W.J. Astore Twenty-five years ago, I wrote the following paper for a class in the history of technology. Back then, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and acid rain as well as global warming were issues highlighting the drawbacks of technology. CFCs were damaging the ozone layer, acid rain was poisoning our lakes and streams and damaging trees, with…
Daniel N. White I’m always glad to read anything Henry Petroski writes and I enjoyed his recent New York Times article on the decline of craftsmanship in building, but my feeling is that he dumbed things down some for this op-ed. That’s easy enough to do, given the difficulty of getting technical information across in…
Stuart Lyle. Introduction by William Astore. Ah, the Smart Phone generation. I see my students gazing into them, texting with them, flipping through photos, watching videos, taking photos, you name it. Smart phones promise to link us together, but they paradoxically encourage selfish and anti-social behavior as well. People are more atomistic and narcissistic as…
By Don Rose I wonder how much thought the White House gave to the political implications of releasing the Environmental Protections Agency’s new coal emissions standards at this time—five months before the mid-term elections? I’m not concerned about the usual rhetorical attacks from climate-change deniers or even lambasting from the coal industry and its economic…
P. J. Sullivan What is the most urgent problem facing our planet? Our country? Is it warfare? Nuclear proliferation? Oil depletion? Hunger? Epidemics? Air and water pollution? Degradation of our food? Soaring housing costs? Global climate change? Species extinctions? Deforestation? All of these are important, but what is it that they all have in common?…
JEREMIAH GOULKA MARCH 27, 2014 National security think tanks are cheerleading for the shale gas industry with near-complete disregard for climate change and water security. Guess who’s funding the studies? When it rains, it pours, so they say, but pouring rain is not exactly what you want in a drought. The big storm that hit the parched…
JEREMIAH GOULKA Originally posted at the American Prospect. Used by permission of the author. Chances are that you missed the State Department releasing the final environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline last week. You were meant to: it came out on 4pm on the Friday before Super Bowl Sunday. The mainstream media only had…
Alex Dunn. Introduction by William Astore. The New Year promises much misinformation about Obamacare as “socialism.” Whatever else you can say of Obamacare, it’s not state-owned or state-provided. Rather, it relies on private, for-profit insurance companies to provide health care coverage. In short, health care in the USA remains a market-based commodity. You get what…
It’s Joe Bageant week at The Contrary Perspective. Bageant is best know for writing Deer Hunting with Jesus, but his second (and sadly his last) book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, is equally good. Bageant, a self-confessed “redneck,” worked his way into the middle class as an editor. But he never forgot his roots in…
W.J. Astore One of the occupational hazards of being a historian is reading old books. The one in front of me is John Fiske’s The Destiny of Man (1884). Fiske was an American philosopher and popular writer on Darwinism, Spencerism, and many other representative isms of his day. Like many thinkers of the late 19th…
The Contrary Perspective 