sprawl
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Friday music blogging: Arcade Fire
You can bet an artist is grappling with questions of place and home and belonging when she belts out a line like, "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small / that we can never get away from the sprawl ... Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there's no end in sight."
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American appetite for big homes is falling
Trulia released some compelling charts and graphs illustrating recent opinion research showing what might be the end of the McMansion. Even in Texas.
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Isolated green buildings won't save the planet, TEDsters argue
Everyone in the green-buildings world already understands this -- if they're halfway informed and halfway honest. Who exactly are the writers refuting? Real-estate marketers.
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Climate & Energy Bill Will Do More For Health Than Health Care Legislation
This post was co-authored by Dr. Rahul Rajkumar, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. As oil and gas continue to spew out of a broken pipe at the BP spill site in the Gulf of Mexico, those of us who rode on the health care reform bandwagon have to wonder if we […]
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Why urban businesses have better advertising
It’s no secret that there are lots of chain businesses in sprawling areas and relatively more independent businesses in urban cores. The blog Discover Urbanism has a fascinating explanation of how the built environment determines the kinds of businesses — and the types of marketing — that succeed in a given place: The urban and […]
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Does ‘sustainable transportation’ mean better cars or fewer cars?
Ohio State University’s excellent Moving Ahead 2010 conference wrapped up with an impromptu panel on the oil spill and oil addiction. (White House energy adviser Carol Browner was supposed to do the final keynote, but got pulled away. Apparently there’s something going on in Louisiana.) I’ll wrap up my coverage by making a point I […]
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Putting Wal-Mart’s green moves in context
What journalists and even environmentalists so often fail to do in reporting on Wal-Mart’s sustainability announcements is to provide some context. Context is everything. Consider Wal-Mart’s latest announcement: It will push some of the factories that supply its stores to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a good thing in and of itself, but what […]
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The assumption of inconvenience
Cross-Posted from Streetsblog. Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe. Rosenthal attributes much […]
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Lamar Alexander loves the earth too much to support solar and wind
Alexander unveiled his nuclear plan in July.One of the few Congressional Republicans who talks about the need to address climate change, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, made an interesting argument against wind and solar energy this week. He’s concerned about the amount of land required to produce energy from wind and solar, writing in the […]