The Post-Partisan Emporium

  ‘Expresso Vaccines’ and Lessons from the American Chestnut Tree Why a vaccine designed in two days faced less regulatory scrutiny than a venerable nut tree that sustained life for centuries Dr. Mathew Maavak A tree that once fed multitudes now faces a decade of federal red tape before a single seed can touch wild soil, while a brand-new genetic vaccine, cooked up in 48 hours and injected into billions, sailed through approval in under a year. One restores a vanished forest, the other rewrote human cells on a planetary scale. Both are genetic modifications, yet one is treated as a potential ecological threat while the other is hailed as a modern miracle. Welcome to the “expresso lane” of modern biotechnology, where speed, risk, and scrutiny depend entirely on whose veins are on the line. Reign of the Chestnut King In the ancient forests of Appalachia, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) once towered as the unmatched monarch. Stretching from the southern ridges to southern Can...

  An Anthropocene Worth Having John Michael Greer For more than two years now I’ve been trying to figure out how to introduce a way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature that cuts straight across nearly all of the conventional thinking on that subject. It’s been a challenge. I’m glad to say, though, that a project now being lauded by the corporate-enabler end of the environmental movement offers a very good way to talk about the way of thinking I have in mind. That’s not because the project in question embodies that way of thinking. It’s because the project goes so far in the other direction that it offers the perfect contrast to the way of approaching nature I want to discuss. Nature, as envisioned by the 30 by 30 Project. The project in question is called “30 by 30.” Its ostensible goal is to have 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface defined as protected areas by 2030. What that label “protected areas” means is very hard to figure out from the websites and press relea...