living green

Don’t bag your leaves — they just go in landfills

Awesome, an excuse to be lazy in the fall! Melissa Hopkins, a spokesperson for the National Audobon Society, is encouraging people not to bag up their leaves, because 8 million tons of them end up in landfills every year. (The leaves are biodegradable, of course, but the bags are not.) Instead, you can compost them, […]

Do individual green actions matter? Maybe not, says New York Times

The Huffington Post's eco-etiquette column yesterday featured a question from “Kimberly,” who writes "I used to be enthusiastic about going green, but now I feel like what's the point? Like a stupid reusable water bottle is going to make a difference…" She got a comforting answer, but if she’d written to the New York Times, op-ed contributor Gernot Wagner might have told her she might as well pack it in.

HuffPo’s advice columnist Jennifer Grayson identified Kimberly’s problem — "You're having a F**k it moment right now" — and told her to step back, take a breather, and "remember that individual actions do make a difference."

But Wagner, an economist with the Environmental Defense Fund, has a different answer for people like Kimberly:

[S]adly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. ...

Chill your beer without using any electricity

A one that is not cold is scarcely a one at all, but keeping beer frosty on a hot day normally sucks up energy. Not anymore. This ancient innovation uses clay pots, sand, and water to keep stuff cool even on a hot day. 

Not one more winter in the tipi, honey

Going off the grid seems romantic at first, but unfortunately, women are often the first to encounter the worst realities of homesteading.

Could you squeeze into the world's skinniest house?

Biodegradable wool coffins keep you cozy six feet under

Here’s a win-win if we ever saw one: You can spend eternity in the postmortem equivalent of a Snuggie, AND it’s better for the environment. Corpses are one thing we’re never going to be able to stop throwing away, so it’s worth finding lower-impact methods. Wool coffins are all-natural and fully biodegradable, making them a […]

Friends help you move; real friends help you dispose of dead bodies in an eco-friendly manner

Think you get to stop being green just because you kicked the compost bucket? With land space for burial at a premium and crematoriums pumping potentially dubious people-smuts into the sky, you have got to be kidding. Stop slacking off, corpses: If you can't live green, it's time to start dying green. Short of a […]

TreeShagger: Finding love on public transportation

Public transit is an aphrodisiac.Photo: Martin StroblWelcome to TreeShagger, our column on green dating. If you’ve got green dating questions, send ’em our way! Did you hear about Patrick Moberg, that dude who found the girl of his dreams on the New York subway? Like a twee Wes Anderson hipster-man, he drew a picture of […]

Natalie Portman: Oscar winner, green darling, and mad scientist

So take your beaker …Original photo: John MiraThe Intel Science Talent Search has been the Mickey Mouse Club of science for almost 70 years, identifying the Justin Timberlakes of high school research long before they go on to win Nobel Prizes and MacArthur “genius” grants. So anyone familiar with Natalie Portman’s stint at Harvard won’t […]