August 2021

Letter from Felix Smith on the duties and responsibilities of public servants

Badlands is always honored whenever it receives a letter from Dr. Felix Smith, the great US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was in the first team that blew the whistle on the poisoning of Kesterson Wildlife Refuge by heavy-metal laden agricultural runoff from Westlands Water District, a great act of governmental malfeasance by the Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and other state and federal resource agencies. If you ever thought scientists were wimps, I'd like to introduce Badlands readers once again to Felix Smith, a heroic scientist and whistleblower.

Letter from Felix Smith on the duties and responsibilities of public servants

Badlands is always honored whenever it receives a letter from Dr. Felix Smith, the great US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was in the first team that blew the whistle on the poisoning of Kesterson Wildlife Refuge by heavy-metal laden agricultural runoff from Westlands Water District, a great act of governmental malfeasance by the Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and other state and federal resource agencies. If you ever thought scientists were wimps, I'd like to introduce Badlands readers once again to Felix Smith, a heroic scientist and whistleblower.

The power of a great question

8-17-21

Consortiumnews

The Climate Stat We Can’t Afford to Overlook: CEO Pay

If top U.S. corporate execs are still pocketing jackpots a decade from now, our environment has no shot, writes Sam Pizzigati.

By Sam Pizzigati 
Inequality.org

Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us last week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit with a worldwide thunderclap.

The access water journalism of Mark Arax

How far down the water has descended, how salty it’s become, isn’t something farmers like to advertise. Angell, with the support of his wife and his son and a Stanford graduate student who’s crunching the data, knows he’s taking a risk by going public. “Every well we work on, we’re measuring the standing water level. If I can get a farmer to listen, I tell him we can’t keep on doing this. It’s not going to last. Another dam won’t solve this. Another flood won’t solve this.”

Monbiot on Nature's vital cavities and the need for a slow ecology movement

8-16-21
www.monbiot.com
Noble Rot
Protecting the natural world means creating tomorrow’s ancient habitats.
By George Monbiot

We have a slow food movement and a slow travel movement. But we’re missing something, and its absence contributes to our escalating crisis. We need a slow ecology movement, and we need it fast.

"Farewell to Bourgeois Kings," by tinkzorg

Democracy, as bourgeousified in the post revolutionary era, would reveal itself to Tocqueville as likewise inadequately endowed with concern for the political but, unlike aristocracy, it threatened to become over-generneralized. Democratic equality is one way of promising commonality, but bourgeois individualism can undercut equality while bourgeois competitiveness destroys both equality and solidarity. The consequence is the perversion of generality and the prelude to democratic despotism. That dire condition is immanent in the democratic form of apartness, individualism, an over-particularization that withdraws from the public domain and thereby allows power to generalize itself, to extend its rules without encountering differences. Where traditional societies included distinctions of wealth, birth, and status within the political, democratic societies attempted a separation of the public and the private realms with social distinctions forbidden in the one and sanctioned in the other.--Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between two worlds (2003), p.160.