There’s a stretch of arterial in Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood that I’ve traveled probably thousands of times without giving a second thought to the empty, grassy hillside it parallels. When I heard about plans to create a 7-acre urban food forest there, I had a hard time picturi...
Brain Pickings has dug up a list of 41 “don’ts” for female bicyclists from an 1895 New York newspaper, and they are downright breathtaking in their amazingness. Here are some of our favorites: Don’t be a fright. Don’t faint on the road. Don’t wear a man’s cap. Don’t wear tight garters...
In their results, Myhrvold and Caldeira highlight a few poorly appreciated but crucial features of energy transitions. The first is that they take quite a while to have an appreciable effect on CO2 concentrations. The world’s oceans have considerable “thermal inertia” — it takes them ...
On February 23, you posted an article from The Nature Conservancy titled Worms of Your Own. http://www.care2.com/greenliving/worms-of-your-own.html The article stated that one could live in a small apartment and could still compost in ones own home. Since I now have many friends li...
There’s no doubt a homemade food renaissance has taken root. All around the country, home picklers, jammers, and bakers have been looking for ways to transform hobby food production into small artisan businesses. In many states, however, selling food you’ve made in your home is agains...
Each year, U.S. taxpayers spend billions to subsidize affordable housing for low-income Americans. It’s an important part of the social safety net we’ve built to keep families and the elderly from falling through the cracks. But there’s a problem: A lot of that housing has been built ...
Creating an effective program is just the beginning. To encourage ongoing success, you’ve got to treat employee engagement as an ongoing campaign. Sustainability is such a big part of CLIF Bar’s culture , for example, that it’s embedded in employees’ benefits package, including incent...
Strange as it may seem, for most of human history the food that fueled our existence was not packaged, preserved, or purchased from the grocery store, it was provided by nature. But perhaps even today we are still skilled foragers at heart, if not just a bit unpracticed. Soon, however...
Bicycle recycling is nothing new. But a Guatemalan nonprofit is turning trashed bicycle parts into innovative, electricity-free machines that you have to see to believe. Based in San Andrés Itzapa, Guatemala, Maya Pedal Asociación accepts donated bikes from the U.S. and Canada, which ...
It is one of the conundrums of our time: why people would pay more to lock themselves into a proprietary coffee brewing system that generates a ton of garbage when they could use a French Press in about the same time. As Tim Wall points out at Discovery News , discussing the Kuerig sy...
Ultra-thin solar cells that can be “peeled off” from larger pieces of silicon like delicious fruit roll-ups could be the key to making solar competitive with coal, say researchers at MIT. Once solar costs about half what it does now, say the scientists, rooftop panels will be generati...
It’s seed-starting season and spring is just around the corner. If you’re looking to start seeds indoors and realize that you don’t have enough windows space to sprout seeds indoors, or don’t want to raise your electrical bill by installing grow lights, building a greenhouse from recy...
Catlin Seaview Survey A demo image of a diving site off the coast of Australia from the Catlin Seaview Survey. The SVII camera is suitably squidlike. It moves at a leisurely two and a half miles an hour through living corridors and rusted shipwrecks of the Coral Sea off Australia, sna...
It turns out converted rainforest land is neither particularly productive as farmland nor climate smart, since creating it releases huge amounts of carbon sequestered in trees. Photo: Lawrence Baulc Now that we’re surrounded by 7 billion of our closest friends , it’s probably a good t...
You may have seen them installed on adventurous new builds on Grand Designs , or caught a glimpse of one in Canary Wharf, Lambeth or Sheffield – or you might have never heard of them. Whether you’re familiar with the concept of not, across the UK, green roofs are becoming increasingly...
The scent of rosemary wafting from a dish of roasted potatoes is one thing -- but when distanced from the aromas of garlic and olive oil, the astringent scent of rosemary, although lovely, can seem downright medicinal. It’s no wonder that the perennial herb has had a long history of p...
Did you know that you can’t be president if you are African American? At least, so declares Gordon Warren Epperly, an Alaskan citizen who is trying to fire up the flames of birtherism with a new lawsuit meant to strike President Barack Obama from the ballot in the state. The argument?...
This extra day in February only comes once every four years, which is all the more reason to make the most of it. From helping your community to banishing junk mail, here are 10 ways to make your leap day count. Tip #1: The greenest thing you can do is get outside. So, use your leap d...
It was a fair question for the moderator to ask Bill Gates what he was doing on stage at the third annual Energy Innovation Summit hosted by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). “If you look at the improvement of the human condition, it’s relate...
Claim 66. “You know, one of the things that people don’t realize when they read these articles in the newspaper about it being super warm in the arctic in comparison with past years, they have to ask in the global historic network how many data points, does anybody know this, how many...
“Flow” batteries, i.e. batteries filled with a liquid electrolyte that can be pumped out and replenished, have the potential to transform the process of charging an electric vehicle into something that more closely resembles filling it up with gas. This research is still at its earlie...
Antarctic Ocean Alliance An environmental coalition wants 19 zones in the region to gain protection. On another marine front: Frustrated with the pace of the United Nations group charged with protecting Antarctic waters, a coalition of environmental groups announced its own initiative...
There was an interesting article in the Financial Times about "the joys of working out of a backyard hideaway" by architectural historian Jonathan Foyle, who works from the rather nice garden shed shown above. He describes it: It’s built from salvage, a 12ft wide by 8ft deep and 8ft h...
Keystone XL lives! Yesterday, TransCanada announced its next two moves in its fight to get the tar sands pumping pipeline built, and its strategy now involves splitting the project into two parts. Because it stands to reason that if people object to one pipeline, they’ll have no probl...
Commercial fishermen along the East Coast will soon have to begin reducing their bycatch of Atlantic sturgeon in response to the fish’s new federal status as an endangered species. With the listing set to become official on April 6, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ...
Step for a moment into this chilling alternative reality, in which fine young men and women believe “gravity is just a theory” and “cigarettes aren’t addictive”: The video is from the Climate Reality Project, Al Gore’s current climate-change fighting outfit. What do y’all find the mos...
The sophisticated electronic components in race cars, fleet vehicles and the big rigs used for NASCAR are expected to be fodder for an e-waste program the racing organization is starting this season. NASCAR plans to work on the initiative with Creative Recycling Systems , based Tampa,...
New renewable energy generation is now cheaper than new coal generation in Michigan, and could be a $5-billion annual industry for the economically hard-hit state. So say two recent reports analyzing the state’s progress toward renewable energy goals. While both findings are impressiv...
Honestly, they had me at vegan peanut butter and jelly doughnut. This vegan can’t wait to drop by Dun-Well the next time she visits New York, which will be soon but not quite soon enough. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited the best doughnuts in New York City (which must ha...
Meryl Streep Wears Eco-Friendly Lanvin Dress at 2012 Oscars TweetShare on TumblrEmail Photos by A.M.P.A.S. Meryl Streep is the Green Carpet Challenge’s newest recruit, announced Livia Firth on her blog. Wearing Lanvin’s first-ever eco-friendly gown at 6 Celebrities Who Wore Eco-Fashio...
