The Environment
Geothermal
Speaking of Iceland … one of the coolest things about the country is how well they’ve used geothermal energy:
In Iceland, there are five major geothermal power plants which produce about 26% (2006) of the country’s electricity. In addition, geothermal heating meets the heating and hot water requirements for around 87% of the nation’s housing.
I’ve always […]
Green
Red A recently had a post which seems to imply that Taiwan’s own hosing bubble is about to burst, with housing prices way above their actual value. I haven’t shopped for a place here on the East Coast, but I know that things are a lot cheaper and that there is rampant housing speculation.
Looking […]
Trees
I woke up to see this holocaust outside our house. It seems that one of our neighbors who is a member of the home-owners association was complaining about ants coming into her house from the trees, so the solution was to cut them all down.
So now, instead of the beautiful dappled light and green leaves […]
Föhn
The typhoon currently cutting across the northern tip of Taiwan didn’t hit us too hard in Hualien, but we did get something I’d never experienced before: a föhn (fénfēng 焚風 in Chinese).
Paraphrasing Wikipedia, a föhn occurs when a deep layer of prevailing wind is forced over a mountain range. As the wind moves upslope, it […]
Chinese Democracy
Three interesting quotes about democracy in China. Each pointing in a different direction:
The first from a Rick Perlstein review of Mann’s The China Fantasy in The Nation:
Nicholas Kristof dishonored the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre in 2004, Mann points out, with a column titled “The Tiananmen Victory.” The democracy activists had won: “After the Chinese […]
Dioxin
The Tainan City Government yesterday issued a medical report showing that residents living near a closed factory in southern Taiwan have extremely high levels of dioxin in their blood, in one case 30 times higher than the standards accepted by the United Nations.
… According to the report, one of the surveyed residents had 951 pg. […]
Porgera
Fellow Savage Mind, Alex Golub, was interviewed extensively for this excellent article in the Ottawa Citizen about conflict between a Canadian mining company and the local population in Papua New Guinea (where Alex did his fieldwork):
And so the stage was set for the tragedy that is Porgera: On the one side, hundreds of people who […]
Suicide
In 2004 I wrote that rural poverty, rather than a rejection of communalist policies, was largely responsible for throwing the BJP out of power in the last Indian national elections. So I was not surprised, on my recent trip to India, to find that rural poverty remains a huge issue. Between 1997 and 2005, twenty-five […]
Smoke, Dust, Haze
I was checking the weather forecast as we pack for India. I was a little surprised at what I saw for the three cities we will be visiting: Ahmedabad, New Delhi, and Derhadun:
I just love that Indian sunlight!
{forecast, India, sunlight, weather}
Pakistan
I know everyone’s budget is drained, but please give something to help Pakistan. This post at Cliopatria recommends some charities you might not have heard of.
Loads of good links and round-ups in the following posts:
Global Voices
Pinko Feminist Hell Cat
Lorenz
Amardeep
Kathryn Cramer
{Earthquake, Pakistan}
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
