Climate Culture

All Stories

  • 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 […]

    Ask Umbra® Culture

  • 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 […]

    Amanda Little 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 […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • 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 […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • 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 […]

    Ian McEwan Culture

  • 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. […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • 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 […]

    Grist staff Culture

  • 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 […]

    Bill McKibben Culture

  • 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 […]

    David Roberts Culture

  • 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, […]

    Lou Bendrick Culture