Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In the front matter of the December issue of Harper's, Rebecca Solnit writes about the climate change talks in Paris. I'm afraid I can't follow her points very well, because my mind has been distracted to the guessing game of when she wrote this essay. It was obviously written before the Paris talks, which concluded with an agreement December 12th . The political/diplomatic leadership of the 196 nations involved committed to keeping global warming at or below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Solnit essay was not only written before that (and phrased sensibly in the future tense), it was probably written before the terrorist attack on the streets of Paris on November 13, 2015. She writes of "the possibility that the most important activity in Paris this month  will happen not in any meeting room but in the place where most revolutions happen: the streets." Context indicates that she meant that scruffy activists in their street demonstratio...

Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same  sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...