Climate Culture

Car camping with a Prius

Just returned from the annual five-day camping trip with about a dozen other families. This is a photo of a fully mature male Western fence lizard, also known as a blue belly because of the blue spot under the male's throat (my youngest daughter is the hand model). The spot is used to impress the ladies and as a warning to other guys trying to horn in. It only works for lizards, young male Gristmill readers, so don't get any ideas.

The propensity for chickens, lizards and alligators to fall asleep when you turn them on their backs and rub their bellies is a bug in their evolutionary programming. It's an operating envelope rarely encountered in nature, which may explain why they go off line when it happens.

Dancing

In Salzburg, one person made — and several people subsequently reiterated — the point that all this work and struggle on behalf of future generations should be undertaken in a spirit of joy. It’s the human capacity to transcend circumstances, to love and laugh and be goofy together no matter how oppressive the context, no […]

Coolio to educate students about global warming

Grammy-award-winning rapper Coolio is on a fantastic voyage … to spread the word about climate change to historically black colleges and universities across the country. As an official spokesdude for the Environmental Justice and Climate Change campaign (a partnership with Gore’s “we” campaign), he’ll aim to engage students in the climate justice debate and educate […]

Umbra on air mattresses

Dear Umbra, We live in a small house, and when we have guests, the bed situation is limiting. Convenience tells me that an inflatable bed would be ideal. However, the “no vinyl, that’s final” rule reigns supreme in our household. What sort of options can you suggest for a sleeping surface that is easy to […]

A semi-comprehensive sportin’ round-up

Beijing Olympics 2008: With less than 30 days to the Olympic games, Chinese officials and businesses have actively been touting efforts to reduce air pollution. Even as visibility was down to a few hundred meters in the pollution-laden misty July weather, Beijing's environmental bureau insisted that there will be clear skies for the August games.

Chinese corporations are trying to do their part to curb the smog. The Beijing Shougang Group has cut steel production by 70 percent and will take a 2 million yuan loss for the third quarter. International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge told the AP, "We are confident that atmospheric pollution will have no major impact on the Olympic Games."

However, Olympic athletes are not quite as confident as Rogge in the Beijing climate. In the lead-up to the games, the Canadian Olympic Road Racing Team will train in Kyoto, Japan, thereby avoiding the streets of Beijing until the last possible second.

Perhaps the Canadians are right to raise a skeptical eyebrow at Rogge's claims. As of early July, Beijing's smog was five times over the safety limit and a few recent health studies have indicated that polluted air may affect blood circulation and athletic performance for asthmatics and non-asthmatics alike.

Philly Eagles cheerleaders put out ‘eco-sexy’ calendar

We’ve mentioned a number of times how green the Philadelphia Eagles football team is, but I believe we’ve neglected to mention that the cheerleaders are also backing the effort to green the team. In fact, they’ve been so kind as to pose in organic swimwear and eco-accessories for a 16-month calendar printed on (mostly) recycled […]

The link between obesity and the environment

Slate's Dan Engber has attempted to take down Wall-E in classic Green Room style with a piece slamming the film's connection between obesity and environmental destruction.

Engber's critique is flawed in so many ways that it's hard to know where to begin ... For instance, he doesn't seem to believe that obesity really has much to do with being too sedentary or eating too much. To support this, he cites research saying that 80 percent of the variation in body weight can be explained by DNA. But what the research actually shows (and what his own colleague, William Saletan, has recently gotten right) is that 80 percent of the variation can be explained by DNA among individuals living in the same environment. If fatness is determined so strongly by genes, as Engber would have us believe, how in the world, then, is it possible to explain skyrocketing obesity rates in the past several decades?

In sum, Engber thinks the Nalgene-toting eco-liberals are ridiculous (and disingenuous) in their linking of the expanding waistlines and climate change. It's a too-easy analogy, he says.

Granted, I (most likely, we) are among those people Engber loves to loathe and could scarcely be dissuaded from doing so, but just in case -- in case there's been a fundamental oversight, a gap in education -- I feel like sending him a copy of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food or Paul Robert's The End of Food. It's impossibly hard to argue, after reading either one, that agriculture, ecological degradation, and obesity aren't closely intertwined.

From Cat to Crap

SOL catz Oh hai. Did you noes global warming hates teh kittehs? Doll of the wild When the late Croc Hunter’s daughter took on his cause, it was cute. When she developed her own clothing line, it was less cute. But a Bindi Irwin doll that says “Crikey! Let’s go help wildlife”? We can only […]

An interview with climate mockumentary filmmaker Randy Olson

Randy Olson became a filmmaker after fifteen years as a marine biologist, so the perspective he brings to the craft is rooted in science — but blended with his own irreverent humor. His hilarious new film on global warming is a perfect example. Randy Olson. After quitting his university job in 1993, Olson went to […]

Simple cooking can produce delicious results — like old-fashioned Austrian pancakes

Get cooking, sonny. Too many people in this country have been sold a bill of goods. They’ve been tricked, flim-flammed, conned, and hustled. They’ve been bamboozled into believing that food comes wrapped in plastic from the freezer at the nearest Walmart. They’ve learned to believe that cooking is a chore — like laundry or washing […]