Climate Culture

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 […]

Elizabeth Grossman reviews Affluenza and Red

There's been a tendency since Sept. 11 to reconsider everything in light of that horrific tragedy. I've tried to resist that inclination, but I had read both Affluenza and Red before that day and could not ignore the way the attacks highlighted the importance of the books' divergent subject matters: our desire for the good life, which has made us the greatest consumers on earth; and the need to protect the wild places which that pattern of consumption threatens.

Now that's a reason to be jolly

This holiday season, we’re bombing Afghanistan, and perhaps contributing to mass starvation there. We stand apart from the rest of the world on climate change, ignoring the melting ice at the North Pole and rising global temperatures. As if the killing and bombing and starving weren’t bad enough, we’re not just at war with other […]

On Bjorn Lomborg's hidden agenda

Here is Denmark, that harmonious northern country known for its curiously vanilla accomplishments (comprehensive social welfare, pastry, Hans Christian Anderson), and here is its latest export, Bjorn Lomborg, come to announce the good news that we live in a fairy-tale world.