Latest Articles

Worried about radiation in breast milk? Still best to keep breast-feeding

How can we best protect the wee ones?For survivors of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, there have been so many concerns: access to clean water and food, the need for shelter, the threat of disease. It’s the same awful list that accompanies natural disasters around the world — but with one big difference. In Japan, […]

Getting green and happy by exporting pollution and misery: not cool

Do you know where your Apple gadgets come from?Two things I’ve seen recently have got me thinking about how the Western world solves its problems by exporting them. First, over the weekend I saw The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-man theater performance from Seattle’s own Mike Daisey. It’s an absolutely brilliant […]

Family (farm) affair: my connection to Eliot Coleman’s rise to prominence

Portrait of the farmer as a young man: Eliot Coleman with children, circa early 1970s.Reprinted with permission from Melissa Coleman. I’m not sure exactly what it means to play a cameo role in a family memoir exploring the roots of today’s food movement; but certainly it makes you keenly aware of how quickly the years […]

Small bites from the Big Apple: delicious eats in New York City

I recently visited New York City to attend the ceremony for the James Beard Awards in food journalism. I had been nominated for one in the category of column writing. I didn’t bring home a Beard in the end, but I did notch a few victories in the field of the palate. Here are the […]

Denmark calls in armed commandos to fend off Greenpeace

Hippies near an oil rig! Send in the SWAT team! The Guardian is reporting that armed Danish commandos have been helicoptered onto an oil rig off Greenland, out of fears that Greenpeace activists will interfere with the rig’s deepwater drilling. Apparently Greenpeace has sent two ships to monitor the rig, owned by Scottish company Cairn […]

Chicago’s government prepares for climate change to turn the city into Baton Rouge

While other cities ignore climate change, Chicago is doing the obvious: planning its infrastructure as if the next 50 years, and the next generation of Chicagoans, actually matter. Its efforts, started under one of the mayors Richard Daley (we can’t keep track), are now bearing fruit, leading to everything from flood-proof streets to heat-tolerant trees. […]

Japan to mandate solar panels on all new buildings

What do you do if your country depended on nuke plants for energy, but is now too freaked out about nuclear disaster to trust them anymore? You harness the awesome nuclear power OF THE SUN! At least that’s the plan of Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan, who announced an energy policy that may require all […]

Authorities finally admit that all three reactors at Fukushima melted down

It's official: All of Fukushima's working reactors saw drops in their water levels sufficient to melt their radioactive cores. (Experts have been telling us this for months, but Japanese power company TEPCO wouldn’t acknowledge it.) The only way the self-immolation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex could get any worse would be a large […]

Are the Kochs pushing for an international oil pipeline?

House Republicans are trying to speed up the review process for Keystone XL, the controversial pipeline that would carry oil from Canada’s oil sands all the way down to Texas. This is potentially very dangerous, probably overpriced, maybe unnecessary, and almost certainly advantageous for certain corporate bigwigs. In other words, it stinks of unwashed Koch. […]

No bike lane? Make your own!

"Safety First" is a video art installation in Prague, not an actual solution to the lack of bike lanes. We don't recommend projecting a custom bike lane off the front of your ride — or, I mean, go ahead, but that doesn't really make that staircase/train track/highway into a protected lane. But it's still cool […]