Climate Culture

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  • A new era dawns in the wine world

    [Warning: your earnest food-politics commentator is about to burrow headfirst into a wine rabbit hole. Follow him — it will be fun!] In a micro-screed issued Feb. 13 on Twitter, wine’s most influential writer railed against what he called the “anti-flavor wine elite.” Now, ours is a severely troubled world, and a tweet from a […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • Are butterflies the silent harbingers of global warming?

    Camille Parmesan studies the effects of global warming by chasing butterflies. Sounds fanciful, but it is anything but. Her careful field observations of butterfly populations have produced compelling evidence of how climate change has already affected our living planet. In several landmark studies, she has helped pave the way for a body of eye-opening research […]

    Seth Shulman Culture

  • Heritage Foods’ Patrick Martins wants to put slaughterhouses back in the city [Q&A]

    Rare breed: Patrick Martins moves old-school meat.(Les Meyers photo)After founding Slow Food USA in 2000, Patrick Martins went on to cofound Heritage Foods USA, a nationwide purveyor of meat from sustainably raised, heritage-breed animals, which he continues to head. And every Sunday, he records a radio show & podcast, The Main Course, from New York […]

    Erik Hoffner Culture

  • How to be ‘Fast, Fresh, and Green’ in the kitchen [book review]

    Like recycling, listening to NPR, and caring about the World Cup, everyday cooking has become a de rigeur activity for those with certain class and cultural aspirations. And that’s as it should be. We need more home cooks. If diversified, human-scale, community-directed farms are going to thrive, then a much broader swath of the population […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • Obama has spoken, now let's act

    We applaud President Obama’s plan for the restoration of the Gulf Coast and his commitment to comprehensive climate-change legislation. As the President stated yesterday, we must embrace a clean-energy future. We must unleash American innovation and position our country at the global forefront of a clean-energy economy. We must create millions of good, green jobs […]

    Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins Culture

  • How many energy-efficient light bulbs does it take to close 705 coal plants?

    The lighting sector is on the edge of a spectacular revolution, a shift from the century-old, inefficient incandescent light bulb to far more efficient technologies. Perhaps the quickest, most profitable way to reduce electricity use worldwide -- thus cut

    Lester Brown Culture

  • A return to the land, and fresh food, in the backyards of the Delta

    January 2011 update: Many of the photos have been removed from this series so they can be published in a Breaking Through Concrete book, forthcoming this year from UC Press. We drive south down Route 61 (aka The Blues Highway) in Mississippi, finding Dorothy and Owen Gradey-Scarbrough after church and Sunday Supper. Dorothy and Owen […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Culture

  • Daniel Dancer’s ‘sky art,’ climate change choreography

    Imagine if your job was to work with a couple of thousand elementary school kids at the same time — to keep them on task, doing the same project, where everyone needed to be exactly in place for it all to work. “The teachers are always worried that it’s going to be chaos, that kids […]

    Bill McKibben Culture

  • 2010’s most annoying fad: the ‘vintage’ incandescent bulb

    Some ideas are broken from the start.Photo: laszlo-photo via Flickr Apparently, the latest retro-hot-design fad revolves around inefficiency so glaring it’s blinding: a return to “vintage” light bulbs, which are energy-sucking exposed-filament copies of Edison’s original illuminating invention. Restaurant designers all over the world seem to be snatching up these antique-style bulbs that cost anywhere […]

    Ashley Braun Culture

  • Ask Umbra wipes up the confusion on TP, pee rags, and bidets

    Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, We’ve been using “pee rags” for a while now, but are trying to find a way to do away with toilet paper all together. The obvious option is washing, but is the impact of water use for washing close to or equal to the small amount of […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture