Alex Steffen has earned that enviable moniker through more than a decade of long, hard thinking about what it will take to accommodate some 9 billion people on a finite planet. Steffen first distinguished himself as the founder and executive editor of WorldChanging.com. With more than…
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by: Jason Mark – Spring 2013

Arrogance Is Bliss

When Hurricane Sandy walloped New York and New Jersey, most news reports included the disclaimer that routinely accompanies extreme weather. “We can’t attribute this one event to climate change,” the caveat goes. “The storm could have happened without global warming.” Sure, I suppose that mathematically the storm might have occurred absent climate change. But it didn’t. We now live on a planet where almost everything, including the atmosphere, is a human artifact;…
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by: Jason Mark – Spring 2013

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