Climate Culture

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  • Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on spring cleaning

    Dearest readers, Ah, spring is on the calendar and in the air. Birds are singing, bees are buzzing, flowers are making me sneeze—or perhaps it’s this dust that’s been building up all winter. Time for the annual washing, scrubbing, wiping, sweeping, and general expunging of stuff known as spring cleaning. I scoured the archives for […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • How much renewable juice does it take to power an Apple iPad?

    With Apple fans’ fingers itching for the newest glossy touchscreen machine to hit the market this Saturday — the legendary iPad — it only makes sense to ask how the latest gee-whiz gizmo will impact the environment. Even with ten to twelve hours of battery time, they’ll have to recharge the wunder gadget sometime. So […]

    Ashley Braun Culture

  • How to improve a Hummer’s mileage and add retro style

    Improving a Hummer’s mileage doesn’t take much. And it doesn’t even require pricey, high-tech electric batteries. Artist Jeremy Dean says you have to go Back to the Futurama, which is more 19th century than lithium-ion centric. But how to actually improve a Hummer’s mileage? Easy: Put two horses in front of it and take it […]

    Ashley Braun Culture

  • Do Americans really make the connection between transportation, oil use, and environmental impacts?

    The national poll that Transportation for America released this week makes it clear that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of increasing our access to transportation options, no matter where they live in America — big cities, suburbs, small towns, or rural areas. The majority believes that their community — and the country as a whole […]

    David Goldberg & Stephen Davis Culture

  • Ask Umbra on aluminum cans, the climate bill, and bathroom burdens

    Send your question to Umbra! UPDATE: Happy April Fools’ Day! Q. Dear Umbra, I just finished drinking a soda—actually, I still have a sip or two left but wanted to go ahead and email you, so I’d have an answer by the time I finish it. What should I do when the can is empty? […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • In praise of the sandwich-shop trend

    Simply delicious: the sandwich trend takes flight at Butcher in New Orleans.Photo courtesy Jason Perlow, via Flickr. In the late 1990s, if you wanted to go out for a skillfully cooked meal made from top-quality local/organic ingredients, you pretty much had to find to a cutting-edge white-tablecloth restaurant: say, Berkeley’s Chez Panisse or Manhattan’s Savoy. […]

    Tom Philpott Culture

  • Lawyer: No, you shouldn’t paint your own bike lane

    Portland, where else? (This one’s legal, by the way.)Courtesy BikePortland via FlickrIn case you were wondering, attorney Kenny Ching at GOOD says painting guerrilla bike lanes on your favorite cycling streets is a trouble-ridden idea. What kind of trouble? Catastrophic trouble. Never mind property damage and vandalism. You could be responsible—legally, financially, and otherwise—for a […]

    Jonathan Hiskes Culture

  • Walkshed dilemmas and the Nissan Leaf

    The wife and I recently made a fairly difficult decision about where to send our 6-year-old to school for first grade next year. We had the following dilemma: he tested into the gifted program at our neighborhood school, but he also tested into the highly gifted program, which is run at a school across town. […]

    David Roberts Culture

  • Say it loud — I’m childfree and I’m proud

    In 1969, graduating college senior Stephanie Mills made national headlines with a commencement address exclaiming that, in the face of impending ecological devastation, she was choosing to forgo parenthood.  “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all,” she told her […]

    Lisa Hymas Culture

  • China to de-stink landfill problem with giant deodorant guns

    Residents of Beijing are making a stink about the excessive odors residing around the city’s many landfills, which are rising in number nearly as quickly as the Chinese population. (Maybe the government should institute a “one landfill per couple” policy?) But instead of cleaning up this mess of problems for those down in the dumps, […]

    Ashley Braun Culture