Climate Culture
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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. :) […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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How green are the ‘childless by choice’?
Laura S. Scott has surveyed and interviewed more than 170 people for her Childless by Choice Project. “I’m keenly interested in the process of decision-making,” she says. “How do we get from assuming parenthood for ourselves to the point where we’re saying, ‘No kids, thank you!’?” She shares what she’s learned in a new book, […]
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Ask Umbra on pasta, Clorox wipes, and a satisfied customer
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, I am a fairly active, athletic person; that being said, I love my pasta. When I boil the water for my pasta, I run the tap water for about 5–10 seconds until the water becomes very hot, then fill up my pot, and set it on my […]
