Marcellino over at Biopolitical skewers a well-meaning environmental economist for wanting local "ownership" of a resource only if that ownership delivers the ecologically desirable result. Edward B. Barbier discusses at length proposals surrounding support for replanting mangroves to protect against coastal disasters. Barbier identifies the value of mangroves and the factors that make it worthwhile to destroy them, and comes up with a package of policy measures that he thinks would promote replanting of mangroves. Ownership of some form is an integral part of Barbier's solution, but he sets conditions, and that's what annoys Biopolitical.

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Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.7 This week: 88.2
Tuesday 13 March: Totally skipped a week last week. No idea why. Just seemed too dull to post about yet another period of fluctuating up and down a bit. Not that things have been that much more exciting over the past seven days either. A couple of inter...

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My friend Rob has unerringly good taste. He has never once given me a totally bum steer, not even Damien Rice. So why did I wait so many months before watching The Edukators (aka Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei)? It is bloody marvelous, a wonderful exercise in small-scale ensemble acting that kept me...

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Biopolitical's comments on labelling prompted me to check again the whole story regarding Monsanto's product Posilac, a synthetic version of the hormone called bovine somatotropin. BST is produced in the pituitary gland and influences the production of milk (among other things). Farmers can inje...

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Sometimes I kick myself for being too busy to blog something I consider important; with all those jillions of sites out there, someone else is bound to have said what I wanted to say. But it seems I’m in luck. Everyone else seems to be lathered by that long god-bothering piece in the New York Times,...

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