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A review of The Host

What is an environmental movie? Is it a movie that uses the beauty of wilderness to make us fall in love with the earth, as for example Into the Wild, or Brokeback Mountain? Is it a movie that explicitly tackles an environmental issue, such as Erin Brockovich, or The China Syndrome?

Or is it a picture that exploits the power of raw film to open up an environmental theme -- such as the risk of radiation -- with sheer imagination, such as (the original) Godzilla?

It's a rhetorical question, but one with an inescapable answer: all of the above count as environmental movies, each in its own way, some better than others. And if this is true, as it surely is, than the best environmental movie of the year may turn out to be an unlikely candidate: the mesmerizing -- and funny -- Korean movie released internationally this year, The Host.

Though essentially a cheesy horror movie, it's phenomenally well-directed, and to date has been the best-reviewed foreign film of the year.

Gulf State forests ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, says study

The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the people of the Gulf States is well known (if occasionally ignored), but the storm also brutalized the region’s forests. A new study published in Science reports that Katrina destroyed some 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana, leading to a laundry list of problems. Federal funding for replanting […]

A bottom trawler scores underwater pot, and it’s open season for Japanese whalers

... a study found that just 79 percent of known fish species has been formally described, and that the largest gaps in knowledge centered on the oceans' most diverse habitats ...

... California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suspended all fishing in the San Francisco Bay after the area's worst oil spill in two decades. The governor called the 58,000 gallon spill, which occured after a cargo ship collided with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, an "unbelievable human failure" ...

... German scientists developed LOKI, a device that can recognize and count organisms as small as 0.2 millimeters across. It will be used to study zooplankton, a critical food source for juvenile fish ...

Hybrid Chevy Tahoe wins “Green Car of the Year” award

The Green Car Journal has awarded the “Green Car of the Year” prize to … drumroll please … the hybrid Chevy Tahoe. An eight-passenger SUV not yet on sale? Whaaa? “People don’t think green when SUVs are concerned and for generally good reason, since SUVS often get poor fuel economy,” says Green Car publisher Ron […]

How one group is convincing U.S. colleges to invest responsibly

It doesn’t take long to gauge the depths of Morgan Simon’s passion: you can hear it in her voice. Or what’s left of her voice, anyway. The first time I spoke with the activist, she apologized for being hoarse — a recent presentation at Grinnell College had taken its toll, she explained. But the next […]

Umbra on green hotels

Dear Umbra, My husband and I are Americans who own a small budget hotel in Rome, Italy. We try to be as eco-friendly as possible: our cafe is local, organic, and vegetarian, we use compact fluorescent bulbs where we can (although cannot find an alternative for the halogen lighting systems we have), we use eco-friendly […]

Cyclone Sidr

There’s a category 4 storm headed toward a low-lying area Bangladesh. It’s still gaining strength, and could hit land within 24 hours. People in the know say this very well could turn into a worst case scenario. See Chris Mooney for more.

Navy must adopt safeguards for whales in 2008, says court

Update on the seemingly endless saga of whether the U.S. Navy should restrict underwater sonar use in the interest of whale health: A federal appeals court has ruled that while the Navy may continue its current training exercises in southern California as is, exercises that begin in January must operate under better safeguards for marine […]

Record amount of sewage dumped into China’s Yangtze River

Last year, China’s state media deemed the Yangtze River “cancerous” with pollution; to stick with the analogy, it appears the cancer has spread, as a record amount of sewage was dumped into the river in 2006. That’s 30.5 beeeeeellion tons of (mostly untreated) industrial and human waste, an increase of 3.1 percent over the year […]

Britain quickly running out of landfill space, says study

The British, who apparently have a penchant for tossing rubbish willy-nilly, may run out of landfill space in a mere nine years, says a new report. Says Paul Bettison of the Local Government Association, which conducted the research, “Britain is the dustbin of Europe, with more rubbish being thrown into landfill than any other country […]