Climate Culture

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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. […]

A Real Earth Mother

Strange Treefellows

Conservationists are probably more closely identified with the struggle to save forests from logging than with any other environmental battle, as the label “tree hugger” suggests. So it was a case of strange bedfellows when enviros and industry representatives met late last month at the Forest Leadership Forum to discuss ways to better protect the […]

Nicholas Thompson reviews Digital Biology by Peter Bentley

As every picnicker knows, if you spill strawberry jam in the grass, it will be swarming with ants in no time at all. The ants arrive quickly because they always find the shortest route from their nests to the spill -- but how? That question is one that fascinates cutting-edge engineers, computer programmers, and other scientists, who study nature in order to design better and more efficient technology -- a quest compellingly described in Peter Bentley's new book, Digital Biology.

Sharri Baby

After years of mistrust and fear, Albanians and Serbs are coming together over a common interest: protecting the environment. In a project funded by the Norwegian and Dutch governments, environmental groups in Kosovo are setting up an electronic network to enable the former enemies to share resources and information on protecting the environment. The network, […]