books
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Ask Umbra’s Book Club: The three L’s — laziness, learning, and lawlessness
Dearest readers, I’ve so enjoyed reading all of your comments thus far about Dolly Freed’s Possum Living. The 9-to-5 grind, raising and slaughtering your own meat—stimulating threads. You know, I couldn’t help but notice how often Freed talks about the basis for her and her father’s lifestyle choice being that they are lazy. Tending a […]
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Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Is eating animals eating you?
Dearest readers, Great thread yesterday on the varying viewpoints surrounding issues of independence, financial culpability, the 9-to-5 rat race, and being possessed by our possessions—all inspired by Dolly Freed’s Possum Living circa 1978. For today’s starting point, I thought we’d delve into the blood and guts—literally—as in raising, killing, cleaning, and eating your own meat […]
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Ask Umbra’s Book Club: Does your job own you?
Dearest readers, How did you like our first book club selection, Dolly Freed’s Possum Living: How to Live Well Without a Job and With (Almost) No Money? I thoroughly enjoyed it—aside from some mild retching at the thought of removing a turtle’s gallbladder (a necessary step for a proper snapper soup)—and came away feeling amused, […]
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Jeff Goodell: ‘It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room’
Jeff Goodell.To head off the worst impacts of climate change, should human beings deliberately engineer the earth’s climate? Or rather, should they try, with uncertain odds of success and at least some chance of inadvertent catastrophe? Should they even learn how, or would the knowledge itself wreak havoc? These are the sorts of questions journalist […]
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Ask Umbra on keyboard cleaners, automatic composters, and book club
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, I work in an office that is fairly environmentally conscious. However, we have a coworker who religiously sprays keyboard cleaner. How do I confront my coworker without sounding like an eco-turd? I’m just not thrilled about becoming infertile or dying. Suffocating in Seattle A. Dearest Suffocating, Is […]
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Ask Umbra on Annie Leonard and The Story of Stuff
Do you ever think about all the resources, the man hours, the stuff that went into making your iPod? Your cell phone? Your computer? The clothes you’re wearing? Annie Leonard did. And then she started talking to other people about it. You may have seen her animated 20-minute viral video, released in 2007, The Story […]
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Ask Umbra’s Book Club launches
Dearest readers, You know what an extraordinary book nerd I am. And the secret’s out: I know many of you are, too. That’s where the splendiferous new Ask Umbra’s Book Club comes in, because there’s just too much book love to keep all to myself. Here’s how it’ll work: I’ll announce a juicy eco-minded […]
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Jeff Biggers talks about his new book on coal
Jeff Biggers talked about his new book Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland on GRITtv with Laura Flanders last Friday. Check out the interview: Biggers was also on Democracy Now! to talk about the myth the of clean coal technologies that President Obama continues to promote.
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Could novels about climate change shake us to our senses?
Cross-posted from Climate Progress. Sometimes, fiction is the best way to win friends and influence people – H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and George Orwell’s classic 1984 come to mind. Each provoked a visceral reaction that galvanized the culture around it, changing forever the way issues such as class and totalitarianism were perceived. Neville […]
