- forget guerrilla gardening, do it fairy-godmother style

Sure, we have reservations about turning vacant urban lots into vegetable gardens designed purely for the benefit of humans. But, as with all things, the real story lies in the nuance.
That’s why we admire people who take it upon themselves to replace human-designed but blighted urban landscapes (think: ivy-covered front yards and scuffed, litter-strewn [...]

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- more on consumptive parents

Salon has an interview this weekend with Pamela Paul, author of the new book, “Parenting, Inc.” It’s a must read for anyone interested in the consumer culture of affluent Western parenting.
Paul tells Salon:
“I think that we have professionalized parenting, and in a consumer society that becomes translated into buying a lot of things. Parents [...]

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- let’s eat like there’s a war on!

That’s apparently the idea behind British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s new project.
Oliver’s idea, explains today’s Guardian,takes “inspiration from the Ministry of Food’s campaign to encourage families to Dig For Victory, grow their own food and make the most of their wartime rations.”
While it’s a gimmick, the notion also makes some sense.  Second World War rationing [...]

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- urban farming: neat idea, but what about the wildlife?

Yesterday we wrote about ’super-micro farming’ as a trend emerging in response to possible threats to our food supplies.
There’s further evidence of the trend in the San Fransisco Chronicle’s most recent ‘Home and Garden’ section. In a multi-page cover feature, the paper does a nice job of surveying current efforts in the city to [...]

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- grow your own (ditch the lawn)

Climate change threatens to destabilize our lives, for both ill and (perhaps, even) good.
One mark of that instability will likely be a disruption in the way we produce and distribute food.
Could this be why the UK Independent finds the world suddenly ‘going crazy for allotments‘ — those small plots of land that cities lease their [...]

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- is ideal parenting all about consumption?

Here at EarthQuaker’s suburban world headquarters we like to keep in touch with the world of hip, urban parenting, so we receive a daily email digest from Babble.com, the New York-based online parenting magazine.
That’s how we learned recently that even hipster parents find parenting a costly business these days.
Quoting parent Allyson Mazer, writer Melissa Rayworth [...]

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- held in the light of the stars

A few weeks back I was attending our local Friends meeting and thinking about light.
Specifically, I was looking at the many lamps hanging in the meeting room and wondering if they should ever be turned on during a meeting for worship. Why not, I thought, always hold our meetings in the available light [...]

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- more on behavioral economics

We’re glad to see that John Tierney gets what we were saying about climate change and behavioral economics the other week.
In his ‘Findings’ piece this week, Tierney points out that:
“We’re not good at making immediate sacrifices for an abstract benefit in the future. And this weakness is compounded when, as with climate change, we have [...]

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- a global warming upside: more ivory

It’s not from elephants, though, and no animals are killed for it.  Mammoth ivory, the NY Times tells us, is a commodity in increasing abundance as the arctic tundra of Siberia is melting.
There’s a lot of it out there to be found, apparently:
The Siberian permafrost blankets millions of square miles, ranging in depth from a [...]

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- the biofuel backlash grows

Many people feel that biofuels are not exactly the solution to climate change that others — especially in the current US administration — are claiming them to be.
They were joined by a number of European ‘top scientists’ this week, the Guardian reports.
In particular, says the article, Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s [...]

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