Photo: Eric WagnerA couple of weeks ago, we asked you all to send us your observations and insights on the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. (Then we asked again.) And man did you deliver. We received an avalanche of emails, comments, tweets, and posts on our Facebook page. Word came in from New York City, Salt Lake City, Portland, London, Oakland, Vancouver, Sarasota, New Orleans, and no doubt many places in between. Here's the quick rundown on what you had to say: A few of you wondered if the Occupy movement is so caught up in economic grievances that protesters …

Photo: Steven DepoloHey, have you heard? It's Lead Poisoning Awareness Week! Stop. I know what you're thinking. "We don't have a ribbon," says Beth Bingham, communications director for the national Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. "We get a lot of calls from people wondering what color ribbon they should wear. Everyone else has a ribbon or a bracelet, but we don't." Well that takes the fun out of a festive occasion. Ah well. Lead poisoning is ugly business, anyway -- a little lead in the blood, especially during childhood, is enough to turn your brain to mush. Exhaust from …

Neil Chambers' new book, Urban Green: Architecture for the Future, is a study in imprecision. Ankle deep and a mile wide, the book reads like a half-baked primer in green design and conservation science. It could have used another year or two in the oven. It's too bad. At the heart of this book -- the end, actually -- there's an interesting idea. And while he only brushes past it in the book, Chambers, a design consultant and blogger for Treehugger.com, has an interesting story to tell. Urban Green opens with Chambers' epiphany that in our quest to save the …

It was late August, and Eve Mosher was keenly aware of the monstrous storm that was surging up the coast. Irene had roared through the Bahamas as a category 3 hurricane, and weather forecasts showed it spinning up the seaboard like a giant bowling ball, blasting directly into Manhattan. New York City officials ordered almost 370,000 people to evacuate low-lying areas. New Yorkers are not fond of Mother Nature messing with their routines, and some dug in, refusing to leave. But Mosher took the storm seriously. "I grew up in Texas -- I prepare for hurricanes," she says. "They can …

Tidy Street.Jon Bird is a master of getting people to change their ways. A senior research associate at University College London who divides his time between the computer science and psychology departments, he recently designed a machine that helps beginners learn to play the violin by giving them the magic buzzer treatment whenever they make a mistake. "I had a vested interest," Bird says. "My son had just taken up the violin. It normally takes 700 hours to learn. I thought, 'If we could just cut back a little on that screeching ... '" Bird and his cronies also helped …

Elouise Cobell.Elouise Cobell, a small-town banker who took on the federal government for mismanaging Indian lands and won, has died at the age of 65. I first met Cobell in 1998, when reporting on Indian land issues for High Country News. She took me for a tour of her hometown of Browning, Mont., a windswept outpost on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation east of Glacier National Park. As she drove, she outlined for me a financial mess that stretched back a century and involved tens of billions of dollars. For decades, she explained, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs had leased …

This young family is paid well to look happy. They’d much rather live in the city. Somewhere on the way back to the city, Americans got sidetracked. Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs. The trends have spawned stories like this one, from America's Finest News Source, headlined, "Family …

The city of Los Angeles announced a major new initiative this week to cut back on that giant sucking sound -- the sound of commercial buildings hoovering up electricity. Two years ago, the Clinton Climate Initiative helped orchestrate a major overhaul of the Empire State Building that cut the famous spire's energy consumption by nearly 40 percent, trimming more than $400,000 off the building's annual energy bills. Now the Initiative has teamed up with C40, a group of cities that has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to see if they can at least start to do the same for …

Jewelry stand in Bitter Springs.Photo: JetsonoramaThe original inhabitants of the land that is now the Navajo Nation knew something about writing on walls. Spend any amount of time kicking around this canyon country and you'll find symbols and images painted and etched into the stone. Though street art might seem like a similar art form, born from similar impulses generations later in cities such as New York and LA, finding it here in its modern form seems unlikely: You can drive for hours and see little sign of human life, save for an occasional passing pickup truck or a hogan …

The G•O Logic prototype passive house.Photo: Steve ChiassonScanning through the website for the Belfast Cohousing & Ecovillage development in Belfast, Maine, you might find yourself wondering if this is a buncha pinko commies who've just slapped a fresh coat of paint on the '60s commune-in-the-woods routine. Says here there will be extensive common facilities (uh huh), complete resident management (ayup), a non-hierarchical structure (I have heard this all before). But wait, what's this? Separate income sources? WTF? "We probably do have some hippie communists [in the group] that have grown up and look a little different now," says Sanna McKim, …