Climate Culture

High Line Park

What’s going on in New York with the High Line Park is extremely cool. Check out this video: Yeah, some grumps will argue that public money could be better spent elsewhere, but when is that not true? Sometimes you gotta do something pretty even though it doesn’t make sense. Hardly worth being human otherwise.

An interview with Bonk author Mary Roach

Photo: cybertoad Ah, sex. Source of carnal bliss, domestic harmony, cute infants … and global population problems. (Oh, environmentalists are such killjoys.) Overpopulation aside for the moment, sex is fundamental to humanity, and to the rest of the natural world — and besides, it’s a dang fascinating subject, as Mary Roach found out while researching […]

R.I. court reverses ruling, says paint companies not responsible for lead cleanup

Three paint companies should not have to clean up lead contamination in Rhode Island homes, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. The decision reverses a landmark 2006 ruling in which the state was victorious in alleging that Sherwin-Williams Co., NL Industries Inc., and Millennium Holdings LLC created a public nuisance by manufacturing and selling lead-based […]

Three guidebooks for a dream vacation at your dining-room table

Eat your way around the world, without leaving home. If you had to choose one place in the world to go for a summer break, where would it be? For me, it would be a place I stayed once in Puglia, at the heel of Italy’s boot. In 2003, my friends and I spent a […]

Drought hampering Fourth of July celebrations

Friday is July 4, otherwise known in the U.S. as the Fourth of July. Independence-celebrating Americans are accustomed to gazing upon red-glaring rockets, air-bursting bombs, and other shows of pyrotechnic pomp — but this year, many fireworks shows may lose their sparkle. Because of drought conditions, many shows across the country have been canceled, and […]

Green Onion

The Onion’s green issue is out, and it’s a doozy — from eco-junkies recycling (“If you come across an old needle lying around, by all means, use it”), to crediting Working Assets’ long-distance with the planet’s survival, to an opinion piece by a smokestack (“Soon, my tummy starts to feel full. And when I feel […]

15 green books you can actually read at the beach

Green books that are fun to read? What a novel idea. So maybe you’ll finally have a chance to catch up on some reading this summer. But so many of those books about the environment seem kind of … well, homework-y. What’s a vacationing enviro to do? Turn to Grist for advice, of course! Here […]

An interview with author James Howard Kunstler

Author and social critic James Howard Kunstler, known for predicting our post-peak-oil future in nonfiction works such as The Long Emergency, has also brought his forecasts to life through fiction. His newest novel, World Made By Hand, describes the near future in a small town in upstate New York — not unlike the place Kunstler […]

An absorbing news story

A nice bit of engineering problem solving! Anything that discourages people from switching from incandescents (5 percent useful light, 95 percent wasted energy) to compact fluorescent bulbs while we wait for the prices on good LED bulbs to come down is a bad thing.

One thing you hear from the nutjobs is how terrible the mercury in CFL bulbs is, and what an EPA nightmare you will have on your hands if you break one of these in your house.

A clever solution is pending: Providing a small bit of mercury absorbing treated cloth with the bulbs so that, in event of a break (rare -- I have many of these bulbs, and have moved them several times without breakage), you simply put the cloth over the break and it sucks up the mercury, and you recycle the cloth so the mercury is recaptured. Neat!

Manufactured Landscapes is as good as they say

Obviously I need to watch movies faster. Almost a year ago today I posted about wanting to watch Manufactured Landscapes, featuring the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, mainly shot in China. I finally got around to it.

Not only is the movie visually arresting, but it is very, very disturbing.