ate one evening in May United States, with investments amounting 1989, in the narrow, cob- to billions. Its clean-cut, youthful mission- bled streets of La Paz, Bo-aries in their white shirts and black ties livia, two Mormon mission- seem as representative of American values aries were shot and killed as the executives of Citibank and other by three terrorists in a yel- American institutions that have been at-low Volkswagen. In a handwritten state- tacked by guerrillas. Nor is this simply a ment...
or Latter-day Saints, "once upon a time"
was yesterday. Perhaps a majority of to-day's adult Saints grew up in a different uni- verse, one insulated from the larger culture, a world that was divided between "them" and "us." Young Saints learned how to recognize "the other" before they learned their ABCs. To- day much of this has changed: "By 1980," writes religious historian Martin Marty, "the Mormons had grown to be. ..like everyone e...
THE D9 AND
OTHER ONS OF
Who among us does not scoff at UFOs) astrology) and ESP? But the fact is that most of us also embrace dozens of other illusions with scarcely a second thought. These illusions) says psychologist Thomas Gilovich) are a product of the human mind's ceaseless quest to find order and meaning in the world-even where there is no order) even if the mind gets the meaning wrong. Many of these erroneous beliefs are harmless; others can lead to bias, prej- udice) error) or) in th...
exaggerated crises such as Love Canal and distracted minor environmental threats, even as larger ones go unattended. At a deeper level, biologist Daniel Botkin says, they hold ancient and sentimental misconceptions of nature, and of man's place in it, that could stifle the emerging new environmentalism.
ATURE
by Daniel B. Botkin
ast June, California voters tried to strike a blow for the state's endangered moun- tain lions when they passed Proposition 1 17, protecting all but the most aggress...
ast June, California voters tried to strike a blow for the state's endangered moun- tain lions when they passed Proposition 1 17, protecting all but the most aggressive cats from human beings. Anybody caught killing, trapping, or transporting a moun- tain lion in the state now faces one year in jail and a $10,000 fine. The Wilderness So- ciety, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club all lined up behind the measure, and there was nothing in the debate (such as it was) to suggest that Proposition 1...
wo weeks into the Middle
East War a distraught At-
lanta Constitution editorial
writer declared on a televi-
sion news broadcast that
the Iraqi oil spill in the Per- sian Gulf had thrown her into "despair." The same day, the New York Times and the Washington Post published equivocal news stories about a U.S. Environmental Protec- tion Agency (EPA) decision to require an Arizona utility company to spend $2.3 bil-lion at one power plant to try to eradicate a seasonal blue haze that s...
changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man- made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its mean- ing. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.'
The End of Nature caused quite a stir; some suggested that it would have the same galvanic impact on public opinion that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (also first published in the New Yorker) had had 27 years before. But while many were titillated McKibben's violent...
astern Europeans have so of-
ten bemoaned the lack of rec-
ognition of their cultures that
when one of their artists does
achieve world standing, they
are quick to proclaim him a genius who speaks for the entire region. A Yugoslav writer, Dubravka Ugregik, re- cently recalled attending a lecture in Bel- grade by a "world-famous" American au- thor who, when asked if he had ever heard of Ivo Andrik, Miroslav Krleza, or Danilo KiE (all three of them widely translated, and Andrik i...
hy is nobody idle any
more?
I mean openly, to-
tally, cheerfully idle,
and by choice. The in-
dustrial world is no doubt full of people who could work harder, and know it, full of procrastinators and easy riders. But no one seems content to achieve nothing any more, whether at school and college, or in industry or the professions. When I first taught at a uni- versity-in the Midwest during the
1950s-a good fifth of the students, it was widely accepted, did no work, or next to none, and w...
sighed and put paper into the type-
writer. "I'd better start," I said. And
I did. Meaning that, unemployable
since I had less than a year to live, I
had to turn myself into a profes-
sional writer.
It was January of 1960 and, according to the prognosis, I had a winter and a spring and a summer to live through and would die with the fall of the leaf. I felt too well. After the long enervation of the trop- ics, my wife Lynne and I were being stimu- lated by the winter gales of t...