- gardening and climate change

There’s nothing like a passion for gardening to sharpen your awareness of environmental change.
Gardeners need to know when the last frosts end; the number of ‘cooling days’ available to fix their apples; when the soil will be warm enough to plant the summer vegetables – and plenty more – if they’re to garden in any [...]

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against golf — a trend that’s growing

It’s always struck us EarthQuakers as odd that golfers have long been allowed to portray their sport as beneficial to the environment. Golf course owners are adept, for example, at receiving tax breaks, on the grounds that they protect ‘green’ space.
For sure, the first golf courses were relatively low impact. They were [...]

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the economics of repair versus replacement

As befits advocates of ’slow’ living, here at EarthQuaker we’re just now working our way through last year’s New Yorker magazines.
Back in May, Steven Shapin reviewed books about technology and innovation. One interesting point he discusses is the connection between technology and maintenance.
The importance of maintenance becomes even clearer if we take a global [...]

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NYT patronizes environmentally-aware parents

The NY Times this week manages to put a uniquely patronizing spin on the growing awareness among middle class American parents that they could be living more environmentally-friendly lives.
” Move over, Tupperware. The EcoMom party has arrived,” says Patricia Leigh Brown in the piece. And that’s basically all she has to say.
The idea [...]

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mapping our impact on the oceans

The UC Santa Barbara-based National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis has published in today’s Science a “Global Map of Human Impact on Marine Ecosytems.”  You can see the map here.
“We still understand very little of the ocean’s biodiversity and how it is changing under our influence,” says the report, which represents an effort to [...]

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it’s in how you spin it.

Two stories in today’s UK press remind us that Global Warming can be spun as either positive or negative — especially if you live on an island known for long periods of gloom-inducing sunlessness.
“Climate change may kill thousands in UK by 2017,” worries Reuters.
Meanwhile, the BBC tells us that, “Global warming ‘may save lives.’”
Both headlines [...]

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are we our own geological era?

Have we entered a new geological epoch? the Christian Science Monitor asks today. Says writer, Robert Cowen:
Geologists wonder if they should add a new epoch to the geological time scale. They call it the Anthropocene — the epoch when, for the first time in Earth’s history, humans have become a predominant geophysical force. Naming [...]

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for a little perspective . . .

Natalie Angier writes in the NY Times today about the creation of synthetic microbes. But as interesting is what she reports about new research into the breadth of microbial life on our planet.
She quotes Dr. Craig Venter, of the J. Craig Venter Institute.
“From our random sequencing in the ocean, we uncovered six million new [...]

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time for some product endorsements

One issue EarthQuaker cares a lot about is our collective consumption of material objects — especially the kind that get lumped together in the category ‘products.’ How we think of, purchase, use and discard the objects that are sold to us commercially is — after all — a fundamental determinant of our impact on [...]

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paper or plastic?

The New York Times reports today on the extraordinary impact that charging a 33c tax on plastic bags has had in Ireland. The bags are now all but gone from the country and no-one, it seems, is complaining.
Significantly, buying a plastic bag hasn’t been made illegal in Ireland. But soon after the tax [...]

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