Brave Green World
Can sustainability be sustained? Brave Green World covers humankind's effort to launch a successful environmental revolution in an increasingly precarious global climate. It looks at the politics, technological developments, psychology, and health issues behind today's green news.
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Just Like Riding A Bike: Google Streamlines Your Green Commute
More evidence that Google runs the world: they’re planning your next bike ride for you. As of two days ago, their latest mapping feature includes bike lane tracking, so that you can log in from your computer or portable internet toy – I mean phone! – and find your best route in abou… Read More
March 12, 2010 | In Environment
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Don't Take It From The FDA: New Environmental Health Podcast
For the most part, the FDA doesn’t require that the chemicals used in your shampoos, lipsticks, deodorants, and other personal care products be tested. Does that alarm you? It should. Monitoring the toxic load of what we put on our bodies is just as important as monitoring what we put in them, and don’t look first to the FDA for advice on what’s healthy for you in either regard. Instead, for environmental health news, look to the source, and check out Environmental Health Perspectives’ new Researcher’s Perspective series. Each month, the s… Read More
March 9, 2010 | In Environment
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Your kindergarten teacher warned you not to look directly at the sun, but not to worry: now you can listen to it sing, instead. Scientists have long tracked the intensity and patterns of the sun’s “wind” through the solar system and around planets (solar wind is essentially a stream of very enthusiastic particles emitted by the sun), but they’ve done so with boring graphs and charts. Now, researchers at the University of Michigan have turned that data into sound, trading their dry charts in for an ethereal, pulse-quickening song, or “sonification” of … Read More
March 4, 2010 | In Environment
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Let It Snow - Scientists Still Say We're Warming
The weather outside may be frightful, but the planet is still warming, scientists are saying. Hard to believe when school systems across the nation are running out of snow days and DC has been buried for most of the winter, but according to a professor in Monash University’s Geography and Environmental Science department (Melbourne), this January was the ho… Read More
March 1, 2010 | In Environment
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Toxic Fire Retardants In Your Household Dust
Bad news for sporadic dust-busters: our dust bunnies may be killing us softly. It’s not what they say about our abysmal standards for household cleanliness, it’s what they’re doing to our health. Household dust has long been a known culprit when it comes to allergies and asthma, but a new study from the Silent Spring Institute found 66 endocrine-disrupting compounds in dust samples they tested. Remember endocrine disruptors, those nasty little toxins that act like estrogen in the body, have been linked to various cancers, a… Read More
February 28, 2010 | In Environment
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Van Jones To Teach At Princeton
Hold onto your pink slips – Van Jones is back. It was announced this week that President Obama’s former green jobs czar (who left the White House almost as soon as he’d arrived) will be emerging from his six-month departure from the limelight and joining Princeton University as a visiting fellow in the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson Sc… Read More
February 27, 2010 | In Environment
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Mountaintop Coal Mining Could Decimate Fish Populations
Three days ago, a Wake Forest professor of biology went to the US Senate, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, to give them all the disturbing news: we’re poisoning our fresh water fish stocks with destructive mountaintop removal coal mining. In a study of 78 stream samples in areas near mountaintop removal mining sites, Professor Dennis Lemly and his team found that 73 contained toxic levels of selenium. Read More
February 26, 2010 | In Environment
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Corals Come Back To Life In Marine Protected Areas
The world’s coral reefs – which have been around for about 50,000 years – represent a critical treasure trove not only of Earth’s precious remaining biodiversity, but also of potential undiscovered medical solutions hidden in nature’s cloth. But agricultural runoff and climate change are taking a heavy toll: our coral reefs are bleaching and dying, and could vanish entirely by 2110 or sooner. Read More
February 23, 2010 | In Environment
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How We Hear The (Disappearing) Sound Of Silence
What with turbo engines, screeching sirens, and honking cars encroaching on most of the world’s remaining quiet places, silence is a rare and precious commodity today – a natural resource, if you will. Its depletion is messing with our concentration levels, cognitive functioning, happiness, and general wellbeing. Books have been written about the problem: Acoustic ecologist and author Gordon Hempton recently booked it back and forth across America in an exhaustive search of si… Read More
February 15, 2010 | In Environment
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Life Is Like A Box Of Fair-Trade Shade-Grown Organic Chocolates
Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a dozen chocolates made from the milk of hormone-and-antibiotic-injected cows and pesticide-sprayed cocoa beans grown on rainforest land which was shorn bare for maximum wonka bar profit on open plantations. Wait, hang on, that can’t be right. Read More
February 14, 2010 | In Environment
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White Roofs Really Do Make Cities Greener
Most of us are more worried this week about digging our cars out of drifts in snowmaggedon’s wake than we are about mitigating summer heat, but the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is thinking ahead for us all. In a recent study, NCAR found that, come summer, increasing the number of white roofs in urban areas really could help reduce the urban heat island effect, which can make cities 1-3 degrees (Celsius) hotter than rural areas. Read More
February 12, 2010 | In Environment
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Every election year, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) elects to their “Dirty Dozen” list twelve members of Congress who “consistently vote against the environment and are up for re-election in races where LCV has a serious chance to affect the outcome.” On Monday, LCV announced that they were bestowing upon Richard Pombo (R – CA) the great honor of becoming 2010’s third Dirty Dozen member. Read More
February 10, 2010 | In Environment
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USDA Releases 2009 Cropland Data Layering Images
The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has released cropland data layering (CDL) satellite images for 2009, and this time around, they covered almost the entirety of the US of A: 47 of the lower 48, to be exact. Florida, it seems, couldn’t get its certified farm data papers together in time to join in on the fun, but may be on the bandwagon come spring. The NASS’s CDL images will be a handy, now enhanced, tool for those who monitor agricultural water use and carbon emissions, crop rotation, and other ag-relate… Read More
February 6, 2010 | In Environment
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Inside-Out Organic Freezer Jeans
Get a leg in these: a Brazilian company called Tristar has introduced a new line of organic reversible cotton jeans which encourage water conservation in wearers. How? You don’t have to ‘wash’ them to get them ‘clean’. No time to hit the Laundromat before heading out for your Friday night? No problem. Throw your Tristar jeans in the freezer, and presto! The company says your pants will be bacteria-free in a mere 24 hours. Read More
February 5, 2010 | In Environment
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Textbook Industry Heading Into The Green
While magazines and newspapers head into the red, the textbook industry seems to be heading into the green these days. Online textbook rental startups are gaining momentum, and Kindle is looking to bash down the doors on a new e-reader textbook market in 2010. And thank goodness. It’s estimated that 4 million trees die untimely deaths in the name of the textbook each year. Not to mention the outrageous fees students pay for books. Read More
February 3, 2010 | In Environment
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Cornell University recently released a study that highlighted a strange twist in the mostly symbiotic relationship between fig trees and fig wasps. The story usually goes like this: wasp lays eggs in fig fruit (a protective environment), wasp pollinates said fig, little waspies are safely hatched and set out into the world, fig trees proliferate. But sometimes, a wasp takes advantage of the cozy egg-laying environment the trees figs provide, and neglects to pollinate in return. Read More
February 1, 2010 | In Environment
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Nice State Of The Union, Shame About The ‘Clean Coal’
On the extremely cute end of the cuteness spectrum, in Wednesday’s State of the Union Address, was the moment when Obama interrupted his rolling-up-the-sleeves-on-healthcare moment, looked up from his podium to where Michelle was sitting, called the nation’s attention to his wife’s campaign to end childhood obesity, smiled at her stoic response, and said “she gets embarrassed.” On the extremely not cute end of the cuteness spectrum was the moment when Obama yet again snuck ‘clean coal’ onto the list of clean energy technologies we need to build … Read More
January 31, 2010 | In Environment
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Made In China: Your Energy Future
Question: would you rather answer to a boss who has his own interests at heart (not yours), or to no boss at all? Would you rather the US switched from answering to the Middle East on oil and then immediately started answering to China on renewable and clean energy technologies – as the world moves from ancient energy (coal and oil) to current energy (wind, sun, tidal power) – or would you rather we took our energy future into our own hands for a change? Whoops, there’s that word again. Change. Read More
January 31, 2010 | In Environment
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Ten Clean Tech Shout Outs In State Of The Union Address
Depending on how you tally up, Obama gave about eight to ten paragraph-sized clean tech shout outs in Wednesday’s State of the Union Address, and thank goodness for that. The president certainly hasn’t been tiptoeing around the issue of America’s having falling behind in the clean tech race – he recently directed $2.3 billion in recovery act tax credits to clean tech projects – but such heavy emphasis on the need to become competitive in the race, throughout such an important public address, seems like a gift. Read More
January 31, 2010 | In Environment
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iPad Tablet Earns Greenish Marks
If you haven’t yet had an iPod, Mac computer, or other Apple product expire on you (hopefully not mid-jog, as mine did – a real let-down), you’re in a small minority. Tech consumers of today have been bred to look for the newest and shiniest, rather than the most lasting. Which is why landfills are full of toxic tech waste that leaches into our soil and water, and why more and more electronics companies are developing e-recycling programs, and why it’s actually significant that Apple has cut several black-list techy-type toxins from its latest product. Read More
January 30, 2010 | In Environment
Tobin is an NYC-based freelance writer. She blogs for BigThink on sustainability, green policy, and environmental health.