Democracy Theme Park

Ecological Disasters

  • Homo Metallicus: Is Recycling the New Garbage? (2008)

    The history of Homo metallicus mirrors more than technological prowess: consequences may be closer than they appear. And, they are coming from our blind spot. Before humans started hammering portable copper mirrors about five thousand years ago, the only mirrors were pools of clear still water, reflecting trees and sky. A thousand years after those…

  • The Energy Nightmare of Web Server Farms (2008)

    One distracted click during my Internet research for this article gave me instant access to 936 photos of Brad Pitt. According to people who know, that click activated some 7000 computers in the search, and perhaps twice as many more trying to induce me to buy something or type in my personal data. And because…

  • The Case for Un-Building America: Watch Where You Put Your Stimulus Package (2009)

    The Run-Up to Collapse Today as many hundreds of billions of dollars are flying out of federal coffers to bail out and bulk up The Economy, it is instructive to review a few of the places we have not put enough money in the last decades. Universal single-payer health care; living wages for all; effective…

  • Regulatory Agencies Have Failed Us–Let’s Fail Them: Out of the Agencies and Into the Legislatures (2010)

    Too Big to Fail? Regulatory agencies are not, and never were, the Great Protectors of the public interest that hazy origin myths suggest. Understanding regulatory failure entails accepting this inconvenient truth and then moving on. Are we ready to go beyond the usual ritualistic laments about how darned ineffective our “watchdog” agencies are? As the…

  • Fukushima: A “Normal Accident” (2012)

    In retrospect (that is, after an accident has occurred), it is often easy to look back at a situation and describe it as an accident waiting to happen. Too often we just leave it at that, perhaps hoping that someone else will figure out how we could have foreseen it. Somebody has.

  • Eat, Sleep, Click: The Bicycle-Powered Internet (2012)

    Save a tree, bank online. Subscribe Online, reduce your carbon footprint. Listen to music online, watch movies online, read books online. No mess, no fuss. Google Inc. has photovoltaic (PV) solar panels on its headquarters. With all that footprint-lightening, you may soon be down to no ecological footprint at all, right? Since everyone wants the…

Topics

Democracy Theme Park

©

Jane Anne Morris