So Politifact rates the Lie of the Year in 2014: Exaggerations about Ebola. Interesting. If you live in Sierra Leone and you met the Tampa Bay Times staff who wrote this, you might be tempted to drown him or her in a sewage ditch. But we don't have sewage ditches here (unless you count, Big Sugar's runoff into the Everglades) and we don't have Ebola.
Those of us living on borrowed time (we are all living on borrowed time) and have the interest or time to ponder might consider the Tampa Bay Times counting its chickens before the eggs hatched.
I'm not going sermonize on Ebola or anything else. I woke up cranky this morning at 3:30 in the morning, the way one worry leads to another, then the next and next. As one gets older, it's harder to stop the hamster wheel whirring.
But as we approach the end of 2014, there are lots of questions aren't there?
I would not be tempted to call Ebola, "the lie of the year". It doesn't do service to all the little and big lies, we pass along the way to New Year's Eve. We do spend a lot of time and energy at Eye On Miami on these. For example, the notion that Jeb Bush is a "moderate", or, the climate change isn't real -- a position embraced by Senator Marco Rubio and Gov. Rick Scott. Or that we can keep putting sand on beaches, indefinitely, to keep our beach-oriented, coastal tourism afloat.
I recall, about thirty years ago now, the first time I was called a "Chicken Little" for warning about the demise of fisheries I had loved so much starting in the early 1970s. I was shocked. How do you measure the risk of losing what sustains us against the short-term thinking that robs us of options for the future?
The reason people react so viscerally to Ebola or bird flu (that hasn't manifested yet as a global threat) is that we are surrounded by slow moving catastrophes we choose to ignore. Why? Do we ignore them, because we can afford to or because it holds no profit to us personally or fails to impact our day-to-day lives?
The question rests. As for Ebola being "the lie of the year"? Emphatically, no.
I just came across the following from Adbusters. The story is nearly a year old, but it does resonate all the way from Vancouver, BC where Adbusters is based to Miami, Florida: the low lying state where Florida Power and Light wants to build two new nuclear reactors in wetlands.
Top 10 jobs for out-of-work Environmentalists
How to survive the ecologically disrupted century to come.
Erik Assadourian 03 February 2014
Now that the nonprofit environmental sector has for the most part gone bust—it was, after all, supported primarily by surplus wealth held by rich individuals and foundations (much of which vanished as the Ponzi-esque global stock market crashed)—many of us “professional” environmentalists are now looking for work. Might I suggest considering the following jobs, as they all have significant growth potential in the years ahead:
Those of us living on borrowed time (we are all living on borrowed time) and have the interest or time to ponder might consider the Tampa Bay Times counting its chickens before the eggs hatched.
I'm not going sermonize on Ebola or anything else. I woke up cranky this morning at 3:30 in the morning, the way one worry leads to another, then the next and next. As one gets older, it's harder to stop the hamster wheel whirring.
But as we approach the end of 2014, there are lots of questions aren't there?
I would not be tempted to call Ebola, "the lie of the year". It doesn't do service to all the little and big lies, we pass along the way to New Year's Eve. We do spend a lot of time and energy at Eye On Miami on these. For example, the notion that Jeb Bush is a "moderate", or, the climate change isn't real -- a position embraced by Senator Marco Rubio and Gov. Rick Scott. Or that we can keep putting sand on beaches, indefinitely, to keep our beach-oriented, coastal tourism afloat.
I recall, about thirty years ago now, the first time I was called a "Chicken Little" for warning about the demise of fisheries I had loved so much starting in the early 1970s. I was shocked. How do you measure the risk of losing what sustains us against the short-term thinking that robs us of options for the future?
The reason people react so viscerally to Ebola or bird flu (that hasn't manifested yet as a global threat) is that we are surrounded by slow moving catastrophes we choose to ignore. Why? Do we ignore them, because we can afford to or because it holds no profit to us personally or fails to impact our day-to-day lives?
The question rests. As for Ebola being "the lie of the year"? Emphatically, no.
I just came across the following from Adbusters. The story is nearly a year old, but it does resonate all the way from Vancouver, BC where Adbusters is based to Miami, Florida: the low lying state where Florida Power and Light wants to build two new nuclear reactors in wetlands.
Top 10 jobs for out-of-work Environmentalists
How to survive the ecologically disrupted century to come.
Erik Assadourian 03 February 2014
Now that the nonprofit environmental sector has for the most part gone bust—it was, after all, supported primarily by surplus wealth held by rich individuals and foundations (much of which vanished as the Ponzi-esque global stock market crashed)—many of us “professional” environmentalists are now looking for work. Might I suggest considering the following jobs, as they all have significant growth potential in the years ahead:
