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Potent quotables

Speaking of good quotes, check out this list of "notable quotes" from the UN Climate Conference.

Our inaugural open thread

I apologize for the barren postlessness of the blog today. Some of our editorial folk are out of town, and consequently the rest of us are swamped. Woe is us, I tell you.

So why don't we try one of those "open thread" things so popular on other blogs?

Talk amongst yourselves.

Gaghan’s Syriana not at all the feel-good film of the year

Syriana, written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, is a brave and daunting piece of filmmaking. It plunges without apology into hot-button territory few U.S. news outlets, much less Hollywood productions, have dared explore, and does very little to smooth the rough edges for a moviegoing audience accustomed to frictionless entertainment. In a pop-culture […]

From Mascara to Montreal

Beyond eye shadow of a doubt Courtney Corvan may be the only Makeup Artist to the Stars who makes a point of using vegan, cruelty-free products. Funny, we thought being cruelty-free just meant not telling Rachel Hunter her pores are the size of planets. (Oh, Rachel, we kid.) Well, that’s ironicalicious Mazda recently announced that […]

Readers talk back about shade-grown coffee, composting toilets, veganism, and more

  Re: Buzz Alterin’ Dear Editor: You say that shade-grown is not a make-or-break aspect of coffee choice. It is if you want to see the Baltimore oriole. The species is declining by 4 percent a year because the trees it needs are being replaced by coffee plantations. Monoculture coffee plantations are a disaster for […]

Dismember the Maine

Rural Maine residents divided as spring-water bottler moves in An international corporation descending on a rural town, bent on extracting natural resources. Africa? South America? Nope: New England. Nestlé Waters North America Inc., purveyors of Poland Spring water, is prospecting for new sources of “blue gold” in the western Maine wilderness. Some fear the pumping […]

Heavy Metal Bummer

U.S.-owned plant contaminating Peruvian communities with heavy metals There’s heavy metal in Peru, but not the mullet-and-fake-satanism kind. Children in a Peruvian Andes mining town have high levels of toxic heavy metals in their bodies — and the likely source is an 83-year-old smelter owned by the St. Louis-based Doe Run Company. An independent study […]

Arrested Development

FBI arrests six from around the country for green-themed crimes It’s one of the biggest-ever busts for “ecoterrorism” (we’ll take the scare quotes off when someone gets hurt, thank you very much): On Wednesday, federal agents arrested six people in five states and indicted them on charges related to a string of property crimes in […]

At Least You Didn’t Kill Kyoto

Grist offers one last chance to clear your conscience Well, friends, this is it: the very last chance you’ll have to write off the wrongs of 2005 and enter 2006 with a fresh, clean slate. Over the past two weeks, donations and confessions have come pouring in, as Grist Indulgence-buyers have relieved themselves of guilt […]

Google Transit

I was going to write something about the just-debuted Google Transit -- a very cool new tool from Google that aspires eventually to have all the nation's local transit information in one easy-to-use tool -- but Jeremy Faludi went and did it for me. So go read that.