Simon Norfolk is a war photographer, but in a slightly different sense than you’d expect; Norfolk doesn’t focus on images that convey, e.g., a sense of immediacy or suffering, but on scenery and landscape, putting the destruction of war into a different context.

It’s interesting stuff, and a curious approach.

You can see two of his photographs here and a couple more here (scroll down).

(originally via but she’s a girl; additional links via Kunstdunst)

Update: apparently the Kunstdunst site has taken down the pictures, but you can still find some of Norfolk’s stuff thanks to the Wayback machine (and yes, you still have to scroll down).

Something brought a Scientific American article entitled “Rethinking Green Consumerism” bubbling to the surface (it’s actually a 2002 article), and I chanced to stumble across it.

It’s an interesting article, in a generic and superficial feel-good way.

The sub-headline boldy declares

“Buying green products won’t be enough to save biodiversity in the tropics. A new plan for marketing conservation services may be the answer.”

The article is based, in part, on the fact that public lands in the developing world are currently being leased out for incredibly, incredibly rock-bottom rates. The idea being, conservation groups can lease biological hotspots (outbidding, e.g., lumber concerns), thus saving the land, recompensing whatever indigenous peoples might happen to occupy the land, and basically making everybody happy.

Curiously, the authors contrast this approach against current trends to produce “green products” (products produced in a sustainable manner) as a way of pursuing conservation goals.

Which is well and good—and to be fair, you can’t really expect a 6-page Scientific American article to comprehensively put forth an idea for fixing all that’s wrong—but nowhere is the word growth mentioned; ‘consumption’ is mentioned, but not in the context of human resource consumption being a severe limiting factor on any chances of survival.

Nowhere do the authors give so much as a head-nod to the necessity of curtailing consumer consumption. Oh well. Presumably, as long as conservation groups have leases on critical habitat, we can go about our normal patterns of consumption.

Thank goodness! For a minute, I was worried.

(In all seriousness, it’s a competent article, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the authors in fact believe consumption is a factor that must be addressed in addition to their own ‘solution’. Nor would I be surprised to find out that the authors are technologists, utterly convinced that we can continue consuming products as long as technological solutions are found to magically increase efficiency. This uncertainty is the problem—we can’t know, from the article, what the authors believe w/r/t consumption. Consumption is the invisible elephant that most people ignore and everyone else assumes that ‘most people’ know it’s a problem. Until it’s out in the open, we can’t very well come up with a feasible solution to ecological dilemmas.)

(via SciAmerican: “Rethinking Green Consumerism” (PDF) by Jared Hardner and Richard Rice [May 2002])

Starbucks. It’s a corporate symbol that some people love to love, and others love to hate. So what is it: epitome of the evils of globalization or a righteous sign of progressive business practices? Kim Fellner investigates.

Okay, so it’s not exactly an “investigation,” but the author does cover some interesting and thought-provoking topics, disabusing us of certain notions (e.g., that Starbucks is a monolith, lacking diversity in its workforce) while reasserting others (e.g., that Starbucks doesn’t do so hot with unions).

Anyway, it’s an interesting article that’s worth a read if the topic’s one that resonates with you.

(ColorLines: “The Starbucks Paradox” by Kim Fellner [April 27, 2004] via AlterNet)

Iraq Coalition Casualty Count offers something it calls fatality metrics, which allows you to instantly create a graph that, say, shows how many coalition forces, by age, have died so far (19.1% of fatalities being 20 or 21). Or you could graph fatalities by state (California leads, but PA’s #4, right after England—which I didn’t know was a state but, you know) or make a chart showing cause of death during the week of Christmas (16 by hostile fire), etc.

(CNN also has a comprehensive list of coalition casualties, including their pictures, hometowns, and details of their deaths, etc.)

And then of course there’s Iraq Body Count, where you can get a civilian count, which is far more daunting.

Hope this helps, Mr. Wolfowitz.

In what was a potentially fatal gaffe, some HIV-positive US military personnel were vaccinated against smallpox; had any of the vaccinees been anything more than HIV-positive (i.e., had they had full-blown AIDs), even the weakened smallpox virus present in the vaccine might’ve put a serious crimp in their, um, living.

(On a more positive note, the incident did spawn some constructive debate on what exactly should be policy regarding smallpox vaccinations and HIV-positive people who also happen to be at risk of contracting the basically extinct disease [i.e., we’re assuming military personnel here])

(via EurekaAlert: “HIV-positive U.S. military personnel accidentally vaccinated against smallpox” [April 15, 2004])