Throw Momma From the Pontchartrain

Some post-Katrina floodwaters cleaner than expected Some of the floodwaters pumped out of New Orleans by the U.S. Army Corps...

An interview with Kathleen McGinty, Pennsylvania’s green go-getter

Kathleen McGinty, head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, approaches the state’s environmental challenges with an optimistic “let’s-get-it-done” attitude. Early...

Brazil/Seattle

One easy way to get rid of a tire is to toss it over a bridge. In Costa Rica, crocodiles can be seen sunning themselves amid thousands of discarded tires. Not an option here in Seattle where stopping on a bridge long enough to hurl a tire will cause a traffic jam.

I took a load of junk to Seattle's north end transfer station the other day. An employee was standing at the entrance to brief clientele on Seattle's new recycling ordinance. Apparently, it is no longer adequate to voluntarily point-sort our trash and laboriously drag multiple containers to the curb every week to protect our environment and lower the cost of waste disposal. Our wise leaders have decided it's time to take it to another level and make it illegal not to recycle. Why? According to the official site, this ordinance "aims" to save residents and businesses as much as $2 million a year, enforcement "with consequences" beginning January 1, 2006. Contractors will not pick up garbage cans that have "significant" amounts of recyclables.

The Daily Show goes green

The Daily Show has instituted another regular feature called "The War on Terra," which as you might imagine is about environmental matters. You can see the first one -- about melting polar ice caps and dying Chinese tigers -- here.

I must say, I'm happy they're doing this, but the results are a little dispiriting. Even these guys, the funniest guys on the planet (except maybe the writers on Arrested Development) have trouble making green issues funny.

Why is that? Why is humor about the environment never, ever funny? And music about it never good? And art about it never interesting? It seems to repel everything except earnest sanctimony. Truly vexing.

Does anyone have any counter-examples to prove me wrong?

Don’t steal this book

This Slate book review (found via Brad Plumer) covering the history of sprawl is so infuriatingly silly, it's hard to know where to begin.

In a nutshell: Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski reviews a book by University of Illinois at Chicago professor Robert Bruegmann that argues -- quite correctly -- that suburbs have been part of urban life for millenia. In ancient Rome, wealthy patricians escaped to exurban villas. Just so, the walled cities of medieval Europe were surrounded by noxious industries such as slaughterhouses, as well as many of the people who worked there. Since cities have always had low-density outskirts, Bruegmann argues, it's simply inaccurate to characterize "suburban sprawl" as entirely an invention of 20th century American car culture.

All that's fair enough -- the suburbs have always been with us, in one form or another. And for good reasons: Some folks prefer not to live in the city, and some cities prefer to locate public nuisances outside of town.

But from this, the article (I'm not sure whether it's Rybczynski or Bruegmann who's responsible) draws conclusions about sprawl that are hard to fathom -- and even harder to square with reality.

DDT myths

You may not have noticed, but the Right is fairly obsessed with propagating the notion that environmentalists, by getting DDT banned in 1972, are responsible for the deaths of millions of poor in the developing world. This is the kind of thing that people with, um, lives tend to ignore. It travels around underground on right wing sites until it slowly seeps into conventional wisdom.

It's bullsnot, though. For a brief primer on why, see Tim Lambert.

Supermarkets push to the southern hemisphere, driving farmers out of business

The United States has made two great contributions to world cuisine over the last century: the fast-food franchise and the supermarket.

Temples of the cheap-food revolution, both institutions flourished in the 20th century, offering consumers convenience and the cachet of fast life. At the height of the post-war prosperity boom, before the yuppie-led backlash, fast-food and the supermarket occupied the cutting edge of food fashion in a rapidly suburbanizing nation.

At a Grocery Manufacturers Association convention in 1962, an air of hubris and self-celebration held sway that would not have been out of place at, say, a tech trade show in Silicon Valley, circa 1998. As Harvey Levenstein writes:

Bipartisan plan aims to revamp U.S. fisheries law

Congress is plotting its first revamp of fisheries law in nearly a decade — and it’s about time. Every boat...

Umbra on video games

Dear Umbra, After reading some heart-rending, gut-wrenching articles on global warming, I’ve decided that I want to do something about...