Grist List
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Swedish fast food chain makes bank by becoming ‘Klimatsmart!’
Sweden's No. 1 burger chain got rid of its kids'-meal boxes and, contrary to expectations, sales of the meals rose. Apparently parents who are facing the prospect of their children scrabbling for survival on this wrecked cinder of a planet don’t like creating needless trash?
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Scorcese doc ‘Surviving Progress,’ featuring Margaret Atwood, is now in theaters
"I think it's important to make a distinction between good progress and good progress. Things progress in the sense that they change. But when they reach a certain scale, they turn out to be dead ends."
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Turbine makes fresh water out of thin air in the desert
If you've ever watched water drip out of a window a/c unit, you've seen the operating principle of Eole Water's new wind turbine in action.
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Critical List: Meat consumption must drop 50 percent; Los Angeles the Energy Star of cities
We going to have to eat half as much meat as we do now in order to curb climate change. After Deepwater Horizon, throughout the Gulf “things are just a little bit out of kilter,” says the head of NOAA’s restoration team. With 659 certified Energy Star buildings, Los Angeles has the most of any […]
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Now you can smell like fake whale vomit
Finally, thanks to modern science, you no longer have to feed a whale a bathing suit full of rotten fish to get a supply of precious ambergris, the whale-vomit-derived material used in perfumes. Researchers have worked out a way to reliably synthesize ambergris from plants.
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Everyone in Beijing is ditching bikes, except for the foreigners
In 1986, 60 percent of the citizens of Beijing rode bikes; now 17 percent do.
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America’s largest urban Superfund site gets cute new mascot
In order to get people excited about the process of turning the canal into something that will stop depressing local property values, the Gowanus Community Advisory Group has decided that the project needs a mascot.
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Watch plants swallow up tiny houses in this weird living artwork
Artist Rob Carter is interested in the relationship between the built environment and nature, and his newest exhibition, which opens tomorrow in New York City, features mini replicas of three homesteads — Charles Darwin’s, Henry David Thoreau’s, and Sir John Bennet Lawes’. The miniatures live in a garden of dandelions, bush beans, and corn, which […]
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Dude singlehandedly finds homes for 500 unwanted trees
Meet a Seattle resident who digs up and replants unwanted trees -- including arboreal monsters weighing up to 400 pounds.
