Climate Technology

Eco-friendly furniture meets the cubicle culture

The email query came not from you, dear reader, but from a staffer at the Mothership: “Grist is moving offices this spring, and we’re looking into environmentally friendly office furniture,” it read. “I’ve been tasked with researching some companies, and it was suggested you might be able to identify good places to look into. Any […]

Repent, Ye Synners

Shady synfuel industry making billions off tax-credit loophole A budget bill currently being hashed out in Congress may help a few dozen coal plants continue to get filthy rich off of taxpayer money. The backstory: In 1980, Congress enacted tax incentives for turning coal into synthetic fuel, requiring only that the coal be chemically altered […]

Ethanol is suddenly all the rage in D.C. and Detroit

It’s as befuddling to see the “Live Green, Go Yellow” slogan splashed across the General Motors ads running throughout the Olympics as it was to hear the term “switchgrass” uttered by President Bush in his State of the Union speech last month. Here we have GM and Dubya, two of the world’s most entrenched and […]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Remunerate

Eco-entrepreneurs pay people to recycle What’s the best way to get people to recycle? Same way you get them to do anything: pay them for it. Patrick FitzGerald and Ron Gonen founded RecycleBank in 2004 on the notion that economic incentives would motivate recycling more effectively than green principles. Their system rewards households with up […]

Career Window

Advice on taking the first step toward a new eco-career Looking for a job is a daunting task, and just about everyone — from life coaches to library books to your Aunt Edna — has a few tips on how to go about it. But Kevin Doyle of the Environmental Careers Organization says it all […]

Advice on making the move to a new eco-career

As director of program development at The Environmental Careers Organization, Kevin Doyle knows a thing or two about job searching. In a new column for Grist, he'll explore the green job market and offer advice to eco-job-seekers looking to jumpstart their careers.

February is National Mentoring Month. Aren't you psyched? No? Well, consider this column a shout-out to mentors everywhere. If you've had a good mentor in the past, or if you have one right now, celebrate February by calling that person just to say "thank you." (And call your mother, too. She's worried about you.)

In this column, I want to focus on the biggest of big pictures and share three pieces of strategic wisdom I've stolen over the years from people who are a lot wiser and smarter than me.

Just get started!

Take a look at any book about jobs and careers. Inevitably, you'll find the same rigid list of action steps buried in the text. Strip away the detail, and the strategy usually looks something like this: Know yourself (your skills, your preferences, your values, your astrological sign, Chinese New Year animal ...) and understand "your industry" (job titles, public and private employers, salary levels, important trends). Have a plan and develop a vision of your ideal job. Get needed degrees, certifications, and experience, and master the basic job search skills (résumés, interviews, cover letters). Build a good reputation, and develop and maintain a strong career network.

That's a lot of work! Where does one even start? Truth is, it doesn't matter where you start. Trust me on this. Before you're done, reality will force you to deal with all of the career components above. If you're listening to your life at all, each situation will practically scream a good next step in your ear.

So, if you're the planning type, go ahead and plan. If you're a doer, jump right in. If you derive power and energy from self-reflection, by all means, go ahead and gaze at that navel. The important thing is to get started.

Royaling for a Fight

Oil and gas companies set to receive $7 billion taxpayer windfall To supplement their already record-breaking profits, oil companies are set to receive around $7 billion in royalty relief over the next five years — possibly up to $35 billion, depending on the outcome of an ongoing lawsuit — and the feds claim they are […]

What green looks like to the world’s emerging economies

Give a child a hammer, they say, and everything is seen as a nail — or at least in need of a good pounding. Likewise, give an environmentalist a brush loaded with green paint, and she or he may set to turning everything one verdant hue. Pretty, perhaps, but problems can arise when well-off painters […]

But Kermit Said …

Japan rules, U.S. drools in new list of greenest vehicles An annual list of the world’s greenest cars placed the top American car at an impressive, uh, No. 10, while Japanese cars took all of the top five spots. (But American cars dominated the Totally Un-Gay Testostero-Manly Mean Machine list!) The American Council for an […]

Monsanto’s move into veggie seeds shakes up small organic farmers.

Here at Maverick Farms, a foot-thick blanket of snow swaths the cover crops and garlic beds, insulating them from sub-freezing temperatures. In the depths of the field, a big compost pile smolders. As at small farms all over the country, we've been been flipping through seed catalogs as we plan what to plant this coming season.

At this time of year, optimism burns bright, sparked by the glowing prose of the seed catalogs. Here is my favorite catalog, Fedco, engaging in a bit of beet poetry:

The genius of Alan Kapuler at work, this [root grex beet] is an interbreeding mix of Yellow Intermediate heirloom, Crosby Purple Egyptian heirloom and Lutz Saladleaf heirloom. It absolutely wowed me in my 2004 trial and aroused considerable interest at our Common Ground Fair booth display last fall. The term "grex" is commonly used in orchid breeding. There are 3 distinct colors in this gene pool: a pinkish red with some orange in it, a bright gold and a beautiful iridescent orange. We were impressed by the unusual vigor, glowing colors and length of these gradually tapered elongated roots.

Farmers have to work hard to avoid way overbuying seeds, with tempting descriptions like that dominating the catalogs.

This year, however, a new statement confronts us throughout the Fedco book: "This is the last year we will be offering this Seminis variety." Many venerable varieties bear this unhappy statement. Last year, Monsanto bought Seminis, the world's largest vegetable-seed purveyor, shaking up the small-scale organic farming world. (Here is an analysis of that deal I posted a while back.) Fedco, responding to outrage among its growers, decided to stop buying seeds from Seminis/Monsanto. And that means many varieties people have come to love in their CSA boxes and at the farmers market won't be available for much longer.