With the breeding and marketing of new “improved” varieties, traditional varieties are being replaced. Farmers and gardeners stop growing them. Field after field is planted with one variety. Where thousands of varieties of wheat once grew, only a few can now be seen. When these traditional plant varieties are lost...
Tag - ecology
Support to the traditional systems of science and technology in the third world countries has often been attacked as a reactionary attempt to hold back the national progress and to go back in history. These attacks originate from vested interests as well as well-meaning radical groups. Movements to defend the...
Garrett Hardin has finally made it. Once a little known man preaching strange science, his name now appears in Time magazine and on placards at demonstrations in India. He has seized the time and found a friendly reception from an audience fully primed with tales of welfare chislers, lazy poor folk, and belligerently...
Puerto Rico's land and people have been increasingly threatened by industrial pollution from U.S. corporations which dominate their economy and inhabit their environment. To comprehend what is happening to the Puerto Rican environment, we must understand recent developments in the United States, beginning in 1946 with...
The Atomic Energy Commission was formed a year after the holocaust at Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave the world its first exposure to atomic energy as an instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy. The McMahon Act of 1946 set up a 5-man Commission, all civilians, to advise the President on all possible manifestations of this new...
When reaching for a fresh bottle of chemicals on the laboratory shelf, how often do we as chemists think about how the chemicals got there? Who actually made the chemicals? Who put them in the bottle? When we open the bottle and place it under a ventilating hood to avoid breathing the fumes, do we ever ask ourselves...
Not too long ago environmental concern was the dominant issue of the day. This was in no small part due to Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich is viewed by the media and the public as a major spokesman of the environmental movement. He has been associated with a trend in environmental thought that...
Six people from Boston SESPA went to Ann Arbor to participate in the first of the spring environmental teach-ins. They wanted to inject a radical political analysis into the otherwise apolitical program of the Ann Arbor ENACT (Environmental Action) conference. Jim Shapiro (see "Heroes of our time", p 14) had been...