Latest Articles
-
DIY role model: Delilah Snell
Photo: Aida Mollenkamp A version of this interview first appeared on Aida Mollenkamp’s website. Meet food wonder woman (or funderwoman, as I call her), Delilah Snell. She may be the most prolific person I know, with her hands in numerous activities at once. She’s also a Master Food Preserver (there are only a handful of in the […]
-
Is global warming an election issue after all?
Climate change as a campaign issue could be a surprise winner for Obama.Photo: The White HouseThis essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission. Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he […]
-
U.S. roads are built to break
Why do we have to pour so much of our transportation money into highway infrastructure? Well, because 50 years ago, the U.S. decided to structure roads in a way that was cheap to build but expensive and difficult to maintain. It's the infrastructure equivalent of buying a cheap crappy blender and then having to replace […]
-
The new fracking battleground: Trenton
There's a new battlefront in the fracking fight: the Delaware River Basin, which provides water to 5 percent of the country's population. And anti-fracking dreamboat Mark Ruffalo is asking for help in fighting against fracking there. You don’t have to take Ruffalo’s word for it — you probably want to fight fracking anyway. When 350.org […]
-
The Farm Bill: The view from the grassroots
The odds that most of us laypeople will have any opportunity to influence this year’s Farm Bill process are looking awfully slim. Sure, there’s still a chance the current, nearly opaque supercommittee process, and the piece of it now known as “the Secret Farm Bill,” could break down. If that happens, the National Sustainable Agriculture […]
-
Congress wants to count pizza as a vegetable in school lunches
Parents! You needn't worry about what public schools are feeding your kids, because the USDA is reforming school lunch standards and cutting out things like potatoes and salty foods and … oh wait, that was true. But now Congress has gotten involved. And that means that the government is on track to declare pizza a […]
-
Paper wine bottle is classier than a box and just as compostable
Typically, drinking wine from paper vessels doesn't exactly scream "classy." Think about wine from a box … or a Dixie cup … or a paper bag. But the makers of GreenBottle are trying to break that trend with the world's first paper wine bottle. The bottle has a thin layer of plastic on the inside, […]
-
Mongolia plans to combat warming with giant ice cube
Scientists in Ulan Bator, Mongolia are planning to save energy in summer by cryogenically preserving winter. They want to encourage extremely thick ice to form on the local river, thus storing up cold temperatures that can later be used to cool the city. The scientists are artificially creating "naleds," which are slabs of ice up […]
-
U.S. release of British nature doc skips the part about climate change
Global warming is too hot for TV in the U.S., even when the TV is really cold. Frozen Planet, the BBC miniseries about the Arctic and Antarctic, has an episode about climate change impacts — but that episode's not being aired in the United States. The BBC made seven episodes of Frozen Planet. Six feature […]
-
The push is on to discredit clean energy investment
When it rains it pours.There’s always been a tension in U.S. culture between two competing narratives. On one hand, Americans like to think of themselves as pioneers, innovators, forward thinkers — the country that invests blood, sweat, and treasure today to create a better future for the next generation. We tell ourselves stories about building […]
