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View of the Great Salt Lake at sunset, at Antelope Island State Park, Utah

Should Great Salt Lake Have Rights?

The nature rights movement keeps making inroads into establishment thinking — and people keep ignoring the threat

The nature rights movement keeps making inroads into establishment thinking — and people keep ignoring the threat. The concept has now been advocated in a major opinion piece in the New York Times. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is shrinking — a legitimate problem worthy of focused concern and remediation. Utah native and Harvard Divinity School’s writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams — who focuses on “the spiritual implications of climate change” — makes a strong case that the lake is in trouble. A Conservationist Approach Her proposed remedies reflect a proper conservationist approach worthy of being debated: Scientists tell us the lake needs an additional one million acre-feet per year to reverse its decline, increasing average stream flow to about 2.5 million acre-feet per year. A Read More ›

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Light rays through the black window. Toned photo

Can LSD Help Us Understand the Mind–Brain Relationship?

Is the mind generated by the brain or does the brain merely focus the mind on the current scene? An experiment sheds some light

In a fascinating article inThe Guardian titled “Acid test: scientists show how LSD opens doors of perception,” science editor Ian Sample discusses recent research on the mechanism by which LSD alters the brain and the mind. He begins by quoting Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) who noted that LSD “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life.” Remarkably, recent work in neuroscience supports Huxley’s view. The research, conducted at Cornell University, confirms what has been called the Rebus model of psychedelics. Rebus is a rough acronym for “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics”; the model proposes that the brain is essentially a prediction engine for daily life. In this model, the brain processes information Read More ›