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New study finds women dress better when they’re fertile

A new study has found that women tend to dress better when they're fertile, according to an article published today by Reuters. Perhaps there is good reason environmentalists, at least as far as the stereotype is concerned, dress poorly. All the hemp ponchos and fleece jackets are really just another way to walk the talk on population control. At least, that's my new excuse for dressing like this. It's my fertility camouflage.

The greatest email ever

On Sunday, we got one of the greatest emails ever. Here it is:

Dear Gristers!

Last Friday Al Gore was presented the first copy of the Dutch version of his book "An inconvenient truth"; he also attended the grand opening of his film in the prestigious Amsterdam Tuschinski film theatre and introduced his film there. All of this would not have happened without YOU.

I (I am the founder -in 1982- and director of a small environmental communication agency near Amsterdam,) learnt from the book and the film through your daily email. I contacted the Dutch publisher that had published his earlier book about the date the Dutch version would be out. To my astonishment they said they would not publish it ("we did not earn money on his first book, and we changed our publishing policy"). No other Dutch publisher, I found out, had bought the translations rights. So I did, and translated it my self, and organised him to be there at the occasion of the presentation and the film premiere. Attached two photo's of the event (the guy left of Gore is me ... The guy to the right behind Gore on the second photo is the Dutch minister for the Environment).

So: THANK YOU! Without Grist there would definitively NOT have been a Dutch edition.

And as I emailed to you before: I thoroughly enjoy your work as well as they way you do it! Keep up the good work!)

best regards,

Maurits Groen
Maurits Groen Environment & Communication

Here's a picture of Maurits with Gore:

Things That Go Dump in the Night

Illegal dumps sprout up across the American West Amber waves of grain? Purple mountain majesties? These days in the American West, it’s illegal dumps that are proliferating under the spacious skies: heaps of car parts, furniture, appliances, and household trash discarded on public land. The Bureau of Land Management has identified 6,482 illegal dumps since […]

Keep on Hawkin’ in the Free World

Chemical-laden products banned by other nations are sold throughout the U.S. To protect their citizens from dangerous chemicals, the European Union, Japan, and other nations have tightened their environmental standards for hundreds of manufactured products in recent years. Meanwhile, the U.S. EPA hasn’t restricted any industrial compounds since an unsuccessful attempt to ban asbestos 18 […]

He couldn’t have done this a year ago? Or 18 years ago?

He was arguably the most powerful man in Washington for more than 18 years, but former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan waited until retirement to finally come out in favor of a gas tax. Writes Daniel Gross in the NYT:

As a rule, Mr. Greenspan, a Republican by temperament and background who was reappointed twice by Bill Clinton, adhered closely to Republican orthodoxy on taxes: the lower the better. Mr. Greenspan was hardly a proponent of raising taxes on energy to encourage conservation, a policy prescription generally associated with the politicians and economists of the left.

Until now. In late September, as he spoke to a group of business executives in Massachusetts, a question was posed as to whether he'd like to see an increase in the federal gasoline tax, which has stood at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. "Yes, I would," Mr. Greenspan responded with atypical clarity. "That's the way to get consumption down. It's a national security issue."

Want to bet Ben Bernanke will wait until retirement before he comes to the same sage conclusion?

My trip to the Oregon coast

This past weekend I headed down to the annual summer retreat of the Northwest Environmental Defense Center. It was held, as it has been for many years running (around 20, I think), at a little camp called Westwind, perched on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Salmon River.

An interview with Ted Carrington of NJ NAACP

The Environmental Justice For All Tour wrapped up last Monday in Washington, D.C., where the Northeast and Southern tours united to lobby their federal representatives and gain more national attention for the environmental justice issues they had seen around the country. After seven days on the road, with stops in multiple communities each day, tour participants were tired but energized by the outpouring of support and solidarity they found along the route.

Tour participant Theodore Carrington, second vice president of the New Jersey NAACP, took a few minutes to recap the week's events and talk about his hopes for the future of the environmental justice movement.

Mmm … cheese

Continued from last week ...

I like to start a cheese platter with a hard or semi-hard cheese. In the fall I like to use cheddar (you could serve a sharp one and a mild one), aged Parmesan, or aged Gouda. If you haven't tasted aged Gouda, I encourage you to try it. It's a bit pricey, but the flavor is so intense that a little goes a long way. Aged Goat Gouda is good too, though the flavor is very different. I'd pair aged Gouda with apples and aged Goat Gouda with pears. I also enjoy another Dutch cheese called Paranno that's also a type of Gouda and much more affordable. It's moister and less crumbly than aged Gouda and it has a wonderful nutty flavor that reminds me of a good Parmesan.

There are some flavored, semi-hard cheeses people tend to like, such as Cotswold (a double-Gloucester with chives) and Huntsman (which consists of two cheeses, stilton and double-Gloucester, in alternating layers), and the weirdly green Sage Cheddar. And, as Wallace and Grommet can attest, Wensleydale is smashing, and you can get it imbedded with cranberries.

I recently had Stilton with lemon rind (it's a white cheese and doesn't have the blue veins of mold found in a blue stilton). It would make an excellent dessert cheese. (I put a piece of it down to go answer the phone and when I came back I found that the Stilton was gone; in its place was my cat Echo, happy, suspiciously lemon-scented, and licking her paws contentedly.)

It’s driving me mad!

A while back I lamented about how much extra driving my family does, now that our older daughter has started kindergarten. (To recap: the school that my wife and I chose isn't in our neighborhood, and we're driving an extra 75 miles every week as a result. Ugh.)

Just before school started, my main beef was that all that extra driving would increase our family's contribution to climate change. I still think that's right.

But there's perhaps a more immediate impact worth mentioning. I'm spending a lot more time in my car on the typical weekday -- a little over double the time, as a matter of fact.

And at risk of sounding like a whiner: it's really getting to be a drag.

Today

Well, it's Columbus Day, North Korea seems to have acquired nukes, Iraq is falling apart, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, a sex scandal threatens to topple the Republican leadership in the House, polls are indicating a Democratic landslide in the mid-term elections, and slowly, incrementally, invisibly, never on the front page, the climate continues to warm and the end of cheap energy moves ever closer.