After a dreadful PR year for both privatization and government intervention, perhaps we should have expected a renewed enthusiasm for the commons. And that’s just what we got yesterday morning, straight out of Oslo. It’s too bad that University of Indiana political science Professor Elinor Ostrom had to win both the first Nobel Prize in Economics ever awarded to a woman as well as the first pendant the committee handed out after sullying its credibility by awarding President Obama the Peace Prize before he even pardons his first turkey. But no matter! If we can spin Obama’s win as a “call to action,” why not do the same with Ostrom’s? Pessimism (fatalism) aside, I’m all for the twenty-teens being the decade of disappearing nuclear warheads and retreating neoliberal resource management.

Let’s hear from the Laureate herself!

An excerpt form the introduction to her 1990 book, (more…)

Two great ways to get your science written up in the New York Times: link it to climate change or to Thoreau. Boston University’s Richard Primack and Harvard’s Charles Davis hedged their bets and got lucky yesterday. It seems lots of flowers present in Thoreau’s journals are nowhere to be found by industrious grad students these days, and those that remain are blooming earlier in the year. It’s just more bad news for proud Yankees already wringing their hands over their sugar maples turning Canadian.

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