COLIN BEAVAN, PhD

Blog

What’s good for the planet is good for your baby’s butt

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Remembering back about Bella in diapers and thinking how, if you bring up cloth diapers, people always want to talk about the study that show that the environmental impact of manufacturing plastic diapers is no worse than blah blah blah. Even if I trusted the objectivity of a study funded by Procter & Gamble, who […]

Someone who made a difference

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Tonight I was at the fund-raising dinner of Transportation Alternatives (I’m on the board), and a citizen activist named Mary Beth Kelly who works with TA was honored. We’ve talked a lot on this blog about whether one person can make a difference. In her own way, about her own agenda, Mary Beth has really […]

One day’s reason not to get engulfed by despair

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I don’t know if you read Dave Roberts over at Gristmill, but you really should if you care much about climate politics. You should read Kate Sheppard over there, too. Anyway, when people ask me how I don’t get engulfed in despair about the human race, I tell them I pay attention to what’s going […]

Saving resources, improving lives, securing your corporation’s future

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote: “If the need for a product has to be created by the manufacturer, if aggressive marketing is required to convince people to buy the product, can the product, no matter how renewable its materials, really be called sustainable? Because isn’t using resources to make things we don’t even need the definition […]

Spin, counter-spin, counter-counter-spin and on and on

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Watch the short video above. At first, you think, that proves it. If cell phones can make popcorn kernels pop, the claims that cell phones cause brain tumors must be true (read here for nonspin background on this possibility). The industry denials, the video seems to confirm, are just spin. But then you go to […]