Latest Articles

Getting sugar out of schools means getting it out of milk too, says head of Harvard nutrition

Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, weighs in on the dairy industry's campaign to keep offering kids chocolate milk, despite the array of sugar-related health problems America is facing.

More reasons why birds are dumb and humans are terrible

Birds falling from the sky -- sign of apocalypse or coincidence? More the latter, but here's what bird deaths had in common: Humans are bad neighbors.

Learn how truly wild rice is harvested [VIDEO]

Most wild rice that you see at the store is not, in fact, wild. Truly wild rice is superior in flavor, but few have the patience for this kind of painstaking hand-harvesting anymore except Native Americans.

The ‘food bubble’ is bursting, says Lester Brown, and biotech won’t save us

As food prices spike anew, the pioneering environmentalist has a chilling report about the global "food bubble." I asked him whether policymakers and biotech execs are right that genetically modified seeds are the answer to "feeding the world." His answer? No.

The world is only one poor harvest away from chaos

Over the last few decades we've created a food production bubble based on overpumping aquifers, overplowing land, and overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The question is not whether it will burst, but when.

Report: Big solar thermal power's days are numbered

Competition from ever-cheaper photovoltaic panels could cool demand for solar thermal.

Walmart wants a piece of New York City

Walmart has so far been shut out of the Big Apple. Now they're back, using a fancy new PR campaign with all the social-media bells and whistles.

The regular person's guide to who's to blame for the BP oil spill

You've heard there's a gigantic plume of toxic muck at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico; you've seen the fouled beaches and even bought the commemorative tar ball tchotchke. But unless you're a policy wonk, you might not have known that there was a commission tasked with figuring out who should go in the stocks for it -- or that yesterday, they issued their final report. Let us walk you through the basics ...

The (not so) New Agtivist: Joan Gussow, mother of the sustainable food movement

For more than 30 years, Joan Gussow has been writing, teaching, and speaking about our unsustainable food system and how to fix it. Here she tells how growing her own food and reducing her consumption have given her freedom from despair in the face of climate change and other calamities.

Organic cigarettes on the rise, still bad for you

A small but growing number of tobacco farmers are going organic, giving smokers everywhere a potential out from New Year’s resolutions.