By Dr. Robert Thorson Alternative energy sources are darlings of the media because each has something novel and potentially important to offer society. They enter our lives like rising film stars, rookie athletes or dark-horse political candidates. Only later does the downside of each hopeful promise become apparent. Solar voltaic seemed flawless until New Englanders […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Globalization. For most people, this word describes the expansion and integration of modern commerce and culture. For me, the term is worse than misleading. It’s just plain wrong. If globalization means “the process of becoming a globe,” then this hardly describes what’s happening today. Earth experienced its one and only epoch […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Remember Sarah Palin’s comment about lipstick on a pig? To my mind, the University of Connecticut’s Hillside Environmental Education Park (HEEP for short) is carefully applied lipstick on the underground pig of its still-toxic landfill. This hog grew between 1966 and 1993 as UConn staff members dumped trash from a generation […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson This is a story about robbing Peter to pay Paul – the taking of water to feed the opiate of energy independence. March 11, a freight train rumbles through the woods of Windham. Light rain falls, snow melts, the ground softens and the track bends. At 3 a.m., four railroad tanker […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson North Korea. Iran. Dirty bombs. The specter of nuclear contamination seems larger every day. Not since the early 1960s — when suburban families stocked their fallout shelters and schools had nuclear bomb drills — has the world seemed so on edge. This is especially true for anti-nuclear environmental activists, who are […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Saturday’s extra-tropical cyclone needs an official name. Otherwise we’ll forget the Halloween havoc it wreaked: dumping heavy snow that snapped leaf-laden branches and sending an estimated 884,000 Connecticut customers into the dark. We name tropical storms like Irene, the ninth in a series of alphabet soup for the 2011 hurricane season. […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Cosmologists get favorable media attention for explaining time in unfamiliar ways. When geoscientists do so, however, they’re usually ignored, especially after disasters like the recent deadly earthen debris flows in Montecito, Calif. There, in the foothills north of Los Angeles, muddy slurries moving like cement carried boulders, tree-stumps, houses and corpses […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Government is too expensive. One major cause is the heavy burden of regulation required to protect the public against lousy ideas. Take the Ponde Place development being proposed for the northwest corner of rural Mansfield — a place without ponds. There, Keystone Cos., a limited liability corporation from Avon, has spent […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Daniel C. Esty, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, is the right man for the job. He’s the perfect fit for the modern era of environmental management in which the dog of politics wags the tail of nature. His message is basically this: We’ve had only limited success […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson For retailers and compulsive shoppers, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a frenetic season of gift returns, steep discounts and marketing schemes. For me it’s a limbo of lethargy and an interval of introspection. And, being a mammal that doesn’t hibernate, I think quite a bit about surviving […]