Climate Culture
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Shouldering the burden of our environmental impact
Consider this: Friends of mine tell me that their daughter will only eat meat if she knows the name of the animal that died to produce it. She’ll eat the pork roast from pigs grown on our farm — but not the anonymous bacon offered up in the college dining hall. Adherence to this one […]
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Umbra on hybrid cars
Umbra, hi, With Honda having just released its gas-electric hybrid Civic in the U.S., many enviros are scrambling to buy one. But one question that hasn’t been answered to my knowledge is whether the total amount of energy, pollution, mining, etc. involved in making a new car — even a hybrid — constitutes a greater […]
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Umbra on grocery bags
Dear Umbra, At the grocery store, when they ask “Paper or plastic?” (and you have left your eco-friendly organic cotton tote bag at home), which is the lesser of two evils as far as total pounds of pollutants per bag (including solid waste, hazardous waste, and air and water pollution), and as far as ecological […]
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Umbra on computers
Dear Umbra, I normally turn my computer off when I leave the office. However, I was recently told that the act of turning on a computer requires more energy than is saved by keeping it off from 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. The person said that it is better to let your computer go into […]
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They’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Gold
What if the environmental movement could do to gold what the animal-rights movement did to fur — convince the public that far from being a badge of success, it is a symbol of cruelty and vanity? Some environmentalists would like to do just that, and they’ve got the facts to back them up: Gold mining […]
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Bass Ackwards
It’s Marine News Day here at Grist Magazine and therefore our duty to report that more than 90 restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California will pledge Tuesday to pull Chilean sea bass from their menus in an effort to save the fish from overfishing and possible extinction. The Chilean sea bass […]
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Smells Like Team Spirit
Imagine a Tupperware party, but for the tree-hugging set. That’s the vision, sort of, of Global Action Plan, a nonprofit organization that is promoting the formation of EcoTeams, grassroots groups dedicated to helping neighbors create sustainable lifestyles and livable communities. The teams, which are currently in eight cities around the country, meet every other week […]
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Ec-static!
The newspapers aren’t covering it, but we just had to: An environmental organization has garnered second prize in a competition for the world’s best television ads. “Static Electricity House,” a public service announcement by the Alliance to Save Energy, features a family trying to deal with the, uh, shock of big electricity bills by powering […]
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Gregory Gipson reviews Edward Abbey: A Life by James Cahalan
Writing a biography of an author can be a challenging task -- how much do you write about the subject's life, how much about the work? -- and reviewing such a biography even more so. That is especially the case when the subject of the biography is Edward Abbey, who wanted to be a novelist but wrote himself into several identities, among them wilderness Jeremiah and curmudgeonly cowboy. Abbey regularly complained that reviewers wrote too much about him and not enough about his books, a criticism that could be aptly applied to James Cahalan's new biography, Edward Abbey: A Life.
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A primer to help fight despair
Just now despair lives close to the surface in many people I know, and leaks out at surprising times. Taking a walk with my neighbor Phil, a bottle of milk in his arms, my daughter on my back, I’m thinking how warm the spring day feels when he stops suddenly and speaks. Maple leaf sag. […]
