Latest Articles
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Labor pains on the farm
Farmers hoping to battle the Great Recession by hiring out-of-work locals in lieu of legal migrants struggle to keep them on the farm. Americans may have gone "soft," but rural depopulation is the root of the problem.
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What worms eat for breakfast
Our budding Worm Mistress settles in to life with the wrigglers and discovers that it's not as complicated as she feared.
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Marching on two wheels: bikes, protest, and public space
The folks on Wall Street discover what Critical Mass has long known: A bike is a powerful protest tool.
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Climate activism stands with Occupy Wall Street Movement
Riding on the momentum created by the Keystone XL pipeline protests, climate movement leaders are getting involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
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Plane flies 200 miles in two hours on just electricity
Pipistrel-USA's Taurus G4 won the NASA's CAFE Green Flight Challenge (top prize $1.35 million!) by flying 200 miles in under two hours, using an amount of electricity equivalent to less than two gallons of gas. Google sponsored the competition, which is supposed to stimulate the “electric plane industry.” Who even knew there was an electric […]
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If you want a green building, make it out of wood
The third little pig might have staved off disaster, but the second little pig was the greenest, according to the USDA. The agency looked at dozens of studies comparing wood to concrete and steel and declared wood the winner when it comes to emissions. Attempts to use materials other than wood in construction yield, on average, 2.1 tons more greenhouse gases per ton of material.
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Laugh at the crying Indian all you want — the joke’s on us
Remember the crying Indian in the 1970s TV commercial? Well, he's back, and this time, he's not sad -- he's pissed.
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The most beautiful anti-GMO T-shirts you'll ever see
Threadless, which has long been the thinking person's purveyor of silly T-shirts, just ran a design contest with an anti-GMO theme. Artists submitted designs that conveyed a "no GMO" message, and 25 percent of profit from sales of the winning design will go to the Institute for Responsible Technology, which fights GMOs in the United States.
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Australia is so, so screwed
It's possible that the 19th century British powers-that-be were just running a really, really long con when they sent their convicts to settle Australia, because anyone who lives there now is royally screwed. In Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell chronicles exactly how screwed. (Answer: Royally.)
In the few weeks he was there, Goodell encountered:
a record heat wave, a crippling drought, bush fires, floods that swamped an area the size of France and Germany combined, even a plague of locusts.
And in the longer term,
What water is left is becoming increasingly salty and unusable, raising the question of whether Australia, long a major food exporter, will be able to feed itself in the coming decades. The oceans are getting warmer and more acidic, leading to the all-but-certain death of the Great Barrier Reef within 40 years. Homes along the Gold Coast are being swept away, koala bears face extinction in the wild, and farmers, their crops shriveled by drought, are shooting themselves in despair.
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Can you raise chickens in a one-bedroom apartment?
Well, it's not a good idea, but you can, according to the New York Daily News. They've got a story about Robert McMinn and Jules Corkery, who are raising three hens in their one bedroom in Queens.
