The wool and cotton for all of the clothes in Rebecca Burgess' closet was grown within 150 miles of her home in the Bay Area. The wool was spun there, too; the dyes were grown there; the sweaters were knitted there. In fact, the clothes were entirely locally sourced from what Burgess calls her local "fibershed" — the network of farmers, millers, weavers, designers, dyers, knitters, and seamstresses that it takes to make clothes.   Check out the clothes in the video above. Burgess doesn't think that everyone needs to source their entire closet locally but wants others to think …

The Department of Energy, always picking winners, you know? The first Quadrennial Technology Review, to be released today, favors technologies that could come into commercial use in 10 years — i.e. consumer goods you can spend money for. This could mean DOE favors EVs over new clean energy technologies. This company, Renmatix, will probably make it under the wire, though. It says it has the right technology to make commercially viable biofuels from biomass and just opened a plant to forward development of the technique. The natural gas boom comes to Ohio. Although Beijing usually gets a bad rap on …

In India's Kaziranga National Park, rhinos and tigers are thriving, because poachers are dying instead. When it comes to poachers, the park's rangers have a license to kill, and they do. It gets results: In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos. (For comparison, in South Africa, where rangers fire only in self-­defense, five poachers were killed in 2010, while 333 rhinos were poached.) These guys were breaking the law and killing endangered species. But the moral calculus here isn't so clear-cut. In the park's region, jobs …

Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel peace prize for her work planting trees, passed away. She was the first African woman to win the prize and the first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D. Around the world, thousands of people met in more than 2,000 demonstrations to rally for a Moving Planet. That massive NASA satellite managed to plop back to earth without killing anyone. The North Dakota oil boom means that a spot to park a trailer runs $1,000 per month. Like a hydra, but slimier, an injured jellyfish spawned hundreds of clones of itself.

The Bermuda Triangle is just sitting around making ships and planes disappear. Why not put it to work for something useful, like a whale sanctuary? Because when you want to save something, you definitely store it in a place where stuff mysteriously vanishes. That's why I keep my passport in the dryer. In all seriousness, of course, the Bermuda Triangle does not actually destroy ships or make aliens abduct them or whatever, so it'll probably be a great place for humpback whales to rest on their migratory journeys. The proposed sanctuary, a partnership between between NOAA and the Bermuda Department of …

Humans can royally muck up the environment, but sometimes we can put things right again. Seven years ago, Vancouver's Howe Sound was a lifeless chemical stew, poisoned by contamination from a copper mine. And now, according to the Globe and Mail, there's this: Sightings of grey whales, killer whales and schools of hundreds of white-sided dolphins are now being made regularly in the Sound, where massive herring spawns are once again occurring. “We are seeing the revitalization of an entire ecosystem. It is really uplifting,” said John Buchanan, a Squamish conservationist who voluntarily walks streams in the area to help …

The number of non-residential solar panel installations is growing. Disasters connected to weather or climate made more than 30 million people in Asia refugees last year, the Asian Development Bank reports. Oil industry consultant Daniel Yergin wrote a new book about energy. It'll probably annoy you. A professor in Canada made a machine that could suck carbon out of the air. China suspended production at the solar panel factory that protestors said had polluted a nearby river. Kids have their priorities straight: 82 percent of them want to learn about green issues more than they want to learn about traditional …

Here's the thing about apocalyptic droughts: They are bad for people and livestock and all other living things, but they are ESPECIALLY bad for fish. Texas minnows can't wait for Rick Perry's prayer meetings to alleviate the state's record dry spell -- they're already in dire straits as the water shortage robs them of their ability to eat, move, respirate, and reproduce. So scientists are evacuating them, moving the tiny fishlets from the shrinking Brazos River into safer fish hatcheries. Minnows obviously need water to live; that's where they catch their food, get their oxygen, and keep their stuff. But …

"mysid shrimp" 10.7mm from tip of antennae to tailPhoto: David Liittschwager Naturalist E.O. Wilson once wrote that "a lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree." Easy for him to say: He's made a distinguished career out of studying ants and a lot of other little wriggly things that most of us dread finding in the shower in the morning. But Wilson found a kindred spirit in photographer David Liittschwager. Liittschwager has spent years photographing animals, from squirrels to beetles, in a Darwinian effort to wrap his mind around the sheer variety of …

The Obama administration wants to strangle job growth in America like some kind of giant, prosperity-choking python, mostly by banning the importation of said pythons, says a new GOP report. In a new report entitled "Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama's Promise of Regulatory Reform," GOP members cited the proposed snake ban as one of seven examples of red tape choking off job growth in an already ailing economy. After all, the snake-importation industry bears the U.S. economy on its shoulders. As go snake importers, so goes the country, right? Everyone knows that. Here's the irony: …