Climate Culture

Elizabeth Grossman reviews Affluenza and Red

There's been a tendency since Sept. 11 to reconsider everything in light of that horrific tragedy. I've tried to resist that inclination, but I had read both Affluenza and Red before that day and could not ignore the way the attacks highlighted the importance of the books' divergent subject matters: our desire for the good life, which has made us the greatest consumers on earth; and the need to protect the wild places which that pattern of consumption threatens.

Now that's a reason to be jolly

This holiday season, we’re bombing Afghanistan, and perhaps contributing to mass starvation there. We stand apart from the rest of the world on climate change, ignoring the melting ice at the North Pole and rising global temperatures. As if the killing and bombing and starving weren’t bad enough, we’re not just at war with other […]

On Bjorn Lomborg's hidden agenda

Here is Denmark, that harmonious northern country known for its curiously vanilla accomplishments (comprehensive social welfare, pastry, Hans Christian Anderson), and here is its latest export, Bjorn Lomborg, come to announce the good news that we live in a fairy-tale world.

Zed, last of his species, in "There's One Bjorn Every Minute"

Behind the scenes at the Bush administration's renewable energy summit

Ever since the White House declared energy independence a matter of national security, some unlikely evangelists in the Bush administration have been belting out the clean energy gospel. Case in point: Last week, Gale Norton presided over the first national renewable energy summit in history, co-hosted by the Departments of Interior and Energy. Gale Norton. […]

Lost at Sea

In the midst of an expedition to document the impact of global warming and pollution on the Amazon Basin, America’s Cup champion Sir Peter Blake was shot and killed yesterday, when pirates boarded his research boat at the mouth of the Amazon River. Blake, a 53-year-old native of Auckland, New Zealand, won the yacht race […]

Zed, last of his species, in "Putt-Putting Green"

The Ends of the Earth Summit?

The aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States are reaching halfway around the world, rendering uncertain the planning and financing for the World Summit On Sustainable Development, to be held next year in South Africa. The event, which is organized by the United Nations and is better known as the Earth […]

Wood Picker

Eric Gellerman is making furniture out of old-growth Douglas fir, 150-year-old white oak, and Indonesian teak — and getting kudos from environmentalists for doing so. Gellerman is cofounder of The Wooden Duck, a furniture store in Berkeley, Calif., that salvages wood to craft its wares. The environmental benefits range from the obvious — the company […]

Sin-erama