A lament from Time magazine’s Bryan Walsh: Work in environmental journalism for very long and you can eventually become inured to catastrophe. Every ecosystem is on the brink of collapse; every endangered species is just a few steps from extinction; every government decision to authorize an oil well or a coal mine is the one…Continue Reading…
It drives my mother crazy that I won’t take a multi-vitamin. The woman raised me on a steady diet of Ring Dings and Yoo-hoos and now she knows what’s best for my health. I get the mantra every time she visits: “You’re run-down, you don’t get enough sleep, you need to take a multi-vitamin.” “Yeah,…Continue Reading…
This is a priceless post that suggests Grist editors are not reading what goes up on the site, much less editing any of it. Just for kicks, I’m gonna break down the first three graphs: So, the world did not end on Saturday. Harold Camping’s predicted Judgment Day and “Rapture” failed. I wonder how disappointed his…Continue Reading…
In 1995, Cornell’s David Price published an essay in the journal Population and Environment, in which he wrote that the exhaustion of fossil fuels, which supply three quarters of this energy, is not far off, and no other energy source is abundant and cheap enough to take their place. A collapse of the earth’s human…Continue Reading…
Over at Climate Central, I lament the shallowness of popular environmentalism (as it exists today), and wonder if their are lessons to be drawn from a recent climate skeptic’s conversion.
I’m poaching this comment from yesterday’s Dot Earth post on Randy Olson. What’s striking to me is that it comes from a graduate student enrolled in a sustainability program at a top university: I love the ‘woe is me’ and ‘shame on you’ summation. It perfectly characterizes the scope of most environmental communication. The hysterical…Continue Reading…
In between pool volleyball and the Electric Slide, I’m sure the conference attendees on this floating temple to humanity’s excessive indulgences will be hard at work finding ways to be more consumptive in a more sustainable manner. I’m certain that something good will come out of the event, because Chip Giller, Grist’s founder, will be there,…Continue Reading…
Well, not exactly, but it seems that German greens have matured into a potent political force. I do think this Foreign Policy piece hypes their ascendancy, but there’s no denying that greens have long been players in German politics in a way that is unimaginable in the U.S. And it appears they are now appealing to a broader swath of the German populace. …Continue Reading…
Is the stale and stagnant environmental movement on the cusp of being transformed by foodies? That’s what Bryan Walsh chews over in this story for Time magazine: Even as traditional environmentalism struggles, another movement is rising in its place, aligning consumers, producers, the media and even politicians. It’s the food movement, and if it continues…Continue Reading…
Well, I didn’t take the poll, but I’m putting my nomination in early for the official TreeShagger song. I’m also shocked–shocked–that this number one green pastime didn’t make the cut.