Climate Culture

Will my baby be the 7 billionth?

Born in the U.S., my child will be one of the most voracious consumers on the planet. But to apologize for this seems to signal a loss of hope.

Architect recycles a 747 jet into a house

Terrifying recycled playground will eat your children

Let's say you want to build a playground for refugee children from Myanmar. And let's say you also want to recycle some rubber tires. You could tie the tires to ropes and make swings out of them, like kids have done pretty much since the tire was invented, or maybe you could put them on the ground to make an obstacle course. Or, hey, you could fashion them into a sort of Gigeresque nightmare squid! That one sounds good, let's do that.

Local dressing is the new local eating

The wool and cotton for all of the clothes in Rebecca Burgess' closet was grown within 150 miles of her home in the Bay Area. The wool was spun there, too; the dyes were grown there; the sweaters were knitted there. In fact, the clothes were entirely locally sourced from what Burgess calls her local "fibershed" — the network of farmers, millers, weavers, designers, dyers, knitters, and seamstresses that it takes to make clothes.  

Check out this high-tech prosthetic for amputee cyclists

The Cadence leg prosthetic looks like something Chell from Portal might wear, but it's actually specially designed for riding a bike. Design student Seth Astle just won the James Dyson award for Cadence, which helps give below-the-knee amputees the fluid leg movement necessary to pedal a bike efficiently. 

How DIY and the ‘IKEA effect’ make us green

The "IKEA effect" says that we value things we have built ourselves (even if those things are frankly a little crappy). I'd propose an extension -- call it the "DIY effect," which says we tend to hold onto, repair, and upgrade things we build ourselves, breaking us out of the consumerist cycle of trashing what's old so we can capitalize on the (often-illusory) advantages of the latest and greatest.

Bombs away: Yarn bombers get out-heisted in Boulder

Clever yarn bombers give Boulder's bike-share program some fuzzy PR-love by wrapping their drab kiosks in colorful hand-knit cozies. But the prank's on them when anonymous thread thieves nick the knitting one day before they're set to come off.

I am the population problem

Population growth tends to get blamed on other people. But actually the population problem is all about me: white, middle-class, American me.

Well, that's one way to recycle your bottle caps

This Chuck Close-style self-portrait by Mary Ellen Croteau is entirely made of discarded bottle caps. (A lot of them are from sodas, but deodorant caps, childproof pill container lids, soap bottle-style pumps, and tops from bottles of saline solution and eyedrops are also represented, along with probably many more.) This is possibly not a practical recycling solution for everyone, but you gotta admit it looks amazing.

7 billion in 7 minutes: Science magazine explains it all [VIDEO]

"Science" magazine took the good bits from its recent special issue on population and squished them into this handy video.