Naturally Interesting

In the Oregonian:

That movement — dispersed, diverse, leaderless, independent and incongruous in its assembly of anarchists, billionaires, street clowns and computer geeks — began, Hawken said in a phone interview, “when people looked around to see an insult to their property, their river, their forest, their future, their children or their dignity.

“Then they looked around for an institution to do something about it . . . and they find out government is corrupt. It’s either bought off or it doesn’t have the skills.

“That’s how the nonprofit world was formed. It’s not a well-oiled machine. But it’s the fastest growing movement in the world, the largest social movement in the history of humanity, and the one addressing the salient issues of our times.”

“Specifically, the shared activity of hundreds of thousands of nonprofit organizations can be seen as humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease and ecological degradation.”

I had always thought we were the pinnacle of evolution. Apparently it was the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago.  At Discover.

Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs.

 Petersen writes that drug companies push medicines they know don’t work. They invent “diseases,” such as overactive bladder or compulsive shopping disorder, to wring high profits out of marginal medicines. They obfuscate the science by controlling the publication of clinical trial results and writing bogus journal articles. And they shovel millions of dollars to doctors to boost prescriptions. “Selling prescription drugs—rather than discovering them—has become the pharmaceutical industry’s obsession,” Petersen writes.

On that note, how long do we let a company like Eli Lilly with a 100 year history of corporate malfeasance stay in business?

Review in Business Week.

Today’s environmentalist can be found at a renewable energy start-up, one that is funded by venture capitalists concerned with both the environment and profit. Saving the world right now is focused on one thing: energy

and while the old green virtues of conservation, of simple living, must play a part in our response, the key will be technology. This is a race that will create new billionaires. It’s a huge opportunity for America. But it’s an opportunity that the U.S. will miss if it fails to enact the policies to match its technology. That’s the underlying message of Earth: The Sequel

Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund argues that renewable energies can be price competitive once they achieve economies of scale. And that will require governmental support, in Krupp’s view, through a carbon cap-and-trade system.

The idea that new technology can get us out of the climate fix that old technology put us in is an attractive one — especially if we can make a buck while doing so. Venture capitalists invested $3 billion in clean tech in 2007, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, and they’d like a nice return. (But at least the VCs are spending money — federal investment in renewable energy research is a paltry $1 billion, or roughly a day of revenue for Exxon Mobil.) But there’s no reason that business can’t be a major part of the climate change solution, or that profit isn’t concordant with a desire to save the Earth.

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