Climate Culture
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Ask Umbra’s Change Agent: Hannah Salwen
What would you do with half? Half the house, half the lattes, half the TV watching, half the Tweets, half the email checking? More importantly, what would you do with the other half — the extra space, funds, and time? Dearests, meet 17-year-old Atlanta Girls’ School junior Hannah Salwen (you may have read about her […]
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Car free in Boston, for all the wrong reasons
I’m currently in transportation transition. By the end of the month, I will have transferred my aging VW into my partner’s name, and canceled my own insurance. I will have tuned up my bike, spent a good chunk of money on a metro pass, and signed up with the local car-sharing business. But I’m not […]
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Walking: A simple focus for the Smart Growth movement
I expected to hear a lot more about sexy green urban design projects at the New Partners in Smart Growth conference in Seattle last week. I expected more sleek design and big new developments akin to Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia, or Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Maybe American urban planners are better at keeping it […]
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Ask Umbra on engagement rings, straws, and napkins
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, My boyfriend and I are talking seriously about marriage, and he knows I don’t want a diamond ring (at least not a new one) because of the social and environmental impacts. You addressed this topic in 2003, saying the only good options were no ring or a […]
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Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on Valentine’s Day
Dearest readers, Sometimes when I’m down in the stacks researching answers to your latest dilemmas, I enjoy taking a stroll down Ask Umbra archives lane. Here are some sparkly tidbits I culled from my past advice on lessening your impact on that sweet little romantic holiday, Valentine’s Day. Have any of your own sustainable loving […]
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Fish for Thought
Editor’s Note: Anna wrote this post (and several others) before leaving on maternity leave. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl in December. To eat fish, or not? If you’re pregnant, nursing, or even thinking about becoming pregnant, it’s a Catch-22. Seafood is the best possible source of the long-chain omega-3 fatty acid DHA, […]
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My whiz-bang light rail is your pain in the asphalt
Seattle light rail. Photo courtesy LeeLeFever via Flickr One train, two views: Getting to the airport from Seattle’s north side — its wealthier, whiter half — on public transit first involves a bus ride downtown. From there, as of two months ago, you can take a new light-rail line, instead of another bus, to Sea-Tac […]
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On talking to our kids about the future
Now that the first month of the new year in the new decade has come to an end, a first month that has brought much to mourn and not much to celebrate, I’ve been thinking again about hope. What some were calling “Hopenhagen,” did not, as we all know, and perhaps should have known from […]
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How personal actions can kick-start a sustainability revolution
Step it up! Small is the new big.The environmental movement is divided over the importance of small steps — are they a critical starting point or a distraction from needed policy and institutional changes? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but will small changes add up to the kind of […]
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Oscar smiles upon ‘Food, Inc.,’ stiffs ‘Mr. Fox’
Food, Inc., Robert Kenner’s hard-hitting exposé of the food industry, has snagged a Academy Award nomination in the “best documentary” category. (Full list of nominess here; Food Inc. is up against another food politics-themed film, The Cove.) This is a significant development. I know people in the food world who have taken a blase approach […]
