The real trick to understanding how to approach Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the new book by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler, lies in recognizing the limitations of your inner Homer Simpson. In the authors' view, your whole brain is a civil-war zone between your "automatic system" (the rapid, intuitive, reptilian part) and your "reflective system" (the slow, deliberate, self-conscious part). Behavioral economists take the position that snap judgments formed by your Homer Simpson brain are often quite terrible ones, which go on to have enormous consequences in your financial, physical, and emotional life. Like Homer, we use all sorts of mental "heuristics" or cognitive "rules of thumb" that are flawed, which is why we pay for magazine subscriptions for years after the three-month "free" trial ended ("status quo bias") and why we buy lottery tickets ("unrealistic optimism").
The premise of Nudge—the authors caution in their very first footnote that this is not to be read as noodge (noun: from the Yiddish, meaning, "You never call; you never write. ...")—is that in framing public policy, "choice architects" should gently guide us to make better choices, the sorts of choices Albert Einstein or Star Trek's Mr. Spock* might make or that we would make if we were to consult such men on our personal decisions about, say, giving up smoking. Laissez faire economics holds that faced with a broad menu of choices, most of us will choose wisely. Sunstein and Thaler fear that some of us might pull a Homer Simpson and try to eat the menu.
Now, nobody appreciates being compared to Homer Simpson, but isn't that really the whole point? Sunstein and Thaler are very persuasive in illustrating how often we channel him in our daily decision-making. In fact, your automatic system may reveal your own biases with respect to this book: While your Homer Simpson brain might leap to the conclusion that any book by a University of Chicago economist and a law professor—Sunstein is about to become a Harvard law professor—might be hopelessly dry, that could just be a mistake of the so-called "availability heuristic" (assessing the likelihood of an outcome based on the examples that come most readily to mind). But Nudge is actually great fun to read. And while your reptilian mind might balk at their language of "libertarian paternalism"—even the authors concede the words are "off-putting" if not "contradictory"—your reflective mind may have to concede that there's something to be said for gently guiding children to eat fruit in the cafeteria or inducing workers to sign up for their 401(k) plans, so long as nobody is being coerced and the Oreos are merely moved to a higher shelf, not banned. In some ways the whole project involves resetting the default buttons of your life to healthy and wealthy and wise. Of course someone else is doing the resetting, and that is where the problem lies.
You will not like the version of yourself you meet in Nudge. For one thing, you eat too many cashews, long after you stopped wanting one. (You will also eat squeaky, stale popcorn even if you hate it.) Problem blackjack players (like, er, myself) will play more recklessly with the "house money" you have just won. You are hopelessly enslaved to the judgments (even the wrong ones) of others. You believe everybody knows (and cares) which T-shirt you are wearing. You pay insane fees on your credit cards and don't contribute to your 401(k) even though you know you should. You claim to want to be an organ donor yet somehow find checking the box on your driver's license to be beyond you.
One way you may soothe your Homer Simpson mind is by patiently explaining to it that he is not only stupid, but that public-policy decisions made to get around him are already quite common: Sunstein and Thaler tell us that Chicago's Lake Shore Drive features white stripes on the most dangerous parts of the road that offer drivers the illusion that their speed is increasing. Drivers slow down. An Amsterdam economist had black houseflies etched into the wells of the urinals at Schiphol Airport under the theory that "If a man sees a fly, he aims at it." Spillage decreased by 80 percent. Some of these suggestions for libertarian paternalism in savings have already been enacted into law. Automatic enrollment is becoming the norm for 401(k) plans. In 2006 Congress passed the Pension Protection Act, which offers employers incentives to match employee contributions and resets certain enrollment defaults to maximize contributions. And the ATM beeps to remind you that you've walked away without your bank card.
Is it oh-so-slightly creepy (or socialist) to envision a world in which shadowy choice architects are nudging you away from the cashews and toward organ donation? Could those seniors who understood all 46 options offered in President Bush's prescription drug plan please raise their hands?
If Sunstein and Thaler are right that we live in a world of too many choices, with insufficient time and information to make the best one and little feedback about the stupid choices we've made in the past, the question is not so much whether we should be steered toward the smart ones as: Where should we be steered instead? Given that someone someplace is often setting the defaults anyhow, wouldn't we prefer that the guy in charge be Mr. Spock? Could any of us agree, however, about which Mr. Spock is truly worthy of making these decisions? The authors urge that "if the underlying decision is difficult and unfamiliar, and if people do not get prompt feedback when they err, it's legitimate, even good to nudge a bit."
Some of the suggestions will generate controversy, particularly when one contemplates some wise decision-maker who is resetting our defaults, in secret, or producing the summary sheet of the best schools for our children. And although the nudges in question are often referenced as "small" or "gentle" or "non-coercive," there are certainly moments at which a nudge turns into a full-on body check, particularly when you contemplate the government becoming involved. The authors toss out ideas about privatizing marriage, allowing patients to waive the right to sue their physicians, paying teen girls not to get pregnant. And my own favorite suggestion may well be a "civility check" warning you that the e-mail you are poised to send "APPEARS TO BE AN UNCIVIL E-MAIL. DO YOU REALLY AND TRULY WANT TO SEND IT?"
As the child of an economist, I must confess that there was a part of me that wanted to push back against the message that animates Nudge, i.e., that every time I think I am picking the best health plan for my children, Homer Simpson is actually just reaching for the double-glazed chocolate doughnut. I want to believe I am smarter than that. But you see that, too, is a product of my reptilian brain. As Sunstein and Thaler explain, another common cognitive error is the heuristic called "optimism and overconfidence." It's what leads more than 50 percent of Thaler's MBA students to predict they will all perform in the top two deciles of their class and allows 94 percent of professors at large universities to believe themselves better than the "average professor." In other words—painful though it may be to admit—the mere fact that we believe ourselves smart enough to optimize complicated choices may be the most Simpsonic thing about us. I know: D'oh!
I fear that my well-tended lawn is wreaking havoc on the environment. I've considered replacing it with synthetic grass, which requires far less maintenance. But manufacturing that plastic vegetation must give off a lot of carbon emissions, right? So which type of lawn is (figuratively) greener—real or fake?
It's tough to declare a winner here without knowing the specifics of your lawn-care regimen, as well as your geographic location. If you're reckless with the fertilizer, oblivious to the consequences of heedless mowing, and live in a drought-stricken region, then ersatz grass has the clear environmental edge. But if you're diligent about your gardening routine, the real stuff may be better.
The environmental drawbacks of genuine lawns are easy enough to tally. They're thirsty, of course—the average American lawn gulps down 21,600 gallons of water per year. Lawns planted atop sandy soil can be particularly wasteful since they drain more quickly. And the water usage problem is particularly acute when a homeowner insists on laying sod that's ill-suited to the local climate.
Gas-powered mowers, meanwhile, are hazardous to more than just eardrums. A 2001 study by Sweden's Stockholm University found that an hour's worth of mowing resulted in the same amount of smog-forming emissions as driving a car 93 miles. Mower manufacturers contend that their newer models have become cleaner, yet they still resist calls to add catalytic converters to their products; according to the Swedes, doing so would reduce mower emissions by 80 percent.
Another knock against real grass is that it's frequently drizzled with fertilizer, most of which is synthetic. American homeowners use about 3 million metric tons of synthetic lawn fertilizer per year. The fossil fuel equivalent of a barrel of oil goes into manufacturing 560 pounds of such fertilizer, so our collective lawn habit is costing us more than 11.8 million barrels of oil annually. We also use 70 million pounds of pesticides and herbicides on our lawns every year. Clippings that are improperly disposed of can end up polluting major waterways.
On the plus side, lawns do act as carbon sinks. According to a 2005 NASA study, the United States is covered with roughly 40 million acres of tended lawns. Assuming all clippings are bagged and tossed in the trash, those lawns can soak up about 13.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide per year. But the study's authors stressed that the lawns' carbon absorption is likely negated by the amount of energy that goes into making synthetic fertilizer and powering mowers.
While it's not entirely maintenance-free, synthetic grass requires neither water nor fertilizer nor mowing. Its greatest environmental sin occurs during manufacturing, since the production of polyethylene and other essential fake-grass materials (such as polymers and elastomeric coatings) is energy intensive. One must also consider the inevitable disposal issues—like most plastics, aside from those found in beverage and detergent bottles, artificial turf is typically landfilled rather than recycled.
So how bad is fake grass? The best life-cycle study the Lantern could find is this one (PDF), in which Canada's Athena Institute tried to calculate the carbon toll of converting a school's playing field from real grass to artificial. The new field could be made carbon neutral, the study's authors concluded, by planting and maintaining 1,861 trees for a decade. But keep in mind that this was an athletic pitch measuring 96,840 square feet, not a piddling single-family lawn. And Athena's calculations had to take into account the installation of PVC pipes for drainage, something that may not affect the average homeowner.
There are also many environmental activists who revile fake grass that uses rubber infill—that is, crumbs of recycled tires sprinkled between the blades, in order to provide cushioning. They claim that these rubber bits can cause health problems if inhaled; the artificial-turf industry counters that such fears are scientifically unwarranted. The Lantern will note only that the infill issue seems to affect athletic fields more than ornamental lawns and that there are artificial options that don't include rubber crumbs.
The bottom line is that, whichever lawn type you choose, you should commit to managing it responsibly. If you want to minimize your water and fertilizer use by going the fake route, make sure you purchase a quality product that won't have to be replaced for a decade or more.
But if you don't feel comfortable with plastic, think about drastically altering your lawn-care practices. For starters, compost your clippings instead of bagging them; per the NASA study, this can nearly triple your lawn's effectiveness as a carbon sink. Ditch your aging gas-powered mower in favor of a reel push mower. And make the switch to organic fertilizers that contain ingredients like cornmeal or seaweed.
Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.
[Thought you might be interested in excerpts from this article. --pws]
Entering its second season, the study has found that 47 of about 170 species known to be breeding in the state have declined by at least 10 percent over the past three decades.
The American kestrel is among the birds whose numbers are dropping sharply and unexpectedly. No one is sure why the small falcon is in such big trouble. Suburban sprawl may be part of the reason, but the state is also losing farmland to forest. Since kestrels thrive in open fields and pastures, the rise of dense woods means no more mice, grasshoppers, and other meadow prey.
"Birds are tricky, and the reasons for population losses or gains aren't necessarily the obvious ones," said Joan Walsh, an ornithologist and director of the project. "It isn't always because of 'bad' bulldozers ripping away nature. Farms go down, fallow fields grow up, and birds that require open land disappear. The flip side? Birds that like woodier habitats may move in."
The Cooper's hawk, for example, is proliferating in older suburbs like Concord and Lincoln that are now thickly timbered.
"Each bird has its own story," Walsh said.
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| Black Capped Chickadee 600 x 461 - 50k - jpg www.ohio-nature.com | Black-Capped Chickadee 470 x 300 - 30k - jpg www.birdsandblooms.com | Black-capped Chickadee 400 x 400 - 27k - aspx identify.whatbird.com | ... of the Black-Capped Chickadee 417 x 348 - 50k - jpg www.learnbirdsongs.com | Black-capped Chickadee 985 x 802 - 169k - jpg www.johnsonmill.com | Black-capped Chickadees 400 x 303 - 37k - jpg web2.uwindsor.ca | black-capped chickadee photo 530 x 380 - 164k - jpg animal.discovery.com |
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| CAROLINA CHICKADEE 400 x 301 - 56k - jpg www.outdooralabama.com | Carolina Chickadee 450 x 379 - 24k - jpg www.fws.gov | Carolina Chickadee, Gary Carter's ... 408 x 650 - 16k www.birdsasart.com | Carolina Chickadee. 546 x 411 - 74k - jpg main.nc.us | Carolina Chickadee Breeding Male ... 400 x 400 - 21k - aspx identify.whatbird.com | A Carolina Chickadee brings a ... 428 x 600 - 51k - jpg www.naturalsciences.org | Carolina Chickadee (maybe!) 704 x 586 - 59k - jpg www.howardsview.com |
Relatives of a Chinese tourist who was killed Thursday hiking in New Hampshire's White Mountains in what authorities called a rare accident are questioning whether better warnings about the dangers of the trail, or a quicker medical response, could have prevented the death.
Shu Qin, a 28-year-old on vacation from Shanghai, was hiking on the Falling Waters Trail in Franconia when a boulder split from a ledge and came crashing 40 feet onto her.
She was still conscious in her husband's arms as family members sought medical help in the isolation of the wilderness after the 2:30 p.m. incident.
"She was begging him, in Chinese, 'My husband, my husband, help me, help me,' " Jeff A. Gruneich, a brother-in-law from Wellesley who was with Qin when the boulder fell, said yesterday.
rest of article
Living by "green" principles can be extremely satisfying, but how do you do it? Surely, it's not by purchasing more "green" products, because buying and using more "things" is all part of the problem. Mildred Jeter and Thomas Loving grew up as friends and neighbors in Caroline County, Va. In June 1958, Thomas got 18-year-old Mildred pregnant, and the young lovers decided to get married. Ordinarily, that would have been the respectable thing to do. But Mildred was black, Thomas was white, and the Commonwealth of Virginia and 15 other states still had laws on the books prohibiting miscegenation. Mildred and Thomas had to travel to Washington, D.C., to get married in a civil ceremony. Then they returned home to Central Point, Va.
A few weeks later, the local sheriff literally burst into the newlyweds' bedroom and arrested them for violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. ("If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.") The Lovings were convicted by a judge who wrote, "Almighty God … did not intend for the races to mix" but agreed to suspend their one-year jail sentence provided they left Virginia and didn't return for 25 years.
The couple moved to Washington, D.C., and Mildred, hoping to end this exile, pleaded her case in a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union, which agreed to represent the Lovings. In 1967, Loving v. Virginia reached the Supreme Court. Citing the 14th Amendment, the court overturned the Lovings' conviction and ruled that all anti-miscegenation laws would henceforth be null and void (see the opinion below). "Under our Constitution," wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the freedom to marry or not marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed upon by the state." At least two subsequent Supreme Court justices have Mildred Loving to thank for the legality of their own interracial marriages.
The Lovings returned to Virginia, but, sadly, they enjoyed only a few years together before Thomas was killed in a car accident in 1975. Mildred survived the crash and lived an additional 33 years. She died yesterday at 68.
The summer when I was 4, my mother took me each Friday to the town library to sit in the dark with a juice box, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and 10 or 20 other kids to watch a movie. This was a year or two before VCRs became ubiquitous, when watching movies was still by necessity a communal pastime. These library outings happened each week, but there's only one movie I can remember—vividly—seeing there that summer: a half-hour, nearly wordless French film from the 1950s called The Red Balloon.
Directed by Albert Lamorisse and starring his 5-year-old son Pascal, The Red Balloon, just out on DVD, is about a boy who, seeing the object named in the title tied to a lamppost one morning, shimmies up the pole to untie it and take it with him around Paris. He soon discovers that the balloon has a mind of its own and wants to play. He also learns that adults feel threatened by the distracting, impetuous object: With his bright red companion tagging along, he's tossed into detention at school and out of church entirely. His fellow 5-year-olds, meanwhile, see the balloon merely as something to be grabbed and poked and, eventually, destroyed.
Pascal's devotion to the balloon singles him out from his peers, and viewers (or like-minded 4-year-olds, at least) come to identify with this unassuming outsider. The movie is not straightforwardly allegorical, but the balloon does represent a kind of freedom and individualism at odds with the conformity of school and church and the bullying ways of the mob. When the film debuted, to great acclaim—it won best short film at Cannes and, remarkably, the Oscar for best original screenplay—these qualities had a special resonance: Made a decade or so after the liberation of Paris, the film celebrates a very Parisian balloon, all joie de vivre, surrounded by people who seem more suited to the Vichy era. (The schoolmaster in particular has the look of a collaborator.)
The balloon, in this reading, is the resistance, fighting not only authority but also ugliness—for, above all, Pascal's balloon is pretty, a perfect red orb of extraordinary hue, filmed to contrast with the gray streets and buildings of the city. After a stunning death scene (one of the little bullies punctures the balloon with a slingshot so that it slowly, painfully deflates, at which point another boy cruelly stomps it to death), all the balloons of Paris take flight and alight on Pascal, who wraps himself in their strings and is then carried through the sky above the city. You can interpret this ending in various ways, if you're so inclined, but the primary response to seeing those many-colored dots floating through a cloudless sky is "Wow, that's beautiful."
That is also the response one has to the best work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the 60-year-old Taiwanese filmmaker whose latest movie, The Flight of the Red Balloon, is an homage to the Lamorisse classic. Or, rather, it's the response some have to his movies, which are characterized by long takes (often with little camera movement) and a disregard for traditional story structure. His champions—like Times film critic Manohla Dargis—speak of his "mastery of film space," the way he arranges people and objects in striking compositions on the screen. Detractors, such as Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, see a problem with "what happens" in his films—namely, "not enough."
Hou's Flight, now in the midst of a small U.S. run, stars Juliette Binoche, bleach-blond and wonderfully unkempt as Suzanne, a Parisian woman who provides voices for a puppet theater. She also deals with the deadbeat tenants in the apartment below; pleads with an absent husband off writing a novel in Montreal; and takes rather erratic care of her son, Simon. When the movie begins, she has just hired Song (Fang Song) to be Simon's nanny. Both women are artists: Suzanne is a performer, the center of attention, while Song is an observer, collecting material (she's working on her own homage to The Red Balloon). Both are clearly devoted to their work—and, in their different ways, self-absorbed.
Which brings us to Simon, the heir to Pascal. Though he doesn't lack for company, Simon seems just as isolated as his predecessor. With his PlayStation and his piano lessons, he's far busier than his 1950s forebear, who had little in his schedule to interfere with balloon-following. (If Simon ever sees The Red Balloon, it's safe to assume it will not be in a dark library with a bunch of other kids, but at home, and on Blu-ray.) There's a commentary here, also present in Hou's other recent films, on the hectic pace of contemporary life and the sheer number of distractions with which a mere balloon would have to contend for the attentions of a young boy.
In Flight's opening scene, which is directly adapted from the Lamorisse original, Simon tries to get the balloon to join him on public transportation (the subway this time, rather than a trolley). The balloon is coy, floating behind the leaves of a tree for a minute or two, in a manner reminiscent of the original balloon's occasional flirtatiousness. Except that the balloon in Flight never comes back out into the open: It is nearly always behind a window or a door, just outside the world of Simon, Suzanne, and Song. In the movie's longest passage, all three of them sit around their apartment, up to various things, while a fourth person tunes the piano and the red balloon hovers outside. Here, Hou's talent for layering the screen with multiple points of attention—and his patience in allowing the viewer's focus to drift slowly to each of these points—is at its most impressive. The scene is seven or eight minutes long and all a single take.
The argument may seem clear: The enemies of beauty are no longer school and church and the mob but the clutter and distraction of contemporary life. And yet the sheer loveliness of the piano-tuning scene complicates that idea: Hou has crafted an exquisite scene out of just such dissonance and disorder. Perhaps, he seems to suggest, we can find beauty in clutter and distraction, with a little more patience and quiet attention. Hou has not updated The Red Balloon so much as adapted its symbolism for his own purposes.
In the film's penultimate scene, Simon visits the Musee d'Orsay in Paris on a field trip, and we watch as his class discusses "Le Ballon," by Félix Vallotton. In the painting, a child in the foreground runs after a red ball, while two women in the distance go about their business. By reaching a century into the past ("Le Ballon" is from 1899; one of the film's working titles was À la recherche du ballon rouge), Hou implies that the red balloon, and whatever it represents, has always been elusive, and that Simon will chase after it in his own way, as Pascal did in his. One of Simon's classmates describes the painting as "a bit happy and a bit sad," since the foreground is light and sunny and the background is dark and shadowed. This is also true of Hou's film, which, rather than lifting Simon above Paris with a phalanx of multicolored balloons, ends with a single red balloon floating alone above the city—distant, perhaps, but not entirely out of reach.
I've been tossing my used yogurt cups in the recycling bin for years. So imagine my horror when I recently got around to reading the fine print on my city's sanitation guidelines—yogurt cups, it turns out, are supposed to go in the regular trash. Has my inadvertent sorting error ruined many tons' worth of recyclable plastics?
No, there's hardly a need to flagellate yourself over such a minor environmental sin. Sure, you've been making life ever-so-slightly less pleasant for the hardworking employees of your local recycling facility—they exert considerable effort picking through incoming refuse. But your yogurt cups, which are probably made of polypropylene, won't cause much damage to the recycling stream itself. The same can't be said for items made of polyvinyl chloride, such as certain kinds of pipes and food containers. Mix those in with your empty soda bottles and you could be wreaking some serious havoc.
Your recycling center's distaste for yogurt cups is par for the course throughout the United States. Of the seven types of numbered plastics, only No. 1 (polyethylene terephthalate, or PET) and No. 2 (high-density polyethylene, or HDPE) are commonly recycled. Even in those rare municipalities that ask residents to throw all plastics in the same recycling bin, it's mostly just the PET (mostly in the form of beverage bottles) and HDPE (detergent bottles) that get processed. While it's technically feasible to recycle other plastics, the process is expensive and results in plastic that's widely deemed inferior. Products made from plastics No. 3 through No. 7—a range that includes food trays, grocery bags, six-pack rings, and your yogurt cups (designated No. 5)—are typically either landfilled or shipped overseas for incineration. (There's great interest in the developing world in burning plastics to recover the fossil fuels [PDF] from which they're made.)
When loads of plastic are dumped on a recycling facility's floor, the sorting fun begins. Workers often start by picking through the piles in search of obviously discordant items—kiddie play sets, lawn furniture, clothing mannequins. They also scan for plastic mounds that are drenched in nonrecyclable trash, such as food slurries or medical waste. While a little caked-on tomato sauce isn't going to ruin a batch of PET bottles, a Dumpster's worth of nonrecyclable garbage will; if a large apartment building was careless about separating its rubbish, then hundreds of pounds of plastics may have to be sent to the landfill. According to a 2005 Environmental Protection Agency study in the Pacific Northwest, 24 percent of plastic bottles were rejected as too contaminated for recycling. (By comparison, 14 percent of metal goods were rejected, and just 1 percent of newspapers.)
The remaining plastics are then sent along a conveyor belt, where they're sorted by hand—a hazardous task, given the prevalence of syringes and other dangerous surprises in the deluge. Workers mostly look for empty beverage bottles, which are the industry's version of gold nuggets—such bottles are almost always made out of PET, the most easily recycled plastic. This is likely the step in the process at which your erroneously sorted yogurt cups are picked out.
If your misplaced polypropylene slips past the human inspectors, however, it may get caught during the ensuing phase, when the machines go to work. Most use either X-rays or near infrared spectroscopy to analyze the chemical properties of passing plastics. Items that register as either non-PET or non-HDPE are ejected from the sorting belt with jets of air. The best machines claim an accuracy rate of 98 percent; they are occasionally stymied when bottles are stuck together or excessively flattened. As a result, a final manual inspection is often necessary to verify that a load is free of any meaningful contaminants.
The nastiest of those potential contaminants isn't your polypropylene but rather PVC (aka plastic No. 3). Though it's increasingly rare in the United States due to concerns over dioxin emissions during manufacture, PVC is still prevalent enough to ruin many a load of otherwise recyclable PET. The stuff is the bane of recyclers everywhere: A single PVC bottle can irrevocably contaminate an entire 800-pound load of otherwise desirable PET, rendering it unfit to be made into new products—PVC forms acids when mixed with PET, and those acids can make the recycled plastic unacceptably fragile. Because of this danger, many recycling facilities now employ machines such as FlakeSort, which analyzes the PVC content of processed plastic "flakes" before they're sold on the open market.
Those flakes are rarely turned into new food-grade products but are "downcycled" into pipes, fence posts, and picnic tables—exactly the sorts of products that recycling facilities reject during their initial screenings. So when these post-consumer items are no longer wanted, they're ultimately destined for the landfill or for an incinerator in Guangdong Province.
Despite its labor-intensive and relatively inefficient nature, plastics recycling still makes long-term sense. The EPA estimates that making a ton of plastic out of used PET bottles saves 55.9 gigajoules of energy over manufacturing a ton of plastic from scratch. And in 2005, Britain's Waste Resources and Action Programme analyzed (PDF) 60 different life-cycle scenarios for plastics. The organization concluded that recycling was invariably superior to landfilling, in terms of net carbon emissions. Recycling was clearly preferable to incineration, meanwhile, in more than 76 percent of the scenarios. It bears noting, however, that the WRAP study doesn't seem to have factored in the energy used to transport plastics to overseas incinerators nor the possibility that those incinerators lack proper emissions safeguards. (Environmentalists fear that burning PVC, in particular, can lead to toxic emissions, and that even ostensibly safer plastics contain heavy metals in their pigments.)
The equation tilts more heavily in recycling's favor once you consider the recent rise in oil prices. About 8 percent of the world's oil supply goes toward making plastics—half into the actual feedstock and half to power the manufacturing plants. With crude futures currently hovering around $120 barrel, there's a lot of incentive for companies to figure out how to use recycled flakes in lieu of virgin plastic. If this trend continues, maybe they'll even start jonesing for your yogurt cups.
THE United Nations Population Fund projected last week that Russia's population will drop from 142 million today to 100 million in the next 40 to 50 years. The agency's report praised recent government efforts to increase birth rates and extend lives. But not enough is being done to counter stark demographic forces: an impending decrease in the number of women of child-bearing age, poor healthcare, rampant vehicular and industrial accidents, widespread alcoholism, and social conditions that discourage family formation.
These trends have disturbing implications, not just for Russia and its political leadership, but for the United States. No amount of windfall profits from oil and natural gas in the hands of Kremlin plutocrats can save Russia from a many-faceted decline - unless surpluses are invested in medical and social services, industrial modernization, and hefty incentives for child-bearing.
Russia's government is in denial. Officials tout a recent uptick in births. But it will be ephemeral, because it is due to a larger-than-usual cohort of women of child-bearing age who were born during a minor baby boom in the 1980s. After the Soviet Union imploded, Russia fell on hard times, and the birth rate and the population dropped. Between 1992 and 2007, there were 12 million more deaths than births.
And as the workforce shrinks, repercussions will be felt in the military, on farms, and across the economy. Ethnic Russians already worry that they will cease to be a majority in the country's far east, along the border with China. A Russia anxious about its vulnerabilities, its diminishing human capital, and its borders is likely to be a prickly partner for the West.
The need to improve US-Russian relations has barely figured in the current presidential campaign. But it should. Few other countries contain greater potential security threats. Russia still has an enormous nuclear arsenal, insufficiently secured nuclear materials, facilities that are a prime target for terrorists, and a promiscuous arms industry with clients worldwide.
On top of all this worrisome hardware, Russian political leaders harbor deep resentments over what they see as America's broken promises since the end of the Cold War. They see a high-handed attempt to humiliate Russia in Bill Clinton's expansion of NATO, President Bush's annulment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, his planned deployment of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the recent recognition of Kosovo's independence.
Against this background, American support for pro-Western movements in Ukraine and Georgia have taken on threatening overtones for Kremlin policy makers. President Vladimir Putin and his advisers suspect that Washington has been encircling Russia and encroaching on what Russians call their near-abroad.
Paranoid or not, Russia's foreign policy elites have come to a troublesome consensus about US intentions. They complain, for instance, that the Bush administration wants Putin's help in getting Iran to suspend its enrichment of uranium, but does not respect Russian interests in return.
They fret about a Cold War mentality in Washington, an attitude that scorns Russia as a vanquished power whose security concerns need not be taken seriously. Russian strategists infer that the ultimate aim of Bush hard-liners is regime change in Russia.
The next president will have to undo the damage that was done to this crucial relationship by the last two presidents. This does not mean pretending that Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, are Jeffersonian democrats. It does mean reducing nuclear stockpiles, taking nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert, avoiding a new arms race with Moscow, securing nuclear materials, working out mutually beneficial arrangements for natural gas pipelines, and treating Russia as a proud nation with legitimate security interests.
A Russia that is wealthy from energy resources but weak from social decline can become a dangerously resentful spoiler instead of a partner in building a peaceful world order. The next president could hardly do more for American security than to help Russia past its anxieties about the West and its own internal fragility.
