Business, Consumption, Ecology

This can be a place to discuss a wide variety of business-related issues, as well as the fundamental functioning of free markets in great flux, natural capitalism, ecological economics, climate change and consumption etc.  Some possible books for review include Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets, by David A. Westbrook, Paradigm Publishers, 2009.  Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, And Swallow Citizens Whole, by Benjamin Barber.

Also see the Education tab on this site and “Nature” tab for other reading and discussions on ecology and nature.

2 thoughts on “Business, Consumption, Ecology”

  1. From NBC News, featuring link to PDF from the American Geophysical Union.
    Monster Hurricanes Once Plagued East Coast & May Return

    While Europe was going through the Middle Ages, America’s East Coast was being pummeled by hurricanes at least as intense as Katrina every 40 years or so, climate detectives say. Between the years 250 and 1150, almost two dozen Category 3 and Category 4 storms left their signatures in sediment deposits in Salt Pond on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the researchers report in a study published online Wednesday by Earth’s Future, one of the American Geophysical Union’s open-access journals. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 storm in 2005, while 1999’s Hurricane Floyd is an example of a Category 4.

    Such storms would be catastrophic if they hit the northeast U.S. today, according to lead author Jeff Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “These records suggest that the pre-historical interval was unlike what we’ve seen in the last few hundred years,” Donnelly said in a news release.

    Donnelly and his colleagues suggest that shifts in sea surface temperatures in the western North Atlantic contributed to the frequency of intense storms — and that warming seas could bring a return to those conditions. “We may need to begin planning for a Category 3 hurricane landfall every decade or so rather than every 100 or 200 years,” he said. “The risk may be much greater than we anticipated.”

  2. A sign of hope. The words of Pope Paul VI; although spoken almost exactly 50 years ago, remain ever timely, as noted by Pope Francis during his talk at the UN. “The hour has come when a pause, a moment of recollection, reflection, even of prayer, is absolutely needed so that we may think back over our common origin, our history, our common destiny. The appeal to the moral conscience of man has never been as necessary as it is today… For the danger comes neither from progress nor from science; if these are used well, they can help to solve a great number of the serious problems besetting mankind (Address to the United Nations Organization, 4 October 1965).” Among other things, human genius, well applied, will surely help to meet the grave challenges of ecological deterioration and of exclusion….

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