Comments jaiagreen has made

  • Far be it from me tell other people how to raise their children -- I'm 26 and don't yet have any -- but would your response be the same if his passion was reading or board games or soccer? (Assume that he still couldn't ride a bike or swim and preferred that one particular activity to all others.) Well-roundedness is a good thing for most people, but I think there's a common knee-jerk negative reaction to electronic media, especially among us enviros.


    For some devastating critiques of "internet addiction" and similar ideas, see mindhacks.com.

    On The fight to save childhood posted 2 months, 1 week ago 8 Responses

  • No internet access except on Saturday morning seems rather harsh. If your oldest was a compulsive bookworm, would you say, "No recreational reading except on Saturday mornings"?

    As a writer for Grist, you know how much there is to be learned on the Internet. (I was debating politics with lawyers at 13.) If the concern is excessive gaming, why not just limit gaming or limit total screentime to a couple of hours a day? Playing outside is great, but I always recall Isaac Asimov's words about his childhood as a non-athletic, unpopular bookworm. ""But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew."

    On The fight to save childhood posted 2 months, 1 week ago 8 Responses

  • Never Too Young for Civic Action

    Teach the kids how to write to political and business leaders. The Kid's Guide to Social Action by Barbara Lewis is a great intro for kids (and adults!) to letters, petitions, publicity, etc.On Umbra on eco-actions for kids posted 11 months ago 12 Responses

  • CheatNeutral is silly

    Cheating in a relationship hurts your significant other. In other words, its effects are local. CO2 emissions, on the other hand, only exert their effects globally. Your town doesn't warm up if it emits more carbon dioxide. The CheatNeutral comparison is incorrect and misleading.On Umbra on carbon offsets posted 2 years, 1 month ago 7 Responses

  • The Future is Not the Past

    I agree with SnoDragon about choosing sustainably grown over local food if local sustainable isn't available. To grow food organically, or at least with reduced chemical inputs, a farmer has to undertake a number of fairly demanding task. To grow food locally, a farmer has to change... absolutely nothing!

    Ethical consumption means examining the history of a product in order to influence what will be produced in the future. I am a vegetarian to avoid creating more demand for meat. The animals whose flesh is in the market freezer are, however, already dead.

    By buying organic, maybe preferring small producers, we are encouraging other farmers to go organic in the future. Buying local at the farmers' market is fun, but all it does is maintain the status quo. (However, choosing local food at the supermarket encourages the store to stock more local food, so this is probably worthwhile.)On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 28 Responses

  • Let's Dream Big

    So you're against returning to the moon because you don't see any immediate benefits? Because you think it costs too much? Environmentalists should be the last people to make that argument. Certainly photos of the Earth from space have helped our movement, haven't they? Learning to live in closed biospheres in space will help us learn to live in this closed biosphere of Earth.

    How much money does the war in Iraq cost? This year alone, we'll spend over $400 billion on the military. Saving all the world's biodiversity hotspots would cost $25-30 billion.

    There's more to life than problem-solving and there's more to civilization than averting catastrophe. It's part of human nature to explore. I have some problems with the current NASA plan -- I think it's much too slow and shouldn't cut funding from life support research -- but it's certainly better than nothing!

    You might like to read the article "The Real Why" by Tad Daley, who works in progressive politics.

    On Bush hopes to send Americans to the moon ... again posted 4 years, 2 months ago 2 Responses