In the 1990s, many public health advocates homed in on food availability as a significant influence on obesity. Major anti-obesity campaigns now center on radically remaking school and neighborhood food environments by reducing access to unhealthy foods and improving access to healthy ones. With this approach advocates have fostered a reductive story about obesity that appeals to liberal audiences but doesn’t comport particularly well with the evidence. Against the popular discourse, those most at risk for obesity would be far better served by strategies demonstrated to improve overall health than calls for more grocery stores and farmers’ markets.

Nostalgia for the boom economic growth years of the 1950s and 1960s is misplaced. Americans of all classes have grown materially richer every decade since. The lower growth rates today are a function of the slower metabolism of large economies, not a sign that American capitalism is fundamentally broken. Higher rates of economic growth might be desirable, but whether or not they materialize, the stagnation discourse misrepresents the country's economic health. We will be better at solving unemployment and poverty by starting from the recognition that rising prosperity remains the norm of American economic life.

Thirteen years after he authored The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell would argue in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism that rising affluence and changing values would result in greater social fragmentation and create a crisis for democratic governance. What Bell did not foresee was that all that heterogeneity would ossify into a new polarization: the enforcement of orthodoxy by powerful ideological institutions, the narrowing of partisan platforms, and gridlock on many of the most serious issues facing the country. This issue of Breakthrough Journal is dedicated to understanding the forces behind wicked problems, including ideological polarization itself, and what can be done to overcome them.

The theory of climate justice tells us that the gap between rich and poor and the looming threat of catastrophic climate change are not simply unfortunate circumstances that demand our attention and action, but rather the result of active efforts on the part of rich nations, wealthy elites, and powerful corporations to profit on the backs of the global poor and the environment. But demands for climate justice too often ignore basic practicalities of energy, poverty, and climate change, directing our gaze away from the issues that really matter to the future prospects of both the global poor and the planet and toward issues that don’t.

When the eurozone was on the brink last fall, Michael Lind's summer Breakthrough Journal essay, "Against Cosmopolitanism," appeared prescient. What just a few years ago seemed to be the permanent alignment of interests between the radically different economies of Germany and Greece was replaced by an awareness of the currency union's fragility and contingency. Economic integration had outpaced political integration. The nation-state wasn't giving way to global governance. It was prevailing everywhere.

Not so fast, say Ulrich Beck, one of the world's most influential living sociologists and author of the landmark 1986 tome, Risk Society, and Nils Gilman of Monitor 360 and Michael Costigan of Global Business Network. Cosmopolitanism may not be up to snuff but the nation-state isn't doing so hot either, they argue in a new Breakthrough Forum we publish today.
 

Has humanity crossed a so-called "planetary threshold"? Will the Earth soon be no longer capable of supporting humanity? Or do such limits even exist?

As a growing consensus among scientists has recognized the onset of the Anthropocene -- in which humans have become the dominant ecological force on the planet -- some have expressed concern that human civilization is fundamentally unsustainable. In his Breakthrough Journal essay "Planet of No Return," environmental scientist Erle Ellis argued that this view was at odds with science and human history -- it has been human limits, not natural ones, that have shaped human development.

Not everyone agrees. Now, in a new Breakthrough Forum we publish today -- featuring responses from Bill McKibben, Nils Gilman, Robert Dello-Russo, Ronnie Hawkins, and Francisco Seijo, as well as a reply by Ellis -- the debate over what the Anthropocene means, and how we ought to respond in the coming decades, takes center stage.

In their Breakthrough Journal essay, "Conservation in the Anthropocene," Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Robert Lalasz showed that conservation is losing the war to protect nature despite winning the battle to create parks and game preserves. While the number of protected areas has risen, species in wild places have fallen. Conservationists must shed their 19th Century vision of pristine nature, the authors wrote, and seek a new vision, one of "a planet in which nature exists amidst a wide variety of modern, human landscapes."

In a new Breakthrough debate, a host of passionate 21st Century conservationists face off with the authors over the resilience of nature, corporate partners, and the state of conservation today.

The Essay:
"Conservation in the Anthropocene," by Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier.
Read a summary of the essay here.

UPDATE: The debate continues at the New York Times. John Lemons, an emeritus professor of biology and environmental sciences at the University of New England, has taken Kareiva to task at Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog.

Kareiva has replied here.

In "Evolve," Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus argued that only by embracing modernization and technological innovation can we overcome this century's formidable environmental problems. Humans have long been co-creators of their environment, and what we call "saving the Earth" will require creating and re-creating it again and again for as long as humans inhabit it.

In a new Breakthrough Debate, two scholars lend criticism to this new "modernization theology."

The call to put "faith" in modernization is cause for concern, contends Jon Christensen, executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. "The troubling history of modernization gives us every reason to be deeply suspicious of anyone who suggests we should simply take it on faith," he writes.

In another response, Leslie Paul Thiele, professor of political science and director of sustainability studies at the University of Florida, argues against a "black and white" view of technology. "The issue is not about being for or against technology," he writes. "The question is this: do we invest in the education and empowerment of citizens such that they can wisely -- which is to say, selectively -- utilize technology in ways that help sustain both a high quality of life and a healthy environment?"

The Essay:
"Evolve," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.

The Responses:
"The Myth of Prometheus," by Leslie Paul Thiele.

"Oh Me of Little Faith," by Jon Christensen.

Last fall, Reagan scholar Steve Hayward declared the conservative movement's starve-the-beast anti-tax strategy a failure. Not only has it failed as a policy, resulting in massive indebtedness and no constraint on the growth of the welfare state, it has failed politically. Soon, he warned, Republicans would be forced to choose between "cuts to popular entitlement programs, deep reductions in national defense spending, and tax increases... It is hard to see how this ends well for conservatives."

The essay served as an electroshock to the libertarian amygdala. While Hayward won plaudits from center-rightists like David Brooks and David Frum, as well as from conservative apostate Andrew Sullivan, Joe Bast of the libertarian Heartland Institute sent Breakthrough Journal a letter, which we publish online today, calling Hayward a "bonehead," and speculating that Hayward is either trying to preserve a dying Reagan coalition (between neocons and libertarians), or just looking for "something to talk about with liberals at cocktail receptions."

In January, the Breakthrough Institute published its report, "Planes, Trains, and Car Bombs," arguing that despite warnings from politicians and terrorism experts that terrorists will pursue "exotic weapons and targets," al Qaeda continues "to carry out the same sorts of attacks they executed in the decades before 9/11."

In the past decade, hirabis have not used biological or chemical weapons, nor have they targeted dams, our food supply, or the Internet. Instead, "al Qaeda directed, financed, or inspired attacks have targeted planes, trains, buses, government and symbolic buildings, and western hotels with bombs (and sometimes assault weapons)."

Now, in a Breakthrough debate, terrorism experts John Mueller, Brian Fishman, and Tom Parker weigh in over the assessment of the terrorist threat, the importance of language when discussing terrorism, and whether we're simply playing into terrorists' hands.

The True Roots of Liberal Policy Failure

Last February, we published an article at Yale Environment 360, "Beyond Cap and Trade, A New Path to Clean Energy":

Putting a price and a binding cap on carbon is not the panacea that many thought it to be. The real road to cutting US emissions, two iconoclastic environmentalists argue, is for the government to help fund the development of cleaner alternatives that are better and cheaper than natural gas.

Economist Gernot Wagner, of the Environmental Defense Fund, responded, arguing that "Innovation is Not Enough: Why Polluters Must Pay":

Innovative energy technologies are certainly essential if the world is to curb carbon emissions. But in response to a recent e360 article by the co-founders of the Breakthrough Institute, an economist argues we must also cap emissions or put a price on carbon in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

At present rates, an American's chance of being killed by a terrorist is about one in 3.5 million per year. The number of people killed worldwide outside of war zones since 2001 by Islamist extremists of all shapes and varieties is a few hundred per year. This number is regrettable, of course. But it scarcely presents an existential or apocalyptic threat.

Every good academic course on terrorism should begin with an inconclusive argument over the definition of the term 'terrorism.' The purpose of that debate is to explore the troublesome questions of legitimacy, targeting, and group dynamics that make terrorism not just a difficult word to define, but a vexing phenomenon to counter. As Menachem Begin recognized when he eschewed the convention of earlier anarchist militants to claim the title 'terrorist' and instead referred to the Irgun as "freedom fighters," terrorism is often a fight over language.

By crafting attacks designed to provoke a draconian state response, terrorists hope to exploit the inevitable societal polarization that results to attract new recruits to their banner while undermining the state's own claim to be acting legitimately.

In his essay, "Liberalism's Modest Proposals," Daniel Sarewitz makes the mistake of presupposing that "liberals" even exist. They don't. So it's no good bashing them because they aren't here. Such talk is an aspect of what I have come to think of as "ideological spectrum disorder," in which antique political categories, corresponding to no groups in the world today, are still used to try to make sense of why different people make different policy choices. I side with Leszek Kolakowski, and Immanuel Wallerstein in seeing the terms "conservative," "liberal," and "radical," as having lost any explanatory power or denotative accuracy. Even David Brooks, in a recent op-ed column in the New York Times has awakened to the fact that the liberals are gone.

If Frankenstein is to serve as a parable for "political ecology," as Bruno Latour suggests in his essay, "Love Your Monsters," then Mary Shelley's plot must be reworked. In the revised version, Dr. Frankenstein is no more than an inquisitive but anxious assistant to the true creator of the monster, his chemistry teacher at the university in Ingolstadt, Professor Waldman. As the professor "infuses the spark of being" into the gigantic human figure, the assistant flees "in breathless horror and disgust". Traumatized by what he has helped create, the young man has a nervous breakdown (as in the novel), which puts him out of action for a long time.