- are high prices for industrial food a good thing?

A few weeks ago we noted that high prices for industrially-produced food might be a good thing if you wanted people to buy more organics. Even the New York Times came to the same conclusion.
But not so fast, says Tom Philpott over at Grist.org.
Philpott worries that, as supermarket prices for conventional goods rise, people [...]

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- where it’s illegal to hang out your washing

It may be hard to believe, but some 35,000 homeowners’ associations in California alone ban clotheslines.
That’s a lot of places where the wonderfully drying California sun could be doing for free what otherwise takes a lot of energy and, these days, adds plenty to homeowners’ gas or electric bills.
As Mindy Spatt of the Utility Reform [...]

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- the answer to climate change: drill for oil in Alaska!

As environmental issues finally seem urgent to broad swathes of the US commentariat, that reality is spawning all sorts of creative arguments for what people wanted all along.
Take the example of drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive habitats in the USA. In a Tribune Media column today, the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson argues [...]

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- confused this Earth Day?

What, exactly, is the world coming to? How worried, precisely, should we be about the state of our climate, our energy system, our food supplies, our water, the air we breath? What really is — or might soon — be the problem with any of these?
It’s hard to keep track and easy to [...]

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- a distopian Earth Day

Gloom — appropriately perhaps — seems to be the theme this Earth Day.
Joseph Romm in Salon thinks it’s already too late to save much of the flora and fauna on our planet. It’s time to worry out ourselves, he says.
Over at Alternet, Michael Klare worries at length about a ‘new world order in energy.’ [...]

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- wanting to give up on organics

You’d think that as we reap the environmental, health and political consequences of industrial farming techniques that consume vast quantities of fossil fuels, degrade soils and leave us with poor diets, organic produce would become ever more popular.
But two recent New York Times stories reveal a counter-intuitive, but important, reality: that as the problems associated [...]

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- some green truths on (and in) Parade

Every week some 32 million copies of Parade Magazine — the popular (and populist) insert to many US Sunday newspapers — get printed. So it’s hardly a paragon of environmental sustainability. As wikipedia notes, one of its signature features is also “a significant amount of advertising for consumer products.”
So we say ‘God Bless’ [...]

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- live Green, die Green

A green death is the logical successor to a green life and, as more of us become more environmentally-minded (and older!), we can expect the subject to gain more attention.
At the moment though, as an AP story today reminds us, the subject still seems to warrant the ‘those-kooky-greens’ treatment from the mainstream media.
Still, it’s already [...]

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- farming your balcony

What if you want to be an urban farmer, but you don’t have an allotment or even a postage stamp-sized front or back yard to plant?
Well, you can take inspiration from the members of Food Up Front, an urban food-growing non-profit based in Balham, in south London.  Even if all you have is a walkway, [...]

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- it’s never to late to work for peace

as 101 year old American Kathryn Davis proves.
To celebrate her 100th birthday, Davis set up ‘Projects for Peace,’ which supported college students in 100 projects that promoted peace around the [...]

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