I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

• In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
• Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
• I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
• Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
• The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
• There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
• Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
• I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
• We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
• James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
• Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

• Edible Forest Gardens is a great two book set that lays out an agenda for productive and low-input ecological garden design in eastern North America. You can turn your lawn into a food forest today. (+2)
• Non-invasive robotic surgery to clear blocked arteries may be 5 years out. (+1)
• Passive house technology is slowly drifting from Europe back to the U.S., where it was first invented but then forgotten. (+1)
• Cities seem to cause depression, and nature seems to cure it. Since we can’t send everybody in the cities to the countryside (because by definition that would just reverse the two), we have to bring nature to the city. (+1)
• Cars are evolving to include more and more smart phone-like technology. They can be hacked. (+0)
• Sherlock Holmes had a full-proof recipe for creative problem solving: music+drugs+thinking. (+1)
• Bangkok is sinking alarmingly, but China is saying some of the right buzzwords about better management of the urban hydrologic cycle. (+0)
• CRISPR is being talked about as a game-changing genetic engineering breakthrough with enormous implications for medicine. (+1)