Culture & Celebrity

Image from Daily Mail

With all the best intentions, most of us don't have the nerve to really change our life style dramatically. We do as much as we can within the limitations of our busy lives, but haven't the true grit to go that extra mile. Here are 3 inspirational stories of young families that are taking things to the limit and loving it.

The first tale is about a family of 4 that decided to see if they could survive for a year without shopping at supermarkets. They grew their own vegetables in their back yard and bartered the extra food for essentials. Living in a smallish city, they were able to rent an acre of land to plant crops as well as keep animals.

Business & Politics

Pedestrian braves the street, avoiding the un-shoveled sidewalk. Image credit:The Hook, photo by Hawes Spencer

Having grown up where snow up to the windows was normal, it is with amazement that I view my fellow Southeastern Pennsylvanians dealing with serious snow. Two honest-feet fell Friday night; and, another two feet are predicted starting tomorrow night. Pretty crazy. Unless you are a denialist or a meteorologist, looking out the window, you'd think the climate had changed!

Suppose 4 feet on the ground becomes a winter norm going forward. How will they adapt? The 1950's offer a model.

Travel & Nature

Photo: Wikipedia, CC

What Can We Learn From The Highways in the Sky
Science recently published a study titled "Flight Orientation Behaviors Promote Optimal Migration Trajectories in High-Flying Insects". It's about how migrating insects have evolved to take advantage very efficiently of high speed winds (while you're stuck in traffic, butterflies whiz by at up to 60 MPH, possibly more) to travel hundreds of miles in relatively short periods of time, all that while correcting for crosswinds taking them off-course, and expanding as little energy as possible. This made me wonder, in the spirit of biomimicry, what can we learn from that?

Business & Politics

photo via Flickr

The UN's top climate official and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, has penned a novel that reportedly mixes global warming lectures with steamy sex scenes involving a male protagonist that resembles Pachauri himself. An engineer by training, Pachauri has endured the recent failings in Copenhagen and the recent attacks on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over charges that the group wasn't careful enough when editing their 2007 global warming assessment.

Business & Politics

Photo via UC Berkeley

A recently published report is exposing some shocking exploitation of the Amazon's natural resources--and this times it's water being stolen. Where is this water headed? According to the report, "tankers are quietly removing water" to be bottled and sold in Europe and the Middle East. This is coming at a time when regions of the northern Amazon region have been experiencing a devastating drought that threatens the livelihoods of its people. This burgeoning crime is known as hydro-piracy, and it could foreshadow a future of resource wars as clean water supplies become scarce.

Business & Politics

Photo via Syracuse

I have a challenge for you: try to come up with a company that better exemplifies the archetype of the nefarious, greed-driven, monolithic corporation than Exxon. Besides Haliburton. You have until the end of this blog post to do so. But it's a tall order: Exxon is behind one of the most infamous environmental catastrophes of our time, it makes more gross income than most nations' entire GDPs, and it does business with nations with unstable governments that are often hostile to the US. Worst of all, it has done everything in its power to push a misinformation campaign designed to discredit both climate science and international efforts to keep the earth's temperatures from rising to dangerous levels. And according to recent reports, its still up to its old tricks.

Business & Politics

Image credit: Lollie-Pop/Flickr

With Tesla officially filing their IPO papers, it seems like renewable energy is entering a new era of marketability. Such small successes, however, may not be representative of trends.

Culture & Celebrity

Photo via World Sports Tribune

Much has been made of this year's generally crappy Super Bowl ads. But in the green community, one ad has been showing up repeatedly on just about every enviro blog out there: the Audi "Green Police" ad. We even covered it here before the game, where it was already causing a stir. And that stir isn't over the product or the company selling the product. It's over the ad's bizarre method of selling that product--essentially demonizing overzealous environmentalists to get people to buy an environmentally responsible product. Sound counter intuitive? It might be. But it also might be an ingenious way of ushering an era where sustainability is the standard, whether anyone likes it or not.