Climate Culture

All Stories

  • Breaking Through Concrete: Day 1 — Seattle to Talent, Ore.

    The Breaking Through Concrete bus on the way to Oregon.(Michael Hanson photos)   Breaking Through Concrete team(Michael Hanson)The Breaking Through Concrete team — David Hanson, Michael Hanson, Charles Hoxie, and Edwin Marty — is taking a 21st century road trip to document the American urban farm movement. Driving across the country and back in a […]

    Breaking Through Concrete team Culture

  • Kids Books and Rainforest Destruction

    Imagine your horror if you picked up a copy of a book on rainforests to read to your kids, intending to teach them good environmental values, and discovered that the book about rainforests was printed on dead rainforests. Unfortunately, in many American bedrooms tonight, that horror is likely to be reality. A report released today […]

    Margaret Swink Culture

  • Ask Umbra on eco-fiction and hair donations for the oil spill

    Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, I hate to bother you, but I tried doing a Grist search to answer my question and nothing really turned up. I was hoping you could recommend some environmentally aware fiction writers or books. I love Barbara Kingsolver, but have read everything of hers twice already. :) […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • Bike to Work Day and bike to work cities

    Courtesy Billg1 via PicasaHere’s a late Bike to Work Day post. OK it’s a glorified retweet of Ezra Klein’s three-paragraph story about giving up his car in D.C., which is worth reading. Here’s the last two-thirds: The debate over auto ownership is unfortunately moralistic when, in my experience, the realities of auto ownership are almost […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Culture

  • Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on driving

    Dearest readers, Photo: GmanViz via FlickrIn light of the recent oil spill flooding not only the Gulf but also all of our minds here at Grist HQ, I think it’s an apt time to reflect on the larger issue, which is decreasing our dependence on oil. Now obviously one way to do that on an […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • From paradise to Superfund, afloat on New Jersey’s Passaic River

    For the first 18 years of my life I lived along the final 17-mile stretch of the Passaic River. That’s the dirty, ugly part of the river that passes through the most crowded, industrialized part of the United States. The Passaic forms the western border of my home town: North Arlington, New Jersey, a tiny […]

    Mary Bruno Culture

  • The birthplace of pizza may be cooking its pies with coffins

    pie4dan via Flickr Creative Commons When the truth hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a-mor-e. When the pizza was cooked on an old coffin’s roof, that’s … a-pall-ing. Even if you’ve gone to heaven, you still might be burning after you’re gone … that is, if you were buried in Naples, Italy. […]

    Ashley Braun Culture

  • Are we too clean?

    Photo: pfly via FlickrDearests, with yesterday’s Clorox wipes letter on my mind, I was intrigued to read the following headline in today’s Wall Street Journal: Can Dirt Do a Little Good? The story talks about the new film Babies, a Focus feature following the first year of life for four babies living in Namibia, Mongolia, […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • Hardcore hip-hop for vegans

    Dis’ hip-hop duo thinks it’s ridonkulous not to ditch dairy and meat ‘cuz they be eatin’ “only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit, and whole wheat.” Whole foods, fo’ realz. Apparently, the all-natural life prescribed in this song precludes drinking tap water but not smoking weed. —————————————————————————————————————————————————– Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist […]

    Ashley Braun Culture

  • Scientists link ADHD in kids to routine pesticide exposure [UPDATED]

      Writing in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan detailed how, following World War II, nerve-gas factories were converted en masse into synthetic pesticide factories. These weapons reborn as pesticides are organophosphates, as are both Sarin and VX gases. For farmers, they work by, as Wikipedia tastefully puts it, “irreversibly inactivating” an essential neurotransmitter within insects […]

    Tom Laskawy Culture