Climate Culture
All Stories
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The people next door can help you think green
Everywhere I have lived, I have had neighbors, sometimes in houses just 15 or 20 feet away. Always I’ve had a garden and woodpile, sometimes bees, chickens, and fruit trees. In each place I have lived, I have given the garden a lot of my love and care, the lawn and shrubs a bit less. […]
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Oregon Trailblazers
When it comes to sustainability, Oregon is No. 1, says the San Francisco-based Resource Renewal Institute. The group ranked states on transit spending, open-space protection, recycling, and pollution prevention, among other things. New Jersey (shocking!) and Minnesota came in second and third, respectively. The institute’s Randy Solomon said Oregon took top honors because the state […]
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Wall-to-wall Carping
Can a 12,000-square-foot house really be eco-friendly? What about Bill Gates’s 40,000-square-foot house built of salvaged wood? Architect Will Bruder says adding green features like geothermal heating and solar panels to mongo homes with five-car garages is merely a way “to rationalize decadent expenditures.” Daniel Chiras, an enviro professor, says, “[I]f it’s a 5,000-square-foot-house, it […]
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Getting Their Goats
The busiest ski resort in the U.S. is using goats instead of herbicides to get rid of weeds on its slopes. After the goats eat their fill, the Vail resort in Colorado is seeding the areas with native plants to fight off alien weeds. The goats are owned by Lani Lamming, who rents them out […]
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Getting the Munchies
Over the next few months, a Mobile Muncher bus will visit every large town in Spain to help the country reach its goal of recycling 100 tons of mobile phones within a year. The country developed the Mobile Muncher mascot as a way to increase public support for the campaign and inform people of the […]
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Hey Good Lookin', What Ya Got Cookin'?
Nearly all residents in Villaseca, Chile, cook with solar power –pretty nifty in a country where firewood is a big source of energy, contributing to a steep loss in old-growth forests each year. Villaseca in sunny northern Chile has only 300 residents, but proponents of the solar technology hope the gizmos will spread across the […]
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Get Your Solar Kicks on Route 66
The longest solar-powered car race came to end yesterday in Claremont, Calif., with a University of Michigan team in the lead. The victorious single-passenger car took 56 hours and 10 minutes to cover 2,247 miles in a 10-day race along Route 66. Twenty-eight teams finished the race, the sixth since the first U.S. competition in […]
