Climate Culture
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Are greens overlooking a key constituency?
On a snowy winter morning five years ago, after four days of cocooning in the hospital, I walked home carrying my newborn daughter. I knew I was crossing the threshold into life as a mother, caregiver, and working parent. What I didn’t know was that I was about to become a different kind of environmentalist. […]
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Doom and Bloom
Most Mother’s Day flowers are far from green Oodles of Americans will buy flowers for their moms for Mother’s Day (that’s this Sunday, you slackers), but not many will consider the environmental impacts. Conventionally grown flowers “are such a high-value crop that it takes a huge amount of pesticides to make them perfect,” said Pesticide […]
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The World Less Traveled
Greens shun cheap air travel, point to impacts of industry A small but growing number of eco-conscious Brits are turning away from cheap airfares and looking to other means of transport or forgoing planned vacations altogether in hopes of reducing their personal environmental footprints. Overall, aircraft-related carbon-dioxide emissions make up some 5 percent of Britain’s […]
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Umbra on channeling gray water to the garden
Dear Umbra, As part of my water-conservation strategy, I’d like to reuse the rinse water from my laundry machine to water the native plants, many of them edible, in my yard. I’ve heard concerns about the soap (biodegradable) damaging the plants. There are also potentially some regulatory hurdles involved. Can you shed some light on […]
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An interview with actor and solar advocate Edward Norton
Edward Norton. Photo: WGBH. The world has known Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead, a lusty priest, a warbling romantic, Larry Flynt’s attorney, and Nelson Rockefeller. There is also a far less publicized role that Norton plays every day: a dyed-in-the-wool eco-devotee on the front lines of the renewable-energy movement. In 2003, Norton teamed up […]
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Guppy Love
Young urban professionals hip to green-building scene The trend now has a name. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Guppys: Green urban professionals who are young. (Yeah, we didn’t say it was a clever name.) Portland, Ore., has become the epicenter of a movement by the storied “creative class” to find, build, or remodel eco-friendly […]
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Next: Clay Aiken Draws a Line In the Sands of Tuvalu
Hollywood celebs travel to Arctic to raise global-warming awareness Matt Petersen of Global Green spends his time pondering this weighty question: “[I]n an age and culture that’s celebrity-obsessed, how do you in a smart and savvy way use the celebrity to shine the light on the science, on the facts, and on the solution?” When […]
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To address global warming, we must harness rationality, good science, and enlightened globalization
Getting a bird’s eye view of the globe. Photo: Marcelo da Mota Silva. The commonplace view of the earth from an airplane at 35,000 feet — a vista that would have astounded Dickens or Darwin — can be instructive when we contemplate the fate of our earth. We see faintly, or imagine we can, the […]
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Go, Go, Gadgets
Green gadgets and a hydrogen-powered rock band are getting noticed In the past 35 years, there’s been no shortage of inventive inventions aimed at reducing eco-footprints; we’ve come a long way from the old brick-in-the-toilet trick. Today’s new refrigerators use about a third of the power as ones sold 30 years ago, and the U.S. […]
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Is That a Fat Lady We Hear Singing?
The era of cheap oil is coming to an end soon; duck! Cheap oil is running out. A report from the U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves puts the problem in stark terms: “The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit […]
