Latest Articles
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Our economy is hungry for food stamps
Food stamps do more than feed the needy-- they also boost a struggling economy.
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What's the legal status of a country that gets swallowed by the ocean?
By the end of this century, it's likely that at least a handful of island nations will find out what it means to become a "deterritorialized" state, writes Rosemary Rayfuse in the Times.
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Quiz: How much coal is in your life?
Take Sierra Club's quiz to find out how much of a threat coal poses in your life.
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Anti-gay-marriage pledge calls for 'robust childbearing'
The anti-gay-marriage pledge being pushed by a right-wing Iowa group has made headlines, but we haven't heard much about its call for "robust childbearing."
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Urban gardens: The harvest is not just food, it's community
Community gardens have an almost magical power to change the urban landscape. Now many in New York City are safe in the hands of those who tend them.
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Nuclear power's new marketing strategy: hide behind some windmills
The tagline on this advertisement for German Atomic Forum ("founded in 1959 to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Germany") is "CO2 Emissions = Zero."
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Thanks to the recession, recycling is booming
A few years ago, the only people who came in to Alliance Recycling in Emeryville, Calif., were were pushing shopping carts. Now, the same center is seeing people pull up in late model cars.
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How to buy (and price) clean power
You get what you pay for. Clean power mandates in the US mandate that we buy megawatt-hours of clean energy, but they don’t mandate that those sources be reliable. This isn’t to say that clean energy can’t be reliable, but rather that it is mis-priced. Increasingly, this is causing conflicts for utilities, who have purchase […]
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Is it meaningless to talk about ‘sustainable’ food?
How sustainable is your jar of Ragu tomato sauce? That is an insane question, says self-described “anti-foodie” Frederick Kaufman in his TED Talk.
Sustainability, Kaufman suggests, can be sort of like porn: you know it when you see it. But people really want it to be quantifiable. Kaufman describes efforts by a grand consortium of scientists, farmers, agribusiness, and environmentalists to track all the inputs into a product and mush those into one number that would reflect its overall sustainability.
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Critical List: Mitt Romney doesn’t believe in carbon; Halliburton’s profits are up
Mitt Romney doesn't think carbon is a pollutant and doesn't think the EPA should regulate it. But he has said that we should reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases. May he doesn't understand what those words mean?
The hybrid electric flying car! (Brought to you by the military-industrial complex.)
Climate change could wipe out whitebark pine trees in the West, but the Fish and Wildlife Service can't be bothered to list the trees as endangered, or even threatened.
