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Reading tea leaves for the environment

Every month I get a kind of Reader’s Digest for people interested in the future. It’s called Future Survey, issued by the World Future Society. Each month it contains about 50 extended summaries of recent publications about the paths — economic, environmental, social — we seem to be following. The November 2000 issue, for example, […]

The U.S. balks at a global solution to global warming

THE HAGUE, Netherlands Bill McKibben reports from The Hague: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five If you walk straight out the front door of this convention hall and skirt the sandbagged dike that activists built during a weekend demonstration, you find yourself at the front door of a squat building with […]

Banks for the Memories

Prince Charles yesterday opened the Millennium Seed Bank, which is intended to protect more than 24,000 plant species around the world from extinction. The $114 million seed bank in southern England — the largest such effort so far — will store millions of seeds in underground bomb-proof, flood-proof vaults, and house specimens of more than […]

Greenpeace student activists stir things up at The Hague

THE HAGUE, Netherlands Bill McKibben reports from The Hague: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five The Hague, with its constant drizzle, qualifies as one of the gloomiest cities I’ve ever visited, and the tense, uncertain busyness of the convention center doesn’t add much to the atmosphere. But a 20-minute train ride […]

If They Could Just Harness All That Hot Air …

While government representatives in The Hague quibble over ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Germans are making some real progress in adopting clean energy. In the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, home to 2.8 million people and numerous heavy industries, about 19 percent of the electricity is generated by wind, and in some areas of the […]

Bye, Buy!

Sit out the shopping frenzy this Friday and celebrate Buy Nothing Day, an inspired idea from the Adbusters Media Foundation in Vancouver, B.C. The day after Thanksgiving marks the start of an annual consumer rampage, but you’ll have more fun, create less waste, and save moola if you stay home and finish off the pumpkin […]

Reds Seeing Green

Even as tourism has begun to boom in Cuba, attention to environmental concerns is also increasing. In 1970, Cuban President Fidel Castro said, “Unless we conquer nature, nature will conquer us,” and for years he encouraged farming and manufacturing to expand with little regard to the environment. But now Cuba’s communist government is limiting some […]

Will the rest of the world bend to U.S. pressure to weaken Kyoto?

THE HAGUE, Netherlands Bill McKibben reports from The Hague: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five An hour’s drive from the crowded convention hall where international negotiators are toiling to reach some agreement on fighting climate change, you can visit one of the enormous storm surge barriers the Dutch have built to […]

Turtles in the Soup

Environmentalists are outraged after Mexican authorities gave approval earlier this month to five hotel chains to build a tourist center in a sea turtle sanctuary in southeastern Mexico near Cancun. Enviros say the project, intended to span nearly 400 acres, would disturb a beach area frequented by endangered sea turtles and destroy endangered chit palms. […]

How Slow Can You Go?

Italians have launched a worldwide “eco-gastronomic” movement to save what they say are the latest endangered species — foods that are produced locally and organically, in contrast to mass-produced fast food and industrialized agriculture. The growing Slow Food movement, which has attracted more than 60,000 participants in dozens of countries, has as its symbol a […]