Special Reports

Many of us look forward to March. It is the month when we can try out our new 'quant' approaches or 'Blink!' systems to choose who will win the NCAA college hoops tournament. To be sure, March Madness bracket choices are now a science. Sad to say, my own approach remains stubbornly unscientific and partial to Michigan schools. So, unless Michigan State can get to the Final Four, I will have once again shown that state loyalty is foolish and farfetched, not to mention an obsolete way, given the status of loyalty today, to win an office betting pool. It is some kind of madness.  

Just in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Bill McKibben’s 350.org campaign is enlisting support in the form of candlelight vigils.  McKibben recently spoke at Ann Arbor’s Rackham Auditorium, at an evening sponsored by the Ecology Center.  The author of the first general-audience book on climate change (The End of Nature, 1989), his new organization recently pulled off what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” 

Children are going back to school this week. First week attendance could be spotty this year. A few kids are staying home because of their parents’ fears about going to school without being innoculated with the swine flu vaccine. According to the latest reports, a vaccine is not going to be ready until October. Others, however, spent the first day at home because of their parents’ fears the President’s pep talk to the nation’s students, delivered the day after Labor Day, will permanently infect them with ideas they believe are dangerous to their minds.

Recently, at a2ethics.org, we have been trying to get a better understanding and awareness about errors, that is the mistakes, inaccurate statements and goofs we make in the process of writing our wide-ranging musings on things both ethical and unethical in the world around us. All in the interest and for the purposes of establishing a more concrete errors policy for this website, for civic ethicists on staff and visitors as well as for our organization.

The recent summertime decision of a British Supreme Court Justice that women ski jumpers will not be allowed to compete in the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, was greeted with many protestations of "tea and sympathy," or rather "beaver tails and sympathy," in a nod to its Canadian hosts. Even the Justice exuded solidarity. In her written opinion, Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon said, "The IOC (International Olympic Committee) made a decision that discriminates against the plaintiffs.

There may well be box seats for the spectators at ski jumping events. To get to any seats at all, I stared at the never-ending portable stairs built into the hill I had to climb.  Already, I was blaming the organizers: for the signage written in the host country's  language that I could not read; for having security guards everywhere, who like security guards everywhere do nothing until they decide to do something; for the still falling snow at an event that required snow.

The Eastern Michigan University College of Business "corporate headquarters" is in the Gary Owen building in downtown Ypsilanti. It is not difficult to find as it has a logo that strikingly weaves an E for ethos into it, to reinforce for students and presumably anyone who passes by, the emphasis on ethics in EMU's business school.

Local food ethics can be as complex as the overlapping leaves of a (nicely steamed,100-mile) artichoke. Questions of economics and justice, politics and activism, consumption and the environment all come to the table, hungry for attention. Metaphor aside, the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor was recently the host of the first Local Food Summit, whose mission strove to make progress toward "a healthy, just and secure local food economy."