Climate Culture

Read his cranky email to a consumer

A reader wrote in to share this email exchange. This is the email she sent to GM — as I understand, it’s a form letter you can sign and send from the Plugin America website. Dear Sir, I am tired of being held by the throat by oil companies and I want to buy a […]

It’s the society, stupid

Andrew Dobson posted a thoughtful and useful piece in yesterday's issue of OpenDemocracy.org:

A sampling of recipes for Passover

Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about meals that express our connection to and appreciation for the earth. In keeping with this theme, I'll start with Marge Piercy's new book, Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own.

My interest in seders (the meal served at Passover) started when I was in high school and worked as a "hostess helper" for families who were hosting seders. Having been raised Catholic, I had never experienced a seder before, and was deeply moved by the beauty and ceremony of it. As someone who loves food and ritual, I was especially interested in the foods that were assigned special meaning on the Passover plate.

Recently, when I told my friend Rabbi Michael Feshbach that I was writing about this topic, he said, "The greens, which are the first item eaten, are seen as signs of spring. I think of the entire seder as the first multimedia teaching experience -- you tell the message, you smell the message, you eat the message."

For all of these reasons, when I heard that Piercy was going to be in Cambridge doing a reading from her new book, I cleared my schedule so that I could go.

Guster helps school students on climate change

I’ve told you before about the rockin’ work of environmental nonprofit Reverb, an organization that partners with musicians like Dave Matthews Band, Avril Lavigne, and Bonnie Raitt to "green" their tours and help educate fans about eco-issues. This year, they’re going even bigger by helping Warner Music Group reduce its industry-size carbon footprint, collaborating with […]

Sustainable food meets social justice

Grassroots organic is alive and well, even in the concrete jungles of New Haven and Boston. Today I spent an hour and a half at a talk called "Food Policy: Addressing Social Justice in the Sustainable and Local Food Movements." The event's keynote speakers were two women who work for urban sustainable food initiatives.

One of the organizations, CitySeed, is located in New Haven, Conn. At the talk, CitySeed's executive director, Jennifer McTiernan, spoke about how her organization works with Connecticut politicians to give low-income eaters access to fresh food and urban farmers' markets.

The other organization, The Food Project, hails from Boston, and works to integrate urban youth into their network of small scale organic production. Their speaker was a woman named Rebecca Nemec, who works as a policy fellow for the Project.

From Ferrell to Fuzz

You had us at Old School We’ve tried so hard not to giggle over the flabby buttocks, the shabby accents, even the promise of figure-skating glory. But it’s hopeless. If loving Will is wrong, we don’t want to be right. Besides, the environmental movement could use a little more cowbell. Photo: Vera Anderson / WireImage.com […]

Alternative School

U.S. college students are, like, totally into clean energy In answer to the loathed question “What are you going to do after you graduate?” gaggles of U.S. college students are looking into careers in alternative energy. (A group of college students is called a gaggle, right?) Green technology is having a heyday in schools from […]

Growth promoters in beef may damage sperm

As reported by the BBC, a University of Rochester study found recently that men whose mothers ate lots of beef during their pregnancies had lower sperm counts than the sons of women who ate little or no beef while pregnant:

Don’t want any hypocrisy

… ’cause that would make him a total hypocrite. As it is, he’s fine.

Rising costs affect consumers

One of the side effects of the rapid increase in ethanol consumption in the U.S. is that corn -- the main feedstock for ethanol -- has gotten much more expensive. Just take a look at the futures markets: the July 2007 corn contract started climbing last fall, which was about the time people started to realize just how quickly demand for corn-based ethanol was growing.

Obviously, rising costs trickle down to consumers in all sorts of ways. If corn prices stay high, meat, poultry, and dairy products will all get more expensive, since the animals are fed lots of corn. But more directly, stuff that's made from corn -- such as the corn flour, corn sweeteners, and corn oils that are used in all sorts of processed foods -- will get pricier too. (Sorry, donut fiends.)

So wait, does this mean that there's an upside to the rapid rise in corn prices? If junk food gets more expensive, will we eat more healthfully?

Not likely.