Climate Culture
All Stories
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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A takeout eater turns CSA shareholder
I’ve lived in New York for four years. Being a busy, free spirit in the city doesn’t lend itself to grocery shopping and meal planning. So, like many New Yorkers, I enjoyed living off the fat of the land. And by that I mean the takeout menu. Like many of my peers on the takeout […]
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Who would win the 2010 Green World Cup?
The 2010 World Cup is underway! Brazil and Spain may be the favorites, but superstars Kaka and Fernando Torres won’t help their countries score on clean air and low greenhouse-gas emissions as they compete with some of the world’s environmental powerhouses in the bid for the 2010 Green Cup. To celebrate the World Cup soccer […]
