Excellent articles

I came across two excellent articles and want to recommend them to you.

The first is a piece by Paul Krugman which was published in the 2/27/06 NY Times, and then in the Oregonian - "Graduates Versus Oligarchs. In it he discusses increasing economic inequality in the U.S. and debunks the myth that high skill/educated workers are pulling away from the rest of the population. "Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint."

The other article is in the March/April 2006 edition of Mother Jones - The Fate of the Ocean. In this very well sourced article author Julia Whitty gives a detailed discussion of the current status of the oceans and where it is headed if we don't take action. The following quote sums up the article, but does not convey the detail of analysis Whitty provides.

"The 25 years I've spent at sea filming nature documentaries have provided a brief yet definitive window into these changes. Oceanic problems once encountered on a local scale have gone pandemic, and these pandemics now merge to birth new monsters. Tinkering with the atmosphere, we change the ocean's chemistry radically enough to threaten life on earth as we know it. Making tens of thousands of chemical compounds each year, we poison marine creatures who sponge up plastics and PCBs, becoming toxic waste dumps in the process. Carrying everything from nuclear waste to running shoes across the world ocean, shipping fleets spew as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as the entire profligate United States. Protecting strawberry farmers and their pesticide methyl bromide, we guarantee that the ozone hole will persist at least until 2065, threatening the larval life of the sea. Fishing harder, faster, and more ruthlessly than ever before, we drive large predatory fish toward global extinction, even though fish is the primary source of protein for one in six people on earth. Filling, dredging, and polluting the coastal nurseries of the sea, we decimate coral reefs and kelp forests, while fostering dead zones."

This is a long article, but well worth the time reading it. If you haven't thought much about the fate of the oceans, this will definitely change your mind.