Climate Culture

From Big Macs to Beauties

Do you believe in tragic? Pledge to fight global warming — get a Big Mac? That’s like handing out SUVs as a reward for taking the bus to work. Except with more special sauce. Frock hunter To honor her father’s work wrestling crocs, snakes, and stingrays, 9-year-old Bindi Irwin will enter the jungle of the […]

Inexpensive clothing industry has a big impact on the environment

That $5 T-shirt you’re wearing may have been a great find for your wallet, but the impact of such thrifty threads is far-reaching. A globalization-fueled glut of cut-price clothing has inspired many consumers to think of their duds as disposable. It’s a phenomenon some are calling “fast fashion” — the apparel equivalent of fast food. […]

The L.A. Times covers the important debate over whom Laurie David should be dating

Gina Piccalo has a piece in the L.A. Times on the most vital issue facing the nation: green celebrity hypocrisy. It’s far more thoughtful and less glib than most discussions of that subject. Still, by the end of the piece I was ready to jump out the window. Somehow taking a serious journalistic approach to […]

Steve Irwin’s daughter launches Bindi Wear eco-clothing line

Bindi Irwin, the 9-year-old daughter of the late Croc Hunter (R.I.P., mate), has launched her own children’s clothing line: The T-shirts, jumpers, swimwear, sleepwear, hats, bags and shoes carry environmental messages. The tags are made from recycled cardboard, the soles on the shoes are made with recycled rubber and 100 per cent of the profits […]

Trash bins overflow with plastic bottles at the ‘green’ Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival

They won't hear the message over the sound of your actions.

Voluntary actions didn’t get us civil rights, and they won’t fix the climate

Strange but true: Energy-efficient light bulbs and hybrid cars are hurting our nation’s budding efforts to fight global warming. More precisely, every time an activist or politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new bulb or spend extra on a Prius, ExxonMobil heaves a big sigh of relief. Scientists now scream the news […]

Toilet running? Better go catch it!

You know, this is probably more effective than about 99% of the PSAs you see on TV.

Lessons from Burning Man 2007

A man in a hardhat just dropped off his chicken for me to mind -- a Japanese Silkie who watched me with one surprisingly smart eye as I typed this post. I reassured her I was a vegetarian, and she seemed to relax. After a few minutes, the man in the hardhat returned, thanked me, and said he was off to find a blowdryer so he could give the little hen a bath. Playa dust has coated her feathers.

If it had been Monday, I might have thought this strange. But it's Sunday, and along with nearly 48,000 other people at Burning Man I've weathered two battering whiteouts of several hours each, and ingested some things I probably shouldn't have, and it was only after he'd walked away that I reflected back on the incident as unusual. That's what's great about this place: The Playa cracks your mind wide open. The spectrum of reasonable behavior widens. You question old prejudices and drop useless restrictions. Your mind frees up to learn.

So what better place to learn new tricks for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? For coming to understand -- in a visceral, tactile, immediate way -- what it means to produce and expend energy?

This, I assume, is what the exhibits under the Man, in the Green Pavilion, were supposed to accomplish. There was a game you could play, in which you threw hacky-sacks at little boards painted with images of oil rigs and smoke stacks, hoping to knock them over. There was the "Single-Cell Solution," an exhibit by the Chlorophyll Collective, which takes up exhaust from biodiesel generators in fluid-filled tubes, feeds those nitrogen-rich emissions into a pond where it feeds algae. The algae can be used to make more biodiesel: A closed fuel cycle. A marvel. Why aren't we doing this on a large scale? What would it take?

Smeg me

Pardon me a little gadget porn as I ogle these Smeg refrigerators, which have made it to the states at last. Despite the unfortunate name, it’s on my Christmas list: They’re extremely efficient, too: 305 kWh / year. I know, I know. If I was a real enviro I wouldn’t refrigerate food.

From DIY to Dirty

The perfect dorm Attention back-to-school shoppers: nothing impresses a sexy coed more than a DIY chair made of recycled six-pack rings. So get to … studying. Photo: Adam Johnson Stick ’em up People who live on the sticks follow strict rules. Lollipops, corn dogs, and kebabs in the morning; pick-up sticks and pogo-ing in the […]