Climate Culture

Taking on the erosive cycle of contemporary politics

Every day I try to protect my children from problems I didn’t create and cannot solve alone. I spread cream on their skin to shield them from the ultraviolet radiation that sneaks through our thinning ozone layer. I try to feed them food free of pesticides and hormones, but I know their bodies are exposed […]

Area 51

Fair-to-middling was the U.S. ranking in a new study, presented at the World Economic Forum last week in New York, that rated the environmental health of 142 countries. In the study, conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, the U.S. […]

Jonna Higgins-Freese reviews Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber

I am an environmental activist, and for almost a year, my husband and I have struggled to understand how our environmental commitments bear on our decision about whether to have children. So when I picked up Sandra Steingraber's new book Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood,, I was immediately drawn in by the opening sentence: "Every woman who becomes pregnant brings to the experience her various identities."

Strip-Trees

Humans are gobbling up too much of the sun’s energy

The energy of the sun, captured by plants and passed on to animals, powers everything in our world — dolphins leaping out of the ocean, geese moving across the sky, people stirring their morning oatmeal. Set in our ways. Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc. This truth contains beautiful poetry: It teaches us that in our children’s […]

Irish Eyes Are Smiling

The Irish government has okayed plans to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm. The $630 million project will have three times the electricity-generating capacity of all current offshore wind farms worldwide; its 200 turbines will produce 10 percent of Ireland’s power. When completed, the project will help Ireland cut its greenhouse gas emissions by […]

Blood Is Thicker Than Water

It was a family affair, but the significance was national: President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, signed an agreement yesterday to guarantee that water captured by a $7.8 billion Florida Everglades restoration effort will indeed go toward reviving the national park. Because the state and federal governments have potentially competing interests […]

Retirement Party

Utah Republican Jim Hansen, who has served 11 terms in the U.S. House, most recently as chair of the Resources Committee, announced yesterday that he will not seek reelection this year. The announcement came as a surprise to even some of his closest staff members — and a welcome one to environmentalists. Hansen started off […]

The Old Year’s Resolutions

Gluttony at home is not necessary for victory abroad

My grandmother, the family provider in World War II’s market of scarcity, pleaded — or was it flirted? — with the butcher for meat. My father, who couldn’t hit his hat with a hammer, volunteered for military service and wound up in Boston army ordinance helping “our boys” make munitions. On “the home front,” my […]