Latest Articles
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Won’t You Be My Labor?
Immigration crackdown exacerbates organic-farm labor shortage Organic farmers are desperately struggling to find workers, caught between rising demand and an ever-more-severe labor shortage. More than half of the 1.8 million farmworkers in the U.S. are here illegally, and increased border patrols have reduced the number of immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Service-sector jobs […]
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Switch Getters
Industries pull the switch on mercury switches The steel and auto industries have agreed to pay $2 million each to remove mercury-containing light switches from millions of scrapyard-bound vehicles. The deal will reduce U.S. annual mercury pollution by at least 5 percent over the next 15 years, according to U.S. EPA chief Stephen Johnson. Bully […]
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Deliver an Inconvenient Truth
In this great Rolling Stone interview last month, Al Gore said that he plans to train 1,000 volunteers to deliver the Inconvenient Truth slide show across the country. I immediately began scouring the web looking for information on how to apply, but found nothing. Finally, I called Al and Tipper's office in Tennessee and they gave me an email address to which I summarily sent a resume and cover letter. Yesterday I received a reply.
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Dymaxion vehicle
A car that seats eleven, reaches 120 mph, can turn on a dime, and gets 30 miles per gallon.
In 1933.
Now that's damn interesting.
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‘Tis the Season (for cold soups and cold showers …)
"It's so hot that the terrorist alert level has been raised to Gazpacho!" -- David Letterman
Several years ago one of my male friends came up to me at a party, leaned down, and whispered in my ear: "You know, sometimes, late at night, I lie awake and think about your ... gazpacho." This particular scenario might have been slightly less annoying if it hadn't happened so many times already.
There seems to be a very strong soup-sex connection in men's souls. My father had a habit of saying mortifying things at the dinner table whenever a boyfriend of mine was visiting from college, and one night he announced to all present, "You know you're getting old when you lie down at night and find yourself thinking about soup instead of sex."
My mom looked furious (you could always tell when she was furious because her lips pressed together to make a completely flat line), but it was hard to tell exactly why she was upset. There were so many possibilities:
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Fear preview
I'm busy working on a post, or perhaps a series of posts, on fear and why it is useless for environmentalists. But in my reading around, I came across this delicious bit from John Rogers that I just had to share:
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Snake oil
I found this press release from Green Power on the net the other day. Some guy from Germany is trying to sell his system for converting garbage into diesel to small municipalities around the country. I saw a demo on a local news channel a few weeks ago for a community near Seattle. I had to chuckle when I heard that he is hoping to lease land for the facility from a guy whose last name is Turnipseed (seriously). Here's another one released in May of this year:
Spitzauer says that all landfill material and other waste, including liquids can be consumed. Contaminated dirt, rocks, tires, animal carcasses, plant material, batteries, even appliances, will be consumed by the full scale version, thereby eliminating waste and a need for landfills altogether.
Oh brother.
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Going to jail for the environment
Today I received an email from my friend Kate, with whom I studied environmental politics and geology in college, and who now works for the Cascadia Wildlands Project in Eugene, Oregon. On Monday, she was arrested in Medford, Oregon, during a protest against the roadless-area logging recently approved by the Bush Administration. Below the fold is her letter describing her experience and explaining why she chose to participate in an act of civil disobedience. I've added links to relevant bits of background.
