Latest Articles

Stuffed and Starved author on the myth of consumer choice

Raj Patel, author of the searing book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, is one of the most trenchant critics of industrial food. According to Patel, one billion people in the world don’t have enough to eat, while another billion suffer from the consequences of too many low-quality calories. The […]

Energy politics take a weird turn

Kate Sheppard mentioned it in her tireless coverage of the Republican convention, but it bears highlighting again: The official GOP presidential platform calls for an end to the biofuel mandate. Now, politics makes strange bedfellows, and sudden Republican opposition to biofuels stems largely from meat-industry shrieks about high grain prices. For example, Texas Gov. Rick […]

Snippets from the news

• Highway repair fund, paid for with gas-tax revenue, is nearly depleted. • Want to put stinkweed in your tank? • Climate change could harm giant sequoias. • Engineers unveil new generation of tidal turbines. • Power outages from hurricanes hamper gasoline production. • Iraqi marshes thought to be site of Garden of Eden will […]

Slow Food Nation was magnificent in many ways, but overshot its mandate

Photo: karmacamilleeon Slow Food Nation — that grand, sprawling culinary event that seemed to permeate San Francisco over Labor Day weekend — has passed. Now we can ask: What was it? A brazen display of foodie elitism, as some critics charge? A transformative moment in an ongoing effort to overthrow the industrial food system, as […]

Cameroon and Nigeria team up to protect endangered gorilla

Cameroon and Nigeria will partner up to protect the world’s most endangered gorilla under an agreement facilitated by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Only some 300 Cross River gorillas remain, all of which live only in those two Central African countries. Gorilla gorilla diehli is threatened by illegal logging, agricultural conversion of its habitat, and poaching […]

McCain’s 10 energy lies top Palin’s four

From McCain’s prepared text we see the Arizona senator easily tops Palin’s lies: My fellow Americans, when I’m president, we’re going to embark on the most ambitious national project in decades. We are going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don’t like us very much. Lie No. 1: McCain has no […]

From Drink to Drive

No beefeater allowed Is it bad that veg-friendly rehab only makes us want to drink more? Hairy spotter Unable to bear it any more, the British army is looking to find a substitute material for its tall, fuzzy hats. Paging Devendra Banhart! Photo: Ella Mullins Stranger than friction If Smencils are smelly pencils, then Sliquid […]

New York chef urges people to get back in the kitchen

Dan Barber is one of the most highly regarded chefs in the United States. Back in the late 1990s, his small Manhattan restaurant Blue Hill got lots of buzz for Dan’s innovative cooking. But even while he was dazzling diners with his technique, Dan was already haunting Manhattan’s Union Square Greenmarket for ingredients, before many […]

Consumers demand market rejection of food from cloned animals

Consumer market rejection seems to be the ongoing theme of U.S. food politics in the waning days of Bush’s inept Food and Drug Administration. Given FDA’s repeated failure to protect our nation’s food supply or to respond quickly and appropriately to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses, consumers have turned to food companies and demanded that they […]

New sea-level rise research, part 1: ‘Most likely’ 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100

Two major new studies, in Nature and Science, sharply increase the projected sea-level rise (SLR) by 2100. This post discusses the Science study ($ub. req’d), “Kinematic Constraints on Glacier Contributions to 21st-Century Sea-Level Rise,” which concludes: On the basis of calculations presented here, we suggest that an improved estimate of the range of SLR to […]