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Prairie Crossing in Illinois: The ‘urban’ farm of the future?

Matt and Peg Sheaffer run Sandhill Organics in Prairie Crossing.(Michael Hanson) For the final stop on the Breaking Through Concrete tour, we’re gettin’ all peri-urban on y’all. It takes almost an hour to drive from downtown Chicago north on I-94 to the town of Grayslake, Ill., home of the Prairie Crossing residential development — “A […]

Response To The Cornucopians

(Photo credit: Ollie Crafoord’s photo stream Flickr) Cross Posted from Biodiversivist There have been four recent articles in Grist (mine makes the fifth and I would not blame anyone for not bothering to read it) on the topic of population. I put it together mostly as a matter of record. Good luck keeping track of […]

Population trends as you’ve never seen them before [VIDEO]

As part of my GINK and population coverage, I’ll be bringing you a video each Saturday with a different take on these issues. Check out the previous installment, and stay tuned for more. Hans Rosling uses “colorful new data display technology” (ahem) to show you population trends over the last half century and the half […]

BP whistleblower: ‘They just don’t know who they’re messing with’

If you’ve been reading Mother Jones lately, you’ve heard about BP’s stranglehold on media access in the Gulf, which has included preventing reporters from visiting oil-soaked public beaches and barring its spill cleanup workers from talking to the press. Now, one of BP’s ex-media enforcers is speaking out. Former BP contractor Adam Dillon went public […]

Grist president gets a pie in the face

Here at Grist, we are berry grateful to all our lovely, generous readers who donated during the May 2010 “Save our endangered journalists” fund-raiser. We were thrilled to hit our mark of 2,000 delicious donations. Behind the scenes, we set our own challenge: Our President and Founder, Chip Giller, offered to let us throw a […]

The Emerging Politics of Food Scarcity

A dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging in which individual countries, acting in their narrowly defined self-interest, reinforce the trends causing global food security to deteriorate. This began in late 2007 when wheat-exporting countries, like Russia and Argentina, attempted to counter domestic food price rises by limiting or banning exports. Viet Nam banned rice […]

Bald Eagle Take Out (Red-Tailed Hawk)

Last week a bunch of crows (called a murder for reasons unknown) were making so much noise I stepped out of my house to see what was up. Most of my neighbors did as well. We discovered a pair of red-tailed hawks in a nearby tree, one of which was eating a crow. Today I […]

Corn Ethanol's Enemy List

Photo courtesy of, er, Hidinhumiliation via Flickr A short, relatively innocuous post on an obscure farming blog created a small stir last week when it caught the attention of some less obscure bloggers, Robert Rapier in particular, who was was on the corn ethanol enemy list presented in this article. I didn’t want to open […]

Best Buy to Carry A2B

The original Metro (not being sold at Best Buy) is actually more of a moped than a bicycle. It has a twist throttle,  smallish wheels like a scooter (which enhances acceleration from a stop), along with front and rear suspension–pedaling optional: Maximum road speed under power – 20 mph Up to 20 miles* unassisted range […]

The Bobs–Corn Ethanol's Dynamic Duo

Photo courtesy of Chuckumentary via Flickr “Could it be the unholy alliance between oil interests and environmentalists?”–Bob Dinneen, CEO of the RFA *Bob Dinneen (the Bob on the right) is the CEO of the RFA, a corn ethanol propaganda mill lobbying organization that never prints the word “corn” next to the word “ethanol.” Note also […]