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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Without major capital investments, this generation of Americans will short change the next

From 1980 to 2007, total U.S. electricity consumption increased by a factor of 1.8, but total generation capacity increased by only 1.7 times. In other words, demand out-grew supply. For a while, that was fine — we had more toys than we needed, and real power prices declined for two decades as we made better […]

Stuff your own Twinkies, then stuff your face

Editor’s note: In his book Food Rules, Michael Pollan declares, “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” The idea is that by cooking at home, you’ll avoid all the unpronounceable chemicals found in store-bought junk. And even though you might gorge on it, you can only eat as […]

What can the health-care act teach the food movement?

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton celebrate healthcare reform. Will food reformers ever get to celebrate a wide-ranging policy victory? Photo: White HouseWhat follows is the first of a two-post series. “This is what change looks like,” declared a triumphant President Obama after the House had narrowly passed an historic healthcare-reform bill. What would […]

Ask Umbra knocks off Twinkies organically [VIDEO]

You’ve heard of knockoff purses, but have you ever heard of knockoff junk food? Michael Pollan’s book Food Rules encourages us to make our own junk food. Yep, eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself. Umbra takes junk food into her own hands and shows how to make […]

American Enterprise Institute accidentally makes the case for climate legislation

Several folks have already taken note of this but I wanted to add a few thoughts. Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute seems to be inadvertently making the case for climate change legislation. First, he lists a series of things environmentalists predicted would happen assuming business-as-usual levels of pollution. Then, using this chart, he […]