Harpers/Atlantic

Recommended reading in the April issue of Harpers:

• Death of a Mountain - Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia, Erik Reece
• OPEC on the March - Why Iraq still sells its oil a la cartel, Greg Palast
• The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid - Why Social Security won't be enough to save Wall Street, Michael Hudson
• The Cuba Diet - What will you eat when the revolution comes? Bill McKibben

Not available online, but very worthwhile to pick up from the newsstand. Favorite quote from the strip mining article:

These days it is thought unfashionable, even backward, to talk about laws of nature or to read a philosophy, a morality, into the workings of the natural world. For 4,000 years, theologians and philosophers have debated whether an Intelligent Designer stands behind it all. I have nothing to contribute to that discussion. But this much seems clear: this forest certainly demonstrates an intelligence, one it has been honing for 390 million years. Its economy is a closed loop that transforms waste into food. In that alone it is superior to our human economy , where the end of the line is not nutrients but rather toxic industrial waste. Is there design behind this natural intelligence? I have no idea. But I will venture this: The forest knows what it's doing.

From the April issue of The Atlantic, a short article entitled "Crude Politics: The United States, China, and the race for oil security", reprinted here. Check out an interesting website called PetroPulse referenced by that article.