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Help Grist and Gristmill improve
On Wednesday and Thursday, the Grist editorial team will be at a retreat in our top-secret mountaintop redoubt, plotting world domination. As a result, there will be no Daily Grist and blogging will be light.
We're discussing the next steps for this little web magazine of ours, which is growing so fast and has so much potential.
So, what would you like to see for Grist? Or more particularly, for my own selfish purposes, what would you like to see for Gristmill?
Where do you want Gristmill to go? What do you want from it? More posts? Fewer? More guest authors? Fewer? Different subject matter? (Less energy, more wilderness? Less global warming, more population?) More avenues for reader participation? More avenues for activism and organizing? An email subscription option? A print-this-post option? Anonymous commenting? A pony?
Think big. Think small. Just think, and let me know what Gristmill would become if you were emperor.
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What should I ask Anthony Flint?
On Thursday, I'm going to be chatting with Anthony Flint, author of This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America.
Despite a modest revival in city living, Americans are spreading out more than ever -- into exurbs and boomburbs miles from anywhere, in big houses in big subdivisions. We cling to the notion of safer neighborhoods and better schools, but what we get, argues Anthony Flint, is long commutes, crushing gas prices and higher taxes -- and a landscape of strip malls and office parks badly in need of a makeover.
This Land tells the untold story of development in America -- how the landscape is shaped by a furious clash of political, economic and cultural forces. It is the story of burgeoning anti-sprawl movement, a 1960s-style revolution of New Urbanism, smart growth, and green building. And it is the story of landowners fighting back on the basis of property rights, with free-market libertarians, homebuilders, road pavers, financial institutions, and even the lawn-care industry right alongside them.Flint is a longtime journalist and author on the subjects of urban planning, density, sprawl, land use, and related matters about which I am highly interested but woefully ignorant. Hopefully I'll learn something.
What should I ask him?
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XONSUX
Bruce Wright of the Conservation Science Institute sent us an amusing story. For six years, his wife has had a vanity plate on her car: XONSUX. She was surprised that the DMW let it past, but after six years she thought she was safe. Not so! Not in Alaska. Apparently someone complained, and the DMV […]
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Water power
Anybody know what's up with this? Seems too good to be true, and you know what they say about stuff like that.
(hat tip: reader Laurence)
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Craig Sams interview
Check out Treehugger's interview with Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black chocolates. I particularly like this bit:
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Yawn
Shorter Debra Saunders: I'm still able to dig up a few skeptics.
(hat tip: Katharine Mieszkowski)
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Asia is effed
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- Rapid global warming poses a variety of security threats to the Asia Pacific region that have been "seriously underestimated," a new study says.
The report, released Tuesday by a Sydney-based think tank, paints a grim scenario of disease, food and water shortages, natural disasters, territorial tensions and mass population movements threatening political stability in the region. -
Chinese coal growth
NYT ran the latest in their "energy challenge" series on Sunday: "The Cost of Coal" looks at China's coal use and resulting pollution problems.
It starts off with a bleak portrait ...
One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants
... and moves on down from there.
