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Vacation: not just for Europeans any more

As alert readers know, every year around this time, Grist takes a two-week publishing break, while we staffers try to get used to being away from a keyboard for a while. The finger-twitching usually dies down right about the time we have to come back.

The break starts Monday, and consequently posting will be very light, possibly (one can hope!) absent entirely.

We'll be back on Jan. 3, with some exciting developments for Gristmill. Stay tuned.

Green bytes

Some tips over at About.com on greening your high-tech purchases.

Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Lecture

Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10, 2004:

The Gonad Test

Joel Gallob, who writes for the Newport (Oregon) News, has a fascinating column on Tidepool.

It points out the awful time lag between how fishing is regulated and how fish populations change. There's too much fishing when fish populations plummet and too little fishing when populations surge. And he suggests an ingenious mechanism -- involving the gonads of female black rockfish -- for synchronizing fishing with fish numbers. Check it out.

And to All a Good Fortnight

We’re leaving for two weeks; we’ll miss you As is our yearly custom, Grist will be taking a two-week publishing break, starting Monday. We’ll return on Jan. 3, rested and ready to publish the heck out of some environmental news and commentary. While we’re off intercepting whaling ships, setting up solar stations in indigenous villages, […]

Regular Folk

Human compost boosts harvests in Mozambique The more than 2,500 residents of Mozambique’s impoverished village of Matimangwe have harnessed the power of their poo to fertilize their crops, and the village is now on the road to sustainable food production and development. Thanks to a human-waste compost latrine system called EcoSan, villagers have seen a […]

You’ve Got Whale

Feds propose threatened status for Puget Sound orcas The National Marine Fisheries Service yesterday proposed giving threatened status to a population of 80-some orcas that spend their summers in Washington state’s Puget Sound and the waters surrounding British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. Government officials say the listing would be somewhat symbolic, as the marine mammals already […]

Stossel and Crichton, a match made in … uh …

Noted hack John Stossel has found a true brother-in-hackery.  On Dec. 10's 20/20, Stossel effusively praised Crichton's new book State of Fear (more on that here, and more to come), which purports to expose global warming as a media scare story perpetrated by Hollywood liberals and, oh, you know, all the usual winger suspects.

He offered no countervailing view (from, say, a scientist), instead interviewing a woman ready to pee her pants in fear after seeing The Day After Tomorrow -- presumably representative of the hysteria on the issue. The rest of the segment was devoted to lionizing the "brave" Crichton, who is allegedly taking a great risk by publishing this media-friendly, sensationalist execrement.  Read the whole gory story here.

Evangelicals and the earth

Grist, of course, ran the definitive story on the Christian right's relationship to environmentalism, but it wouldn't hurt to go gather additional insights from this piece by Alexander Zaitchik.  He asks, "If a slowly expanding majority of evangelical Christians in this country supports the regulation of industry to protect the environment, and if there is no clear Biblical injunction against doing so, why are the most vehement anti-environmentalists in American politics consistently found among the Christian Right?" If you guessed "close ties between the movement's national leadership and industry," well, give yourself a gold star.

We Know, We Know, You’re Sick of Hearing About Tajikistan, but …

Former Soviet republic littered with radioactive mine sites The former Soviet republic of Tajikistan may be on the brink of environmental disaster as decades-old abandoned uranium mines lie open to the elements and some 55 million tons of nuclear waste contaminate the northern part of the country, left in the wake of Stalin’s arms race […]