It is a curious feature of the human mind that when confronted with evidence of a reality that contradicts our beliefs, we are often quick to reject this evidence. This confirmation bias--our tendency to uncritically accept evidence which bolsters our own views while rejecting immediately evidence which contradicts it--has been understood as a fact of our thought-processes for some time, and it goes a long way towards explaining why we hold doggedly to fixed beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. This may well be the case with a book that I've recently finished, David Owen's radical piece of environmental thought, Green Metropolis . So what if I say to you that the environmental movement has had it all wrong on a number of very important points? As someone who has been concerned about the state of the environment for some years, I was quite unsettled by much of what Owen had to say. The main point of the book may be summed up as follows: while the e...
Occasional author. Lover of coffee.