The election is upon us, and we all look forward to it being over. Both presidential candidates have stated their positions with regard to science, e.g., in response to Science Debate 2008, not always with equal clarity. Many thoughtful...
POSTED Monday, November 3, 2008

Conventional wisdom says that foreign policy does not determine the winner in US Presidential elections. Particularly not when domestic economic anxieties are high — and that kind of anxiety has probably never been higher in several generations. Still —...
POSTED Monday, October 27, 2008

Much has been made of rising aspirations of the middle class in developing countries, with the implication that this must mean literally hundreds of millions of cars — and hundreds of millions of tonnes of oil use and a...
POSTED Wednesday, October 22, 2008

In his marvelous book “Better,” Atul Gawande tells the tale of obstetric forceps. Invented in the 17th century to help stuck babies get unstuck during labor, they promised to be a valuable addition to the medical toolkit — so...
POSTED Monday, October 6, 2008

The young folks entering kindergarten these past few weeks are a fascinating group. Born at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they will retire — if they retire at all — in 2073. Many could live into the twenty-second...
POSTED Wednesday, October 1, 2008

When the world seems to be falling down all around us, can we afford to spend our time thinking about the future? In the midst of ongoing wars, accelerating economic collapse, and cascading environmental ruin, it’s easy to dismiss...
POSTED Friday, September 26, 2008

I spent Wednesday and Thursday of last week at Zeitgeist, the annual meeting that Google hosts for its partners and a few invited guests. On Wednesday afternoon, during the “Serious Sustainability” session, the award-winning author and journalism professor Michael...
POSTED Tuesday, September 23, 2008

One of my proudest moments as an environmentalist came when the Santa Monica Main Public Library answered my plea to install more bike racks. The racks were hard won: I photo-documented then blogged about the over-crowded racks at the...
POSTED Thursday, September 18, 2008

One of the most important ways to work for a better future is to improve communications between and among people. With all the instant media available today, we could foresee a future in which we can reach out to...
POSTED Monday, September 15, 2008

Little things can have a surprising impact. Take global warming. Increasingly, we’re being asked to think about our “carbon footprint,” the amount of greenhouse gas produced to do the things we do: emissions from our cars, emissions from the...
POSTED Wednesday, September 10, 2008

In Grover Beach, California, nineteen-year-old Cameron Clapp trains for his next track meet — on battery-powered, robotic metal legs. Meanwhile, in Framingham, Mass. a pharmaceutical company is splicing human genes into cow and goat embryos, enabling the animals to...
POSTED Monday, September 8, 2008

Well, hello there! Smile. Good timing. Yes, I have had lots of thoughts out here, most fantastical with occasional but incomplete reality testing. There is a great deal of buzz these days over things combining, converging and emerging, and...
POSTED Monday, September 1, 2008

How you can save the world, or more precisely, what I can do to save the world, has driven me full time for the past 7 years. As a former astronaut, sometime scientist, and dogged good public policy pusher,...
POSTED Monday, August 25, 2008

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth. It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves. That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly...
POSTED Monday, August 18, 2008