Latest Articles
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Culinary boot camp whips ‘lunch ladies’ into cooking shape
School cafeteria workers, a.k.a “lunch ladies,” rank somewhere below custodial staff in the school pecking order, yet they’re expected to perform miracles in the kitchen, turning pennies into full-blown meals. As part of my Cafeteria Confidential reporting, I recently went to Colorado to observe a “culinary boot camp” in which food-service directors and workers from around […]
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California considers mandating energy storage
The California Assembly has passed legislation [PDF] that takes the first step to requiring that a percentage of electricity generated in the state be stored. Electricity, of course, is the ultimate perishable commodity. If the bill is approved by the California Senate and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it would apparently be the first time […]
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Raising water productivity to increase food security
Drip irrigation is a simple and easy way to reduce water use.Photo courtesy of photofarmer via flickr With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce […]
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Big Oil plays jobs card as it fights offshore-drilling moratorium
First we saw interview after interview with out-of-work fishermen and shrimpers. Now we’re hearing from oil-rig workers. Jobs are the trump card of political debate in America these days and, not surprisingly, that card is now being deftly played by critics of the Obama administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. […]
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Big Oil Shakes Down US Taxpayers
Last week, oil company executives testified to Congress about energy policy in the wake of BP’s ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. A casual observer may have thought we were transported to an alternate universe. At one session, Representative Joe Barton of Texas apologized to BP for what he called a White House “shakedown” […]
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Measuring neighborhood diversity and liveliness with ‘JaneScore’
Perhaps you know about Walk Score, the delightfully intuitive tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. (My Seattle neighborhood gets an 85; my suburban Chicago hometown gets a 31.) It was cooked up by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others to help quantify walkability and promote its […]
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Vietnamese gardeners in New Orleans offer much food for thought
January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. East New Orleans is lush and crumbling. Sometimes it feels like the built environment — the convenience stores, sugar factories, distant oil refineries, houses, brick […]
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How To Talk About Energy Policy
Matthew Yglesias makes a strong case that the “energy independence” frame has backfired when it comes to moving the public on climate-friendly energy policy. I agree. (Jon Stewart illustrates better than anyone how poorly this line has fared—as far back as the Nixon years!) And Yglesias isn’t alone. My colleagues in the climate policy communications […]
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Supreme Court’s ruling on Monsanto’s GE alfalfa: Who won?
Updated 2:20 pm Pacific, June 21 The sustainable agriculture world is abuzz today with news of the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding an earlier lawsuit, brought by alfalfa farmers, that sought to stop any planting of Monsanto’s genetically engineered Roundup Ready alfalfa seed. While the press coverage heralds the ruling as a decisive victory for Monsanto, […]
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Obama and Senate finally dive in on climate and energy bill
Tick … tick … tick … The Senate now has about 30 working days before its August recess to decide how serious to get about dealing with greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of this week, particularly after a confab Wednesday between President Barack Obama and top senators [Editor’s note: This meeting was indefinitely delayed], we […]
