2018/19 Biosemiotics Gatherings

My review of the 2018 Biosemiotics Gathering that Terry Deacon and I organized at UC Berkeley is now a Featured Article and Open Access at the Journal of Biosemiotics. The Biosemiotics Gathering this year will be in Moscow.

Islands of unsustainability

John Rawls’s (1971) notion of national self-sufficiency in terms of resources is about as far from our current globalized world as we can get, in terms of theory aimed at non-ideal applications. Globalization is a fact of life. And yet, with each displacement in...

Smoking as Acceptable Rebellion.

Notes from a debrief of Philip Morris’s 1998 Litter Focus Group read: “Non-smokers tend to give smokers a lot of slack about throwing down a butt,” claiming that “throwing it on the ground eliminates fire risk,” and that litter is a “natural result of outdoor smoking...

Every day should be Sustainability Day

In Erasmus University Rotterdam’s weekly online magazine Erasmus Magazine, a condensed version of my speech I gave Monday March 4th, 2019 for the Opening Ceremony of the Erasmus Sustainability Days is now published. It’s also available in Dutch [in...

E-cigarette e-waste litter is an environmental health harm that can be stopped before it metastasizes

My op-ed in the American Journal of Public Health that appeared this week discusses the new tobacco waste stream of electronic cigarette waste. Electronic waste is already the fastest growing waste stream globally. Creating a new product that has no current...