Are you getting a good, solid eight hours of sleep every night? Sleeping soundly from the time you lay down to the time you get up to go to work? Well, stop doing that: it’s bad for you and unnatural. Yes, you heard me correctly! There are so many aspects of our daily lives that we [...]

Yes, this has taken significantly longer than The Economist needed for “Noble or Savage?,” but really digging into the evidence usually does take longer than a superficial analysis, bald assertion, or an assemblage of half-truths. As before, I haven’t written anything original in response to this article, since it doesn’t present anything new—everything here quotes articles you’ve seen here, answering these claims, over the past two, sometimes even three, years.

The Myth of Progress

“Noble or Savage?,” The Economist,” 19 December 2007:

I have already had a few commenters direct me to “Noble or Savage?,” the article from the Dec. 19 Economist magazine. The article has not raised my low opinion of this periodical. As Kenneth Boulding so correctly assessed, “Anyone who believes that growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” You may recall that The Economist teamed up with Shell some years back gave us the absurdist essay contest question, “Do we need nature?” (Derrick Jensen gave perhaps the best answer: “It’s insane.”) But this most recent offering presents precisely the kind of article I have, unfortunately, become all too familiar with—overblown rhetoric based in faulty evidence presented deceptively. Nothing new appears in the article that we haven’t spent pages debunking here in past articles, but we can hardly expect casual readers to have read that much of the Anthropik backlog. Since I have no doubt that many will continue to post links to this inane article mistaking its argument for a cogent one, I offer this piece. It has little new for regular readers; instead, I have simply collated my previous responses to the evidence misrepresented by The Economist article, so that it appears all in one place.

Several months ago, the celebrity gossip blogosphere lit up over a mysterious new tattoo that Brad Pitt began sporting on his forearm. Originally, it was thought to be an outline of Lara Croft–Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider character–but a commenter at one blog noticed that it was actually an outline of Ötzi the iceman, Europe’s oldest [...]

AP - With the new year comes a new Web site and new ringtones featuring the growls, bugles and chirps of dozens of rare and endangered species from around the globe.

AP - There's more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone, a new study found. Nature is pushing the Arctic to the edge, too.

AP - Consumer electronics aren't exactly easy on the environment — they consume electricity that contributes to global warming, and toxins leach out of them when they end up in landfills.

AP - Residents and businesses in central upstate New York sued IBM Corp. for more than $100 million Thursday saying pollution from the company's former microelectronics plant in Endicott endangered people in the area.

AFP - World temperatures will cool slightly in 2008, but it will remain among the top 10 hottest years on record, British weather experts predicted Thursday.

The new issue of Archaeology Magazine has listed what its editors believe to be the Top 10 Discoveries of 2007. One story didn’t make the list but is a must-see: a Neolithic mural unearthed in Syria that could easily pass for modernist art. Made up of red, black, and white geometric shapes painted 11,000 years ago, [...]