events
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While McCain and Obama squabble …
… about who supports clean energy more, Calif. governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is pulling together a summit of community and local leaders from Europe, Australia, India, China, and all 50 states to discuss how best to battle climate change. This is part of the great undercovered story of the climate battle: national governments are largely impotent, […]
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9.27.08 is the green jobs national day of action; or, you could watch Newt on TV
Tomorrow, Green Jobs Now is having a national day of action, with (as of now) 661 events planned across all 50 states. Numerous green, labor, community, youth, and faith organizations are involved, along with thousands of ordinary citizens. The goal is to highlight the potential for a green investment plan that creates jobs, boosts domestic […]
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Debate is a go
The McCain campaign says he’ll debate tonight after all. After that he’ll fly back to D.C. to continue his oh-so-helpful role in the negotiations over the financial bailout. Meanwhile, this morning Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said: “A few days ago, I called on Sen. McCain to take a stand — let us know where […]
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Future of Food director on ‘making soil sexy’
Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia burst onto the sustainable-food scene with her 2004 documentary the Future of Food, a biting, well-researched indictment of Monsanto and genetically modified food. I caught up with her at Slow Food Nation to discuss her current project, a documentary about a topic dear to my heart: soil.
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Why climate change may have more to do with your shopping cart than your car
Anna Lappé might be called a green-diaper baby. Her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, brought out the seminal Diet for a Small Planet back in 1971, and has been agitating forcefully for a just, sustainable food system ever since. Her father, the toxicologist Marc Lappé, was an early, important, and persistent critic of the agrichemical industry. […]
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The GMO industry has been scraping by on bad science
In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture. Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of […]
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Fast Food Nation author says the sustainable food movement should consider labor
Few Grist readers need an introduction to Eric Schlosser. His 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, helped galvanize interest in the politics and ecology of food production. Since that time, he’s used his increasingly high profile to illuminate one of the most shadowy crannies of the food system — working conditions in the vast monocropped fields […]
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National Clean Energy Summit videos
A few weeks ago I went to the National Clean Energy Summit (coverage here) organized by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. It’s the kind of thing Dems do — wonky, tedious, strenuously bipartisan (even though no Republicans of note show up or give a sh*t), and quickly forgotten. Meanwhile Republicans dominate the debate with their […]
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X-Prize
In San Francisco this Friday, the Long Now Foundation will host a talk by Peter Diamandis, founder and Chairman of the X Prize Foundation, on X-Prizes. Here’s a YouTube taster. It got me thinking. Large prizes are great for stimulating the public’s imagination, but do they make for good public policy? Take John McCain’s proposal […]
