Latest Articles
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The rain-barrel connection: Building a better flusher
A writer dreams of someday flushing his toilet with rainwater. Sounds simple enough, but it’s not. His tale of “the regulations, the dreamers, and me.”
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Farm-in-a-truck teaches kids about sustainability
Compass Green is a mobile greenhouse built into a truck, which runs on vegetable oil (natch). Handsome hipsters Nick Runkle and Justin Cutter retooled the truck, which was already fitted with Plexiglas display panels, to turn it into a biofuel-powered educational farm on wheels.
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New climate strategy: Buy the damn coal and keep it in the ground
A new paper proposes that we buy up coal deposits in countries around the world to keep them from being exploited. It's fascinating strategy, but could it work?
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The perfect meal for early spring [Recipes]
With fava beans and chard, this pair of recipes from the new book Ripe offer the perfect combination of refreshment and comfort.
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Texas got a CRAZY amount of hail
I know this looks like a firefighter standing in a crack in some rocks, but no, my friend: those are four-foot hail drifts in Amarillo, Texas. The reason they look so dirty is that this is basically the only precipitation the drought-stricken state has been getting lately — Texas was covered in mostly dust, so […]
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Depressing videos show the human toll of fracking
Because your Friday could use a little bleakness, here’s the trailer for Water Defense’s “Natural Gas Exxposed” video series, showing the toll that fracking takes on communities.
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Government spends $40 million mowing lawns of empty homes
The U.S. government owns 200,000 foreclosed homes. And to keep those empty homes looking spiffy for would-be buyers, the government has to keep up appearances — including the appearance of the lawn. As a result, we taxpayers are forking over $40 million for lawn-mowing at these uninhabited houses.
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Swedish fast food chain makes bank by becoming ‘Klimatsmart!’
Sweden's No. 1 burger chain got rid of its kids'-meal boxes and, contrary to expectations, sales of the meals rose. Apparently parents who are facing the prospect of their children scrabbling for survival on this wrecked cinder of a planet don’t like creating needless trash?
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Scorcese doc ‘Surviving Progress,’ featuring Margaret Atwood, is now in theaters
"I think it's important to make a distinction between good progress and good progress. Things progress in the sense that they change. But when they reach a certain scale, they turn out to be dead ends."
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Turbine makes fresh water out of thin air in the desert
If you've ever watched water drip out of a window a/c unit, you've seen the operating principle of Eole Water's new wind turbine in action.
