Climate Culture

It was only a matter of time

Remember when Umbra wrote about offsetting flatulence in 2005? Turns out she was ahead of her time.

Or should that be get fast trashed?

In college I wrote my honors thesis on the connection between running and spirituality. And I like the idea of eco-running as a combining-of-passions sort of idea. Except I’m not really into combining my passions a la eco-runner Samuel, by picking up trash while I run. Because I’m training for a marathon, and I live […]

Shell and Nat Geo team up to create 5.4 million pieces of trash

A rant: I'm a big National Geographic dork, so it pains me to kvetch about the ton of crap that comes with each issue. Once relieved of its "recyclable" plastic baggie, the fumes usually make me want to hang it on the clothesline for a while to air out, and I would, except a zillion junky inserts would festoon the lawn (excepting the sometimes great map supplement).

But this month's garbage haul topped it all, as a promotional DVD tumbled to the kitchen floor. Called "Eureka," it's a slick nine-minute commercial for Shell Oil dressed up as a movie, complete with a Hollywood score and gauzy cinematography, wherein our hero, the troubled but lovable petroleum engineer with receding hairline, struggles mightily with the problem of how to get more precious oil out of the earth without disturbing a nearby coral reef system, and remains stumped until he looks into his heart and is given the key by a child. Really. And that's not all.

And a bit of introspection

From the Oregonian: Wild birds competing with youth baseball. City wants to turn Little League diamond into wild space. Little Leaguers don’t want to be forced out of their park. Should wild birds trump kiddie baseball players? If I say no, does that go against everything I allegedly stand for as an environmentalist a person […]

Global-warming-themed game now online

A new video game teaches users about saving the planet is coming on the market, and you can try it out for free first. Check out Global Warning, a new game from Midori Tech. Here’s what happens: A dump company sets up an immense (nearly the size of 50 football fields) landfill next to your […]

Umbra on radiant heating

Dear Umbra, We’re trying to build a really small house and be really economical as we do it. Radiant floor heating sounds practical for the first floor, although it’s expensive. What do you think about radiant floor heating, pluses, minuses, efficiency? Radiantly yours, Kerry Florence, Mass. Dearest Kerry, Thank you for helping me to write […]

Harry Potter is way greener than your average book

I wrote last week about Harry Potter going green in the seventh and final installation of the series. Turns out, it’s even greener than we thought. It might just be the greenest book of all time [PDF] (except for all those books that have never been published, I guess). Production of the book spurred the […]

Mmm, pollutocrats

The Simpsons flee Springfield in the dark of night.

TM and © 2007 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Fans of The Simpsons have had to wait 18 years for the first full-length feature film about the family, opening on July 27. Although the hype leading up to the release date has included unique publicity stunts -- such as a contest between 14 Springfields across the U.S. to determine who gets to host the hometown premiere, and the conversion of selected 7-Elevens to Kwik-E-Marts, complete with KrustyO's, Buzz Cola, and Squishees -- the film's producers have kept mum about the details of the plot.

However, the word on the street is that Homer, his new pet pig, and a leaking silo full of pig droppings somehow spur a large-scale environmental crisis that must be contained by the U.S. EPA. The EPA chief is a villainous Russ Cargill, who reports to U.S. President Arnold Schwarzenegger (voiced, respectively, by Simpsons veterans Albert Brooks and Harry Shearer). Somewhere along the way, Erin Brockovich makes a cameo as herself.

The Guardian got a peek at 10 minutes of the film, and notes that a cameo of Green Day in the film has the band members "poisoned and drowning in the fetid Lake Springfield after interrupting a Duff Beer-sponsored show 'to say one thing about the environment.'" Methinks that the water pollution may link back to the pig-poop issue, but that's just wild speculation an educated guess on my part. Another spoiler is that Lisa is rumored to develop a crush on a green activist while pulling together a school presentation on climate change, appropriately entitled "An Irritating Truth."

But we'll all have to wait for another week and a half to find out exactly how it all plays out, unless Fox wants to give Grist staffers a prescreening (hint, hint).

The incredible shrinking American

Could our neglect of health and the environment be making us shorter? According to recent studies, chaps in Holland are an average of two inches taller than American men these days, whereas in the 19th century, our lads towered an average two and a half inches over them and all of the rest of western […]

A scary/funny post from China

I found this in my Google Reader feed this morning, a post from a British blogger named Charlie living in Beijing. Three weeks after it was reported that the Chinese government convinced the World Bank to suppress a report that over 700,000 Chinese citizens die every year of pollution-related ailments, due to the fact that it may lead to revolution social unrest among the populace, Charlie's post reads like a bittersweet valentine to the city he's lived in for four years: