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  • How about we stop claiming environmentalists are “anti-human”

    Know what’s really depressing? Dragging out old saws about anti-human environmentalists.In the dark of night yesterday — OK, at 8:02 p.m. — Slate published a piece by Anne Applebaum that calls out the “anti-human prejudices of the climate change movement.” Specifically, she is worried that the news coming from Copenhagen is turning her nine-year-old son […]

  • Could AlertMe be the Apple of energy efficiency?

    AlertMe iphone app.Photo: Courtesy of AlertMeI’m sitting in a conference room at a PR agency on the San Francisco waterfront when the chief executive of AlertMe, a British energy management startup, pulls out his iPhone to check on a colleague’s kilowatt consumption back in the U.K. The executive, who has the Vonnegutian name of Pilgrim […]

  • Sugar and Spice and…Lead and Mercury

    Sandra Steingraber is my hero. Her book, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, chronicles her own pregnancy from both a scientific and personal perspective. It’s beautifully and lovingly written—yet for a pregnant woman it’s also a tough read. Trained as a biologist, Steingraber meticulously documents the toxic hazards we live with every day, and […]

  • Ask Umbra on holiday donations, green magazines, and more

    Dearest Readers, I write to you from Copenhagen, where I have come to witness the big climate conference. O the life of a Grist columnist gets more glamorous by the day! Be sure to check out our coverage, and follow my adventures on Twitter. Yes, dear readers, I’ve finally succumbed to the tweet hereafter — […]

  • On the message—not the arrests—at Copenhagen’s mass rally

    Demonstrators at Saturday’s climate-change march in Copenhagen.Grist photo/Jennifer PredigerI skipped Copenhagen’s large demonstration on Saturday for the same reason I missed the Bright Green expo and Desmond Tutu speaking at the Bella Center—there’s so freakin’ much happening here, so many events worth attending and reporting at every waking moment. I’ll post more soon about the […]

  • From Big Ben to Brussels: Group walks to raise climate awareness

    Here are the stats on our walk from Big Ben to Brussels: 3 countries, 15 days, 250 miles, an estimated 500,000 steps. Me and 4 footsore, fantastic friends. Our final day seemed almost too easy. We woke up with less than 10 miles to go, and had to dawdle along to allow the camera crew […]

  • This year, have a Slow Christmas

    This post originally appeared on SlowChristmas.org. Recently I have begun to wonder. Just when did Christmas go from this:         to this? USB Warmer Seat Cushion           The world is a fast place, filled with stuff, so I guess it makes sense that Christmas would reflect that. The […]

  • How to make healthy, safe food-bank donations 

    In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night. ————— Time to green the canned-food drive.From the Grist Twitter feed: Looking for healthy safe nonperishable foods to donate to food banks. Ideas?  — […]

  • Take a walk through the JP Green House [video]

    JP Green House walk-through from Ken Ward on Vimeo. Walk through of JP Green House, by Ken Ward, co-founder, and Simon Hare & Declan Keefe of Placetailor, showing materials, design and construction techiques being used, aiming to meet passivhaus standards and meet negative, net carbon impact objective.

  • Study says green shoppers more likely to later cheat, steal

    Dearests, I know this won’t apply to any of you, but it is a curious phenomenon: according to a piece in Slate, a recent psychological study shows that a small group of shoppers who bought green products later acted badly in constructed situations — in one case, sharing less money with those in need, and […]