May 24, 2008

This is the first of two talks I gave at the Building A New World Conference , which was held at Radford University in Virginia. The panel was on climate change.

May 24, 2008

This talk was delivered at the Building A New World Conference, which was held at Radford University in Virginia.

I just came upon a lost gem of a movie–recommended by my dad–called Mindwalk. It was released in 1990, but has never made its way to dvd. After watching it, I’m not surprised, given that–as the Washington Post described it at the time–the “film has virtually no action, no drama and no narrative.” With that sort of criteria, a film would have to be some sort of touchstone French new wave art house classic from the ’60s to get released on dvd. But really, it’s a wonder that Mindwalk ever got released in the first place.

The film is essentially a two-hour conversation between three characters: a politician (played by Sam Waterston), a physicist (Liv Ullman) and a poet (John Heard). The setting is the medieval island of Mont Saint-Michel, where all three characters have converged to escape from their respective midlife crisis. But what this movie lacks in Hollywood elements, it makes up for with an intense existential dialogue on the very meaning of life–but more than just that, it’s the clashing of two distinct ways of seeing life.

Although it is structured like a dialogue, the movie is in large part a monologue or–perhaps more accurately–a forum for the physicist to espouse her new world views upon a reluctant old world politician (described as a conservative democrat) and his generally open-minded poet friend. This approach definitely comes off as a bit too didactic at times, but I’m willing to forgive the filmmakers because it’s clear they too were aware of this pitfall and attempted to compensate by inserting a daughter character, who periodically pops in to remind her mom that no one wants to hear her crazy boring ideas about how the world should work.

Nevertheless, the physicist–whose withdrawl to the island stems from the realization that her work was being fed to the U.S. Defense Department–begins her lecture by telling the politician that he suffers from a mechanistic view of life that dates all the way back to Descartes [...]

April 27, 2008

I spoke to a group of confirmation students at the Ascension School on W. 108th St on the subject of sustainability.

October 19, 2007 | Published by Huffington Post

By announcing his plan to run on both the Republican and Democratic tickets in his home state of South Carolina, Stephen Colbert has illustrated better than anyone that there is very little difference between the two parties, at least when it comes to their mainstream candidates [...]

October 1, 2007 | Published by In These Times

The looting of natural resources, the destruction of ecosystems, and the poisoning and enslavement of people are the forgotten side-effects of cigarette smoking [...]

How Washington-Style Politics and a deal with Big Oil condemned Canada’s pledge to fight climate change.

Canada’s story of public deception and the courtship of Big Oil may seem like a tragic downfall, but it’s no more shameful than the complete failure of the world’s most potent emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States, to take any action at all.

NASA climatologist James Hansen has been vindicated by two decades of warming and a consensus among his scientist peers, proving that there are no skeptics left, just contrarians.

With hurricane season approaching and another Bush crony at the helm of FEMA, a few restive lawmakers are seeking real reform for the storm-tossed agency. Whether they will succeed is another story.