Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Back in May of this year, the Science History Institute did a story entitled "The Myth of the Cuyahoga River Fire." It is a fascinating look at a piece of our collective understanding of environmentalism: how we remember it versus what really happened. Here's a link:  https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/the-myth-of-the-cuyahoga-river-fire I'll say no more.

The story of a man who made a fortune on dynamite, then cleansed his name by creating a Peace Prize, is well known. Recently I've learned of an analogous story, of a man who made a fortune  running one of Europe's largest asbestos firms, then cleansed his name by turning himself into a philanthropic environmentalist. This later story is that of Stephan Schmidheiny, founder of the Business Council for Sustainable Government, one of the organizers of the Rio de Janeiro earth summit, and founder of Avina. a Latin-American oriented endowment for the study of ecological sustainability. But cleansed though he might have thought he was, Schmeidheiny found that his asbestos-,marketing past was hard to shake, and late in the spring of this year he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his part in the deaths of thousands . This came to my attention as a page one story in the Hartford Courant last week. It was a front page story only because the Courant cares about our sta...