Green pre-fab is getting a lot of attention right now in New York City. Hop downtown to the Financial District, and you’ll notice, amidst the suits and skyscrapers, a peculiar exhibit. We’ll call it “a Pre-Fab grows in FiDi” – a humble little abode that looks ever so slightly as though it may have ...

High fructose corn syrup, sedentary lifestyles, endocrine disrupting chemical BPA in our plastic water bottles… we’re already up against enough hurdles when it comes to combating the diabetes epidemic. But now we’ve got another hurdle to clear: the pollution our cars and other motor vehicles put ...

This could be an ideal time for creatures touched by the Gulf spill to pick up yoga and/or meditation. Here’s why. Consider the iguana. When iguanas get stressed out about things like famines brought on by El Nino, changes in their ecosystems, or natural disaster, they release a hormone called ...

Step away from the spray bottle. A warning email blast went out today from Ken Cook, President of the watchdog organization Environmental Working Group (EWG), alerting consumers to the risks they’re taking each time they reach to sprits a wrist or neck. It’s one thing to know that the US does a ...

Here’s the tricky thing about ozone: we want lots of it up high in the upper atmosphere, where it blocks radiation and protects us, but we want as little of it as possible down here on the surface of the earth, and in our eyes, ears, noses and throats, where it acts as a harmful pollutant. And ...

The University of Alabama in Huntsville – in partnership with NASA and NOAA – has taken Earth’s temperature, and determined that (based on satellite data collected over the past 32 years) our planet had a bone-rattling fever this April. The school, in its Newswise announcement of the troubling news ...

As the wake of destruction trailing the Gulf oil spill continues to look increasingly dark, I can’t help but think back to the speech that Interior Secretary Salazar made when he announced his approval of Cape Wind – America’s first offshore wind farm – in late April. Up there on the podium, he ...

Last night, among the eerie nighttime mummies and cave-drawings, a who’s who environmental panel convened at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to discuss how to “move the conversation beyond the ‘is global warming a hoax?’ debate.” That was how mediator Robert Silvers, of the New York ...

In order for Lyme disease to properly proliferate in an area, to the point that you have to check every square inch of your body for ticks when you get home from a pleasant walk in the woods, you need a few things. You need a healthy-sized population of the host species, a deer tick called lxodes ...

Around the turn of the 20th century, if you were in the upper class in America, you’d have probably, at some point, sat down to a nice dinner of Diamond Terrapin turtle. The species, native to Alabama, was a sought-after delicacy then – now, after decades of industrial growth and commercial fishing ...

The fight over Cape Wind – a $1 billion, 24-square-mile offshore wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound – has dragged on so long (9 years) that books have been written about it. But finally, finally, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced that he’ll be giving the project the green light ...

With exactly 40 Earth Days in its wake, the US has come a long way on conservation awareness. But when we think about Earth and all that ails her, we’re still remarkably bad at paying attention to those big blue bits on the map – those bits which, we often seem to forget, make up almost three ...

It’s getting to be that time of year. At some point in the next couple of weeks, on a particularly warm and sunny day, I’m going to suddenly find myself lifting the bed skirt and crawling through a sea of dust bunnies to retrieve my Summer Clothes Storage Box. I’m going to open it and peer ...

The first job my mother ever held involved plucking hundreds of dandelions by their tenacious little roots from her family’s tiny lawn. Her father had set her to the task, and incentivized her by paying her a penny a pop. Like most Americans in the 50s, he disliked weeds. A lot. But the times they ...

One of the highest-impact lifestyle changes a person can make in the name of environmentalism is to go veggie. It takes – as this blog’s image illustrates – 698 and ½ gallons of water to make a hamburger, and a whoppering 616 of those can be attributed to production of the beef itself. Let’s not ...