Comments Caleb Ewing has made

  • Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?

    Speaking of false choices...Fromartz places these two trends in oppostion to each other, as if local and organic were somehow mutually exclusive. But this is not really the case, at least not in most regions. Depending on where you live, there's usually an abundance of locally grown organic produce...even throughout the winter. All in all, given this, his very trendy argument of local v. organic is mostly one of false tension. On Local or organic? It's a false choice posted 3 years, 6 months ago 9 Responses

  • Supply the penance

    Dave,

    The SINS send-up was a fun and productive exercise. Thank you for it. It illustrated the difficulty of living green, and it also showed -yes it did- just how loosely we greenies hold our own values.

    Why was this not the lesson?

    Greenmark made the same point in an expansive, contrarian and kill-joy sort of way, but you and Carl seem to have taken the argument a flawed step further and have marginalized the whole idea of personal responsibility. This is typical of Carl, who's happier beating the commons with a stick  than looking within for change, but I expected better from Grist.

    Rather than letting us off the hook by telling us personal responsibility doesn't really matter, a wiser, more considered (and more interesting) approach would be for Grist to use SINS as baseline to measure its readership, and to use SINS as clarion call for us all to go deeper greener.

    It's not too late. Supply the penance.

      On Whether you recycle plastic really doesn't matter. posted 4 years, 7 months ago 3 Responses

  • Felony Sin

    Among these misdemeanors I will confess to the felony sin of breaking up with my vegan,  earth-conscious girlfriend because her disciplined lifestyle and general good habits drove me crazy. My penance has been crushing self-awareness and the solitary pursuit of those same values. Forgive me Julianne. On What's your secret eco-sin? posted 4 years, 7 months ago 84 Responses

  • Felony Sin

    Among these misdemeanors I will confess to the felony sin of breaking up with my vegan,  earth-conscious girlfriend because her disciplined lifestyle and general good habits drove me crazy. My penance has been crushing self-awareness and the solitary pursuit of those same values. Forgive me Julianne. On So tell us ... what's your dirty little environmental secret? posted 4 years, 7 months ago 84 Responses

  • re SUVS


    Thanks. Imagine what the SC could accomplish in terms of culture shift if, as both protest and a practical matter, the national, states and locals were to renounce SUV's? Whoa! Sure, the SC would instantly lose about 100K members..but it could have a profound and rippling effect on the national energy debate. I think it would even create a shift sufficient to torpedo the ANWR legislation.  

    Of course the bean counters in SF would never consider this..too risky (and what about the innocent auto workers?)plus, SC execs deal in environmental problems, not the underlying cultural ones.  David Brower where are you?  On Battle over immigration policy returns in this month's board election posted 4 years, 7 months ago 10 Responses

  • BE the change

    In todays SC there is no imperative for members not to drive SUV's, yet alone take responsibility for individual contibutions to population pressure.   So IMO The SC would do better to first look to itself to be the catalyst for the change it desires. Would that Sierrans got out from behind their SUVS  (and even the ridiculous and soon-to-come hybred-SUVs), and actually begin MODELING some righteous green value, I would consider listening to them on immigration. Until then, no. On Battle over immigration policy returns in this month's board election posted 4 years, 7 months ago 10 Responses

  • Winners Never Quit

    Despite Martin Kaplan's fulsome objection (in Winners Never Quit) to holding our environmental leaders and strategies accountable for the disastrous outcome on ANWR, I see in the ANWR defeat convincing proof that a major over-haul is desperately needed. Had the Sierra Club and Carl Pope (for instance) resisted the safe path of `environmental niche framing` back in 2003, and instead sought to rally the SC in opposition to the Bush legend of patriotism and homeland-insecurity, today's landscape and tomorrows ANWR could probably look a whole lot different. I really believe this. What Pope DID do in 2003, at the time of pivotal crisis - instead of engaging at the level of our underlying our cultural pathology - was assign his energy and column inches to the problem of soil contamination on US military bases. This to me constituted a total failure of leadership, the latest victim of which is now ANWR. Very sorry you didn't see this coming.  If the defeat in ANWR becomes the referendum on leadership and strategy I think it should, Pope should go, and Kaplan along with him. And as for Kaplan's `tipping point paradigm', it's absurd to suggest that environmentalism is in the middle of an effective long-term campaign. If anything, we are the one's who have been `tipped'. On Civil-rights, suffrage activists didn't give up, and neither should environmentalists  posted 4 years, 7 months ago 4 Responses