living green

Umbra on homegrown meat

Dear Umbra, I try to eat as many vegetarian meals as possible, but I haven’t “gone all the way” yet, mostly because my in-laws (whom my husband and I live with at the moment) raise beef, chickens, and hunt deer; and my husband and I end up with a lot of free, locally produced meat. […]

Climate crusader Richard Cizik forced out of evangelical association over gay marriage

We’ve written a good bit over the years about Richard Cizik, who was until a few days ago policy director for the National Association of Evangelicals. (Here’s an interview Amanda did in 2005, a video interview we did earlier this year, a special series I put together on God & the Environment, and lots more.) […]

Ring in the new with a ‘natural’ bottle of bubbly

Fewer chemicals in our sparkling wines? We’ll drink to that. Nothing says festive quite like the pop of a chilled bottle of bubbly. But while sparkling wine delivers a party in a glass, things are typically less thrilling out in the field. Like most wine, bubbly tends to come from grapes grown in large monocrops […]

Mainstream mags are getting over green

Pop quiz: Mainstream magazines are ditching the whole “green issue” thing in 2009 because: green is soooo 2006, 2007, and 2008 eh, those issues never sold that well they’re incorporating green into stories on a regular basis, so who needs a special issue in these tough economic times, the sweater-belt budget has shriveled up all […]

A roundup of savory holiday links from Grist

Since it’s the holiday season, it’s time for a trip down candy cane Grist archive lane to revisit some festive links that are, uh, evergreen: Decorations Deck your halls with a sprinkling of mistletoe trivia, like that “mistletoe” means “dung on a twig.” That’ll get your lips wet. And Umbra explains why LED holiday lights […]

Serena’s cautionary tale

On Oct. 18, 1929, just days before the stock market crash, Thomas Wolfe published his monumental novel, Look Homeward, Angel, unveiling the machinations behind small town life in western North Carolina. It took Wolfe several years to return to his Asheville hometown, and when he finally took his first glimpse of the Blue Ridge in […]

NYT op-ed says mostly men will benefit from green jobs

Green jobs are great — if you’re a dude, says a recent New York Times op-ed by Linda Hirshman: It turns out that green jobs are almost entirely male … especially in the alternative energy area. A broad study by the United States Conference of Mayors found that half the projected new jobs in any […]

Scaling back our energy-hungry lifestyles means more of what matters, not less

The work of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners Al Gore and the IPCC, along with a veritable mountain of other evidence, clearly lays out the reality and potential costs of human-induced climate change. Most analyses have concluded that we can and must keep our economies growing while addressing the climate challenge; we need only reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we produce. We can do this, they say, by using more efficient light bulbs, driving more fuel-efficient cars, better insulating our homes, buying windmills and solar panels, etc. While we agree that these things need to happen (and the sooner the better), it is clear that they will not be enough to solve the big problems the world faces.

The inconvenient truth is that to ensure quality of life for future generations, the world's wealthiest societies cannot continue our current lifestyles and patterns of economic growth. Further, the large proportion of humanity living in poverty must be able to satisfy basic human needs without aspiring to an overly materialistic lifestyle.

Does this inconvenient truth mean doom and despair? Absolutely not. Indeed, we think this seemingly inconvenient truth is actually a blessing in disguise, for our high-consuming lifestyles and western patterns of economic growth are not actually improving our well-being: they are not only unsustainable, they are undesirable.

Scientists are discovering a convenient truth: our happiness does not depend on the consumption of conventional economic goods and services, but instead is enhanced when we have more time and space for socializing, for nature, for learning, and for really living instead of just consuming.

A Bum Wrap

Study settles cloth vs. disposable diaper question The debate over the relative environmental merits of cloth vs. disposable diapers, like the one over paper vs. plastic bags, arouses passions entirely out of proportion to its significance in the grand scheme of things. But still, the U.K. Environment Agency decided to settle the question once and […]