Latest Articles

Dell Inc. claims carbon neutrality

Dell Computer’s worldwide business operations are now carbon neutral, the company announced Wednesday. True carbon neutrality is, of course, a chimera for a giant IT company; notes business analyst Clive Longbottom, “You have to question whether they have taken all their workers’ commuting into consideration and the materials in making a computer, going all the […]

Fact-checking the McCain campaign’s press call on energy policy

The McCain campaign held a press call yesterday on Barack Obama’s energy policy, in which their spokesfolks let fly a few statements that should be categorized as something other than truthful. Senior adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin: “Barack Obama has said no to more domestic exploration of oil and natural gas … He has said no to […]

Gore and Edwards, not sitting in a tree

Joel Makower makes a fantastic point here: Why aren’t Gore and Edwards working together? Or rather, why aren’t those fighting climate change working with those fighting poverty? I know Van Jones et al have done great work on this, but it obviously hasn’t reached the upper echelons of the left. These are not silos, not […]

Online game ‘PackMan’ tries to give ‘Pac-Man’ a green spin

Joining the ranks of online games with varying eco-plausibility like “Ocean Survivor” and “Catstration” is “PackMan,” or Packaging Man, a creation of the Dogwood Alliance. The organization aims to protect Southern forests from packaging-heavy (and tree-hungry) corporations; the game takes aim at fast-food execs in particular. The intro of “PackMan” depicts colorful villains wielding phallic […]

Ironically, a lost battle against a hog factory planted the seeds for a sustainable farm

In "Dispatches From the Fields," Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America's agro-industrial landscape.

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One Step at a Time Gardens is a model of agricultural sustainability. Over 50 varieties of vegetables grow in rotation on six acres of fine Iowa topsoil that receive no synthetic chemicals. Compost, cover crops, and chicken manure feed the soil. Pests and weeds are kept at bay through the use of physical barriers, biological products, and cultivation. The crew is made up of members from the community and a couple of non-local folks, such as myself. The farm provides produce to supply a local food system.

Yet when the wind blows from the northwest over One Step at a Time Gardens just east of the town of Kanawha, Iowa, visions of agricultural sustainability quickly fade as the sweet stench of pig manure from the local Confined Animal Feeding Operation or hog confinement, as they say around here, envelops the farm. The Kanawha CAFO consists of five buildings that can each house up to 2,500 hogs. Behind the buildings lies the lagoon, the source of the stench, where all of the manure and waste (dead hogs) are dumped.

Factory hog farming now dominates certain counties in Iowa, the nation's number-one hog-producing state. But it wasn't always so. The practice didn't really take off until the mid-1990s, when state law governing CAFOs changed. The Kanawha CAFO played a significant role in that change -- and Jan Libbey and Tim Landgraf, who now run One Step at a Time Gardens but then worked as a county naturalist and a metallurgical engineer, respectively, battled the Kanawha CAFO from the start. The fight against the CAFO is what inspired them to start their farm in the first place.

Using the power of business for people and planet

There are two critiques of Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken's book on the enormous scope of the worldwide grassroots movements for change, that I'm interested in, one being the notion that the fact that there are millions of grassroots groups at work all over the world providing basic services, fighting for justice, and improving the lot of the planet is not necessarily something to celebrate. Rather, it signifies the failure of modern society to pursue the common good. Fair enough, but that's our reality at the moment.

The other critique I've heard is that Hawken celebrates the contributions of the nonprofit and grassroots movements for change to the exclusion of for-profits also doing good.

The ‘psychological effects’ of threatening war with Iran

Steve Clemons makes a point worth repeating — if you’re worried about "psychological effects" on oil speculators, perhaps a better strategy than hyping offshore drilling is dialing back the warmongering rhetoric toward Iran.

NYC officials fear natural-gas drilling would taint water supplies

New York City officials want to ban natural-gas drilling within a mile of six major upstate reservoirs for fear that the city’s drinking water could become contaminated. Extracting gas from the Marcellus Shale rock layer, as some state regulators and lawmakers are pushing to do, would require shooting millions of gallons of water and unidentified […]

Is drilling debate a repeat of the immigration debate?

Last week, Matt Yglesias finished his stint blogging for The Atlantic. Next week he starts blogging for the Center for American Progress. In between he’s taking a week off — the first time, according to Matt, that he’s gone more than 24 hours without blogging in over four years. We don’t want Matt’s head exploding […]

Efficienciezzz …

Bob Herbert’s column in the NYT yesterday makes two points: One, efficiency and conservation are the smartest strategies to combat our energy woes; two, it’s very difficult to talk about efficiency and conservation without being boring as paint.