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Tips for reliving your childhood

I recently removed the play structure I'd built 16 years ago in our backyard. I remember wondering as I built it, "What will it feel like when I tear it down?" Well, it was kind of sad. Memories washed over me as I worked. Time perception isn't linear.

I also tore down the tree house I'd built for my kids. Not only have they outgrown it, but it also wasn't in our tree. Our neighbors had graciously given us permission to use their tree because we didn't have one of our own. Luckily, Seattle's building department has standing orders to ignore kid's tree houses.

I heart David Tilman

Tilman on biofuels in Sunday's Washington Post: eminently readable and reasonable on parsing the differences between good and bad biofuels, drops in ethanol production in Brazil, what renewable really means, and where we should go from here.

The op-ed's based on his December Science study, which was discussed here. Everything he writes makes so much sense. Why can't all scientists be this articulate?

Tomb Aiders

Taiwan freeway officials help butterflies find their way Bracing for the migratory peak of millions of purple milkweed butterflies, officials in Taiwan are closing one lane of a major highway, installing netting to encourage the butterflies to rise above traffic, and using ultraviolet lights to guide them under a busy bridge. “Human beings need to […]

It Seems We’ve Stood and Talked Like This Before

Climate change could make some climate zones disappear, worsen asthma It’s been a while since we’ve done a probable-effects-of-climate-change story, and we’d hate to leave you hanging. So: according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, climate change could reinvent the world’s climate zones by 2100 (feels closer all the […]

Outback Darkhouse

Sydney, Australia, to put the lights out for climate change Last month, Australian officials announced that traditional incandescent light bulbs would be phased out by 2010 and replaced by compact fluorescents and other efficient lighting technologies. But Sydney is getting a jump on the energy-conservation action: this Saturday, bulbs across the city will be going […]

Fuel Me Twice

Bush, Big Auto agree that ethanol is the way of the future … again Detroit’s Big Three automakers cruised to the White House yesterday to plead their case for improving biofuels access and to remind the president that they’re not so keen on that whole “improving fuel economy” idea. Bush played along by plugging a […]

A ‘Maoist insurgency’ in a global information-technology hub?

Did you know that India, hub of the global information economy and destination of untold numbers of outsourced U.S. jobs, is in the grips of a Maoist insurgency? A recent Reuters article referred (a bit casually) to: the Maoist insurgency that has spread to about half of India’s 29 states and has been described by […]

Fun all around

Rep. Jay Inslee’s wife Trudi asked me to pass this along to you: America needs a clean energy revolution, and we need your stories! Are you, your company, or community building the clean energy economy today? We want to tell the world about it. We will share clean energy stories on the website apollosfire.net, and […]

Earth Firster urges a return to conservationism

Dave Foreman spills his guts on the difference between real conservationists and the rest of us, who are interested in saving the environment for utilitarian reasons here, urging a return to conservation's roots in the preservation of wildness for its own sake, and slamming utilitarian environmental approaches to conservation. I actually thought the movement had gotten past this debate; apparently I was wrong.

Key phrase:

... [N]ature conservationists who work to protect wilderness areas and wild species should be called conservationists, and ... resource conservationists, who wish to domesticate and manage lands and species for the benefit and use of humans, should be called resourcists.

When environmentalists turn their attention from the so-called "built environment" to nature, they can take either a conservationist or a resourcist pathway. I've named environmentalists who have a utilitarian resourcist view "enviro-resourcists."

And I've ruffled some feathers with this view.

I've ruffled even more feathers lately by warning that enviro-resourcists have been slowing gaining control of conservation groups, thereby undercutting and weakening our effectiveness, and that nature lovers need to take back the conservation family.

Green urban development, in just 12 years!

If you can ignore the egregious lede — did green building really come from hippies? — there’s much to celebrate in this article on Sonoma Mountain Village, “a community of about 2,000 homes and businesses, centered around a town square, using the latest principles of sustainability, green technology and new urbanism.” It’ll be about 175 […]