Climate Culture

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art

Here’s the paradox: If the scientists are right, we’re living through the biggest thing that’s happened since human civilization emerged. One species, ours, has by itself in the course of a couple of generations managed to powerfully raise the temperature of an entire planet, to knock its most basic systems out of kilter. But oddly, though […]

Ten ways to turn that global frown upside down

Scientists estimate that we’ve already raised global temperatures by one degree Fahrenheit with our hapless spewing of greenhouse gases, and another one or two degrees are pretty much inevitable no matter what we do. Unstable weather, droughts, floods, and rising oceans are the likely result. We’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction, with […]

So tell us … what’s your dirty little environmental secret?

I know this is going to come as a shock to you all, but someone needs to speak the truth. It seems that environmentalists have a bit of a reputation for being holier-than-thou — even, dare I say it, evangelistic. In our zeal to save the planet, we both scare and bore our fellow citizens, […]

What’s your secret eco-sin?

Environmentalists have a reputation for being self-righteous, holier-than-thou prigs. And yeah, well, they frequently are. So in the spirit of humanizing and soul cleansing and all that, we've asked a few greens, including writers Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams, to confess their environmental sins. And we're asking you to do the same!

Leave your deepest, darkest environmental sins in comments. We promise, you'll feel better afterward.

Mark Shelley, environmental film producer, answers questions

What work do you do? I produce films and other media about the environment. In the film world, I am executive producer of Sea Studios Foundation and a senior series producer for National Geographic Television and Film. In the foundation world, I am the executive director and cofounder of Sea Studios Foundation, and last but […]