Latest Articles

Airport beekeeping project is a win-win-win

A new project raises bees on undeveloped land near O'Hare Airport, trains ex-convicts in beekeeping, and sells the resulting honey and beeswax.

Mass Movements in the USA Today

What does it take to build a popular movement that has a chance of succeeding in its objectives? I thought about this a good bit during my recent vacation in the West Virginia mountains. I’ve been personally involved in several mass movements over the course of my adult life: the draft resistance and anti-Vietnam war […]

Politics, farmers, and change: The end of rural America

Big Ag-friendly policy has put family farms in crisis, but Obama can reverse the trend if he delivers on campaign promises.

Cool new game is like SimCity for the whole environment

Is environmentalism a GAME to you? Does it look like some kind of GAME??? Oh, it doesn't? Well, it could. Upcoming game Anno 2070 lets you go all Sims on the fate of the planet.

Whales hanging out in New York

First dolphins, now whales — sea mammals in New York City are bigger than Cats! Urban nature blogger Matthew Wills caught a humpback whale frolicking off Sandy Hook, N.J., within sight of the city. (He's got some great pictures over at his blog.) Wills was dismayed by the floating trash in the bay, not to […]

Teenage genius improves solar panels using math and trees

You gotta heart teenage geniuses: this one, Aidan Dwyer, age 13, figured out a way to make solar panel arrays more efficient after taking a walk in the woods. Here is his basic thought-process, broken down for us non-geniuses:

How to turn raw sewage into profit

For most people, having a open stream of sewage running past your backyard is a problem, not an asset. That how Keshav Tavre, who lives in Bhiwandi, India, saw it, until he decided to set up a homemade filtration system. With a series of walls and layers of soil, he was able to filter the sewage until it was clean enough to use to grow crops. Later, he sold water commercially do local dye industries.

Critical List: New York AG going after natural gas companies; species move one mile north each year

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman subpoenaed three energy companies as part of an investigation into natural gas production estimates.

If rats could abandon Ship Earth, they would right about now. Instead, species in the Northern Hemisphere are moving north at about a mile per year — three times faster than anyone imagined.

Kick your caffeine habit now: climate change could make 60 percent of the places that now grow coffee inhospitable to the crop by 2050.

Google's open-source, wireless, smartphone-controlled lightbulb

Google continues to roll out new details about its wirelessly-controlled “smart” lightbulb, which gets around all the problems usually associated with making a home energy-aware. The latest: the company is working on open-source software that will run on the lightbulbs themselves.

Why Michele Bachmann thinks she can get gas under $2 a gallon

Michele Bachmann isn't crazy -- she's just horribly misinformed. At least in this particular instance: When Bachmann promised that if she became president, gas would be under $2 a gallon, her statement was entirely consistent with the voodoo alternate energy universe she and countless right-wing conspiracy theorists happen to inhabit.