Latest Articles
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Van Jones: “I feel like I’m just getting started”
Van JonesBy now the Strange Episode of Van Jones is well known in and outside of politics. Jones became White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs in March of 2009. Shortly thereafter began a summer of crazy, as Tea Party activists stormed congressional offices and the air waves, shouting warnings of incipient tyranny. In July, […]
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LA Turns Lights on Deadly Coal, Bright Clean Energy Future
As I drive down the crowded LA freeway this evening, I will consider these facts: According to a fairly recent study, California’s costly dependence on faraway coal-fired plants in Arizona and Utah results in an estimated 67 million tons of global-warming carbon–“the global warming pollution emanating from these smokestacks is equivalent to the emissions […]
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Ask Umbra dives deep with ocean advocate Sylvia Earle
Water, water everywhere, but is it on the brink? Not if oceanographer Sylvia Earle has anything to do with it. Dearests, meet Ms. Earle, an aquanaut, author, and one of today’s greatest advocates of the ocean—also, I suspect, a direct descendant of Poseidon. (I’ve asked for funding from Grist for a DNA test to be […]
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Weird and wonderful places to live
The New York Times Magazine did a photo spread of some rather extreme conversions of churches, shipping containers, water towers, and even caves. We do our own roundup of TreeHugger favorites: A chapel converted to residence by ZECC Architects. Churches ZECC Architects, beloved of their conversion of a water tower into a residence, are at […]
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The health-care act requires calorie labeling at fast-food joints
From Marion Nestle: The impossibly impenetrable health care bill that just passed the House has one little piece of good news buried in it: national calorie labeling. The provision covers chains with 20 outlets throughout the country and is supposed to go into effect in a year or so. It also covers vending machines! […]
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Sarah Palin’s spendy nature documentary dreams to become reality TV — on TLC!
UPDATE: Discovery’s TLC has officially signed Alaska’s most famous former official. However, Discovery would really like everyone to stop calling it a reality show, and acknowledge it for what it really will be: a “documentary series about the remarkable Governor Palin and her home state of Alaska.” Will the network’s aspirations to keep it from […]
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Halting tropical deforestation is in the U.S. interest
Click to enlarge. “Want to Protect Farms and Ranches Here? Protect them there. Ending deforestation in the tropics isn’t just some tree-hugger’s cause.” Those are the opening lines of a new advertisement campaign run by the Ohio Corn Growers Association and Avoided Deforestation Partners which stresses the need to protect tropical forests in order to […]
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Scientists: BPA has widely contaminated the oceans
BPA leached from plastic: not just a problem for landlubbers.It’s looking more and more like the chemical industry’s idea to make the endocrine-disrupting chemical bisphenol A ubiquitous in the environment was a terrible, and terribly dangerous, idea. Having successfully tainted the food supply with its presence, BPA has now has put the world’s oceans at […]
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![The pink bollworm: the bug that ate Monsanto’s Bt franchise?]()
![The pink bollworm: the bug that ate Monsanto’s Bt franchise?]()
First came superweeds; now come the superbugs!
The current crop of superweeds plaguing farmers who rely on Monsanto’s RoundUp pesticide represents by now a well documented crisis. But watch out, world! Here come the superbugs. That’s right, Monsanto’s other flagship product, its “Bt” line of genetically modified seeds which emit their own pesticide in the form of a naturally occurring toxin, is now under […]
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Building a Green Tea Party
A leading thinker on the left recently wrote that elite authorities have failed us and require grassroots input to become accountable. A leading thinker on the right recently wrote that centralized authorities have failed us and should be balanced by stronger local economic, political, and social networks. Now Woody Tasch of the Slow Money Alliance […]
