Twenty Nile rivers, and other stories

Water stress: By 2025, to feed growing populations, the world will need to find extra fresh water equivalent to the flow of twenty Nile rivers.

Extreme weather: Bill McKibben ponders just how strange this year has been.

Junk food: George Monbiot concludes that a possible link between Alzheimer's and poor diet might be more than sensationalist media spin.

Heat: 2013 tipped to break more records. With a good chance of an El Niño forming in the coming months, combined with the ongoing warming trend from greenhouse gases, next year could be one for the record books. At least until the next El Niño...

Mangroves: Per hectare lost, mangrove destruction is three times worse for greenhouse gas emissions than deforestation.

NB The following articles are eighteen months out of date, but I neglected to post them earlier and they are interesting.
Malthusians beware: Blame the World Bank and IMF (amongst others) for famine in the Horn of Africa, but don't blame overpopulation.

Deep sea fishing: Is any deep-sea fishing sustainable? The short answer is "almost none". Deep-sea fisheries tend to regenerate very slowly, given the small amounts of energy entering the system. Many of the creatures down there are older than your grandmother.

Organic farming: It can be more profitable than conventional farming over the long term, even if organic premiums drop by 50%.

Climate panic: What we can all be doing about climate change. The Onion nearly always hits the key issue on the nose.

Wisdom in the wild, and other stories

Orion: Wisdom in the wild. What are the effects of removing the aged from a population? Are our hunting and fishing habits not only decimating numbers, but also breaking the cultural continuity of animals?

Guardian: My son, the terror suspect. A father tells the brutal and moving story of his son's conversion to Islam, travels to Pakistan, experiences fighting for the Taliban and eventual capture and suffering at the hands of his own government.

Common Dreams: One more reason why mountaintop removal is really stupid - along with poisoning rivers, destroying forests, levelling mountains and contributing to the destruction of a livable climate, it also doubles cancer rates in the local area.

Bright Green: What's happening in Somalia is no natural disaster.

And the prize for best rant on the Australian carbon price goes to this piece of inspired prose (which comes with a language warning).

What will future generations condemn us for?

A very interesting piece in the Washington Post by Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who notes first the fairly obvious point that perceptions of what is appropriate and good have shifted over the years, and are likely to continue to do so. Where the article becomes interesting is when he asks if there is any way of predicting which contemporary practices might be destined for future condemnation. He suggests three criteria:

"First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

"Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

"And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks."

Appiah then goes on to suggest four possible sets of contemporary practices that our children or grandchildren may well find abhorrent: the prison system (he has his eyes especially on the US situation); industrial meat production; the institutionalisation of the elderly; and our ecologically destructive lifestyles.

I briefly considered this question myself towards the end of this post on morality as distraction, specifically focussing on the issue of whether the church is offering hostages to fortune through our current practices and attitudes.

Are there more examples you can think of that meet his three criteria? In your estimation, which one(s) is (are) most likely to see future shifts in judgement?
H/T Bryan.