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Eco Op-Ed is your environmental forum. While not endorsing all viewpoints expressed here, we embrace the adage that a mind functions best when open; therefore, we welcome a wide range of ecological opinion. To join the discussion, add your comment below any piece.
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Thursday, 29 March 2012 01:00
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Written by Marita Prandoni | Commentary |
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 “Why is it that some walls are so vocal and others are so mute?”
–Eduardo Galeano
In 2006, before construction began on the almost 2,000-mile wall separating the US from Mexico, my family headed south for spring break. We wanted to escape the cold that would keep prairie dogs in their burrows for several more weeks. So we drove to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona to camp among the saguaro, ocotillo and teddy bear cholla—a landscape that writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey called paradise. Read on…
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Tuesday, 20 March 2012 00:00
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Written by Steven Kotler | Commentary |
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 Normally, I try to squeeze a couple of big ideas together in one column. My goal is usually to take a new bit of information and tie it to some old bits and perhaps—if everything works really well and the stars are aligned—this all adds up to a small shift in perspective for the reader.
What I rarely do is plug a single technology, especially a green technology. There are so many new environmental wonders around that it’s often hard to separate wheat from chaff. But today I’m going to deviate. I’m going to describe an environmental breakthrough so important that everyone should sit down and drink one or two.
What am I talking about? Well, beer, of course. Read on…
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Wednesday, 07 March 2012 00:00
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Written by Steven Kotler | Commentary |
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 “Spaceship Earth” is a phrase not used much any more, but it’s been around for a while and seems worth revisiting.
Everybody’s best guess at an origin dates back to Henry George’s 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, and the line: “It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space.” It popped up again in 1965, when Adlai Stevenson said, “We travel together, passengers on this little ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil.”
But it was Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 Operating Manual for the Spaceship Earth that firmly cemented it into our consciousness. When he used the phrase, he meant it literally: we are literally surrounded by a vast and hostile universe. The average temperature in intergalactic space is three degrees above absolute zero. The nearest source of warmth is usually several hundred million light years away. Read on…
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Thursday, 23 February 2012 10:00
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Written by Steven Kotler | Commentary |
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 I have spent most of my life playing gravity games. First it was skiing, then surfing, then rock climbing and back to surfing. Finally, here I am at age 44, learning how to downhill mountain bike.
Let me start off by saying that out of every sport I’ve played—and other than lacrosse, I can’t think of one I haven’t tried—downhill mountain biking is far and away the most ridiculous. Read on…
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Friday, 10 February 2012 00:00
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Written by Steven Kotler | Commentary |
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 This started out as a top-ten-books-about-environmentalism op-ed—essentially the books that shaped my eco-philosophy. And some of those books still remain, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that books simply covering the science don’t get you all the way. There are a number of authors (Rick Bass, for example) who do more than describe eco-systems and how to save them. Instead, they manage to go out and capture the truly inscrutable quality of the natural world, the mystery behind the mystery, and I realized that this list would be incomplete without these titles as well. Read on…
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