Climate Cities

How Wendy Brawer put green on the map

Don’t let Wendy Brawer’s urban address fool you — this New Yorker has a soft spot for nature. After all, she’s the founder of Modern World Design, an eco-design firm, and has spent the last 11 years at the helm of the Green Map System, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping citizens all over the […]

SOL: Sustaining Ourselves Locally

According to the Current TV Studio blog, SOL, a viewer-contributed piece about a sustainable development project in Oakland, will be airing on TV.

I think this is a good example of how people like you, armed with a camera and a passion, can produce a short film that could potentially reach 28 million homes (according to a company press release [PDF]).

Here's the synopsis on Current:

This is specifically a piece on an urban sustainable development project in Oakland that consists of 9 people working together to do community environment work. Amazing project that focuses on everything from compost and farming to food justice.

Watch it now.

Oh No He Didn’t

Chrysler official takes public potshot at oil companies What’s more fun than a quiet, simmering feud between Big Auto and Big Oil? A public catfight! Chief Chrysler spokesflack Jason Vines minced no words on a company blog Monday: “Despite a documented history of … hoarding their bounty by avoiding technologies, policies, and legislation that would […]

Bay City Tollers

San Francisco looks into congestion charging If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear … a money clip. The city creatively known as “The City” plans to study the possibility of “congestion charges” — making drivers pay to enter downtown during business hours. Critics include some stores in high-traffic areas, which fear that […]

Does Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods say anything new?

OK, call me a crank, a malcontent, a hypercritical reviewer with a small, crabbed heart. But despite all its earnestness, despite its heartfelt message, which an environmentalist and concerned parent like me should embrace — in brief, that nature is good for children — Richard Louv’s plea to reengage our children with nature left me […]

An interview with Richard Louv about the need to get kids out into nature

Richard Louv is an anecdote machine. As we milled about near the door of a Seattle cafe awaiting lunch-hour seating, he kept up a constant stream of witty, telling stories — about “no running” signs on playgrounds, clueless environmental leaders, suffering outdoor-gear execs. I started fumbling for my recorder. Richard Louv. It’s no wonder Louv’s […]

Oiling for a Flight

The top 10 best places to live during an oil crisis Pack yer bags, kids — there’s an oil crisis coming and we’re moving to the Big Apple! Eco-website SustainLane has come up with a list of the 10 U.S. cities best able to weather an oil crisis, and New Yawk is number one. The […]

So 2003

Luxury SUVs are losing their cool The jerk-offs who drive enormous, fuel-hogging luxury SUVs between their gated McMansions, plastic surgeons, and corporate-whore jobs — not that there’s anything wrong with that — are slowly but surely realizing that they are, in fact, jerk-offs. Sales of all SUVs have dropped, but luxe behemoths like the Hummer […]

The Road to Hell Is Paved With ‘Hood Intentions

Census estimates show U.S. population shifting to exurbs As the U.S. population rises, more and more people are moving into compact, smartly planned, energy-efficient cities. Ha! Ha! Sigh. Actually, the fastest-growing areas of the country are fringes: suburbs and semi-rural areas on the edges of expanding metropolitan regions. “It’s not just the decade of the […]

City Bickers

Housing developers compete with manufacturers for urban land You know the story: developers target a tract of land for condos and are met with outraged protests from … manufacturers? Progressive urban planners envision dense cities where housing and clean industry (think solar-panel manufacturing, not smokestacks) co-exist peacefully, with the latter providing jobs for those who […]