Podcast: Play in new window | Download A week after announcing her retirement, the director of the US Geological Service told a Washington DC conference that Superstorm Sandy fulfilled her worst climate-change nightmare: it blew out the natural defenses against storms along hundreds of miles of the Northeast coastline, leaving them vulnerable to any garden-variety [...]
Sustainable Living
Brazil: Another Miracle Falters
January 16, 2013
Podcast: Play in new window | Download For years, all the countries that hoped wistfully for energy independence, or renewable energy, or the oxymoronic “sustainable industry,” have looked to Brazil as a shining country on a hill that did it all, and had it all. It was inspiring. A typical headline of a few years [...]
Ray Anderson, RIP
August 11, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download The only industrialist I ever met who had a genuine, drop-to-your-knees, road-to-Damascus, life-changing epiphany about the role of industry in destroying the world was Ray Anderson. When I first interviewed him in the 1990s, he was a few years past the experience — he likened it to “a [...]
Gardening a Crime in Oak Park MI
July 11, 2011
Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan figured her lawn was gone anyway — it had been torn up for a sewer repair — so instead of going back to the water-hogging, fertilizer-leaching, pesticide-soaked obscenity that graces everybody’s front yard, she would do a far, far better thing. She put in five raised beds and started [...]
One Third of World’s Food Destroyed: Culprit Found
May 24, 2011
A study done for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, released a week ago, finds that nearly one-third of the world’s food supply — in the United States the figure is 40 per cent — is never consumed because it is wasted. Billions are being spent to develop new chemicals, new genetically altered seeds and [...]
Free the Food: A Tea Party Worth Having
April 26, 2011
Here and there around the United States, groups of activists are taking their country back from a tyrannical government and declaring their independence in a critical area of their lives. It’s not the Tea Party, and it’s hardly an Arab Spring, but it could be significant if it takes hold. Three towns in New England [...]
Black Eye for “Clean” Coal
November 22, 2010
Last week, the East Kentucky Power Cooperative abandoned plans to build two coal-burning power plants in Clark County. This major setback for Big Coal in the heart of Big-Coal country, comes just a year after Ohio’s American Municipal Power gave up its attempt to build a coal fired electric plant on the Ohio River near [...]
In a Maryland Village, The Street Not Taken
November 10, 2010
Is it, as the town’s mayor and the Washington Post calls it, “the greenest street on the East Coast?” Or is it a tiny Band-Aid on an enormous, cancerous tumor? We’ll report, you decide. The street in question, in Edmonston, Maryland (population1500), is three quarters of a mile long. It has just been re-engineered to [...]
Tower of Power
June 25, 2009
There it is, in Chicago of all places, the Big Idea that could have saved us, in plain view for everybody to see and not talk about. After a $350 million renovation the Sears Tower, at 110 stories the tallest skyscraper in the hemisphere, will produce 80 per cent of its own electricity. [Sears Tower [...]
The Dark Twin
April 10, 2009
The thing we love about the industrialization of everything, the reason we tolerate its destructive rampages, is the notion economy of scale. This is the theory that when you mass-produce something, each something in the mass will cost less. What we need to keep in mind is that economy of scale has a dark twin [...]
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