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Whole Foods tries to trick greens into praising a big corporation

Whole Foods, Inc., the natural-foods market, has recently announced that it will attempt to "reduce its waste to zero," mainly through increased composting. (Via Nick and Jeff)

But wait!

Whole Foods has consistently attempted to prevent its workers from unionizing! And they sell meat!

For these heresies, I assume our readers will rise with a unified voice and condemn this heinous attempt at greenwashing.

Nice try, Whole Foods!

Is there tension between them?

I am an atheist.

I wouldn't call myself a "militant" atheist, as I don't consider being an atheist a big part of my life or my self-image. I don't believe there are furry three-eyed ghosts floating behind me at all times, but I don't get militant about that either. Why bother?

However, in these times we live in, there's a strange pressure to show extreme deference to religious proclamations, however expressed, no matter how absurd the content. Witness, for instance, the global media lovefest when the pope died, during which I read a quote from a bishop who said, "papal infallibility doesn't mean you get it right every time." Oh? Gosh, that sounds kinda dumb to me. But I'm not allowed to say so.

I'm allowed to say that I have a "difference of values" with far-right religious folks about homosexuality, but I'm not allowed to say that finding justification for discrimination in a millennia-old Jewish holy book is %$@#! stupid and irrational.

But whatever. Most of the time, I can live with this -- I reside in a secularist blue-state bubble anyway, and I figure the current wave of backwards medieval religious sentiment will pass in due time. Live and let live, I say.

But Richard Dawkins, author of celebrated evolution masterwork The Selfish Gene, does not share my attitude. He shows no deference and hedges no bets. This interview with Dawkins in Salon is, in that way, utterly refreshing. It reminds you how few people, despite the perpetual delusions of persecution on the part of modern-day right evangelicals, are willing to openly criticize the religious -- despite their complete lack of restraint in criticizing us atheists.

My point? Glad you asked. The one thing I would ding Dawkins for is this exchange:

Buying a Prius has benefits, but don’t forget the costs.

A reader of the Cascadia Scorecard Weblog had this question: What do we think about this piece of advice from the May-June Sierra Club magazine's "Hey Mr. Green" column?

Hey Mr. Green,

What's best for the environment, continuing to drive my perfectly fine 1990 Honda Accord, or trading it in for a new gas-sipping Prius? -- Heath in Los Angeles

Well, Mr. Green hates to say this because you might be bonded to your trusty old Accord, but she burns twice the petrol and wheezes out twice the global-warming gas of a Prius or similar hybrid model. Being a conscientious environmentalist, though, you're also worried about the energy and pollution involved in building a new car -- the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gas. But by the time the Prius hits 50,000 miles, its energy savings will have made up for its own construction. So unless you drive very little, a new hybrid is the way to go.

That's not necessarily the advice I'd give.

Kunstler

There's recently been a flurry of ecoblogospheric attention paid to James Howard Kunstler and his new book The Long Emergency. (We'll have an interview with Kunstler on Grist in the next week or so.)

Kunstler gained an audience by writing several books about the evils of suburban sprawl, and then hooked up with "the kids" via a long excerpt from TLE published in Rolling Stone.

What prompted the outpouring is this interview in Salon, which contains such juicy tidbits as this:

All That You Can’t Weave Behind

Fashion consumers tending toward greener garb Increasingly, fashionistas “don’t just want to look good in their clothes, they want to feel good in their clothes,” says Ali Hewson, co-creator (with her husband, U2’s Bono) of eco-sensitive clothing line Edun. With a growing number of ethical and green clothing lines hitting the market and making use […]

Subsidy Slickers

Nuke subsidies being added to McCain-Lieberman climate bill The latest draft of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act proposes hundreds of millions of dollars in new subsidies for the nuclear power industry, in the form of a cost-splitting arrangement that would have the feds shoulder half the expense of developing and getting regulatory approval for three […]

On a Wing and a Mayor

U.S. mayors form coalition to fight climate change, one city at a time A bipartisan coalition of 132 U.S. mayors — led by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D), and recently joined by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) — has issued a high-profile rebuke of Bush administration inaction on climate change. The leaders have […]

Neva Goodwin, ecological economist, answers questions

Neva Goodwin. What work do you do? I’m an economist, and codirector of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University. How does it relate to the environment? My overall goal is to affect what people are taught when they take economics courses, and to change the kind of economics that’s subsequently in people’s […]

Umbra on letter-writing campaigns

Dear Umbra, I just switched to all-natural cleaning products (Seventh Generation, it’s great!) and I wanted my switch to have the most impact possible. I was thinking about sending emails to the companies whose cleaning products I had previously used, telling them why I switched, describing the nasty effects of their products, and encouraging them […]

It’s cool.

I went to the grand opening of the Ballard branch of the Seattle Public Library this afternoon (the old Ballard branch, a boxy, ugly blight, was replaced by a brand new one two blocks from my townhouse, oh happy day). It was a madhouse, with screaming, apple-juice-stained kids everywhere (I brought three myself), long lines at the desk, Bavarian folk music coming from one room and a chamber trio playing in another ... we had to flee fairly quickly.

However!

Although that other branch gets all the attention, the Ballard building is just awesome. A full list of its environmental features can be found here, but the coolest are the green roof, which visitors can look at through a periscope (!), the "notch and tab" furniture, each piece of which is cut from single sheet of laminated wood and fitted together (with a very hip modern aesthetic), and the solar panels. And check this out:

Rooftop scientific devices that measure wind speed and direction, sunlight and the sound of rain. The artwork - LED (light-emitting diode) displays and an audio composition of Ballard-area sounds - is derived from the weather data.

Art and music derived directly from the surrounding environmental conditions. Now that's cool.

(More from the Seattle Times.)