links for 2010-05-04
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PK: "[A]s visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues.... This decline ... would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course.... As the... crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded... conservatives began pushing back.... Much... demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But... also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans.... Then came the gulf disaster.... For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent.... True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit."
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JW: "My C shelves begin, controversially, with Orson Scott Card, who was one of my favourite authors for a long time but whom I can no longer read. I started reading him with Hot Sleep and A Planet Called Treason in the early 80s, and I stopped in 1997, so I have read absolutely everything up to then and nothing since. I stopped reading him because he said in his book on how to write that the best way to get readers engaged was to have appealing innocent characters and torture them, and after that I kept seeing that he was doing that and it kept jerking me out of the story. Probably his best book, certainly his best known, and beginning a series, is Ender’s Game. It’s probably fair to say if you don’t like that you won’t like any of his work. If you prefer fantasy, Seventh Son begins the Alvin Maker series which is an alternate early America with folk magic. If you want a standalone, The Folk of the Fringe is a fix-up that contains some of his most powerful writing."
