Climate Food and Agriculture

You Put Your Seed in There

Norway reveals design for “doomsday” seed vault Architecture geeks are salivating over Norway’s release of the design of an agricultural “doomsday vault.” The structure, which will cost $5 million to build and $125,000 a year to run, will hold seeds for the world’s 1.5 million distinct crop varieties. You know, in case the guy who […]

Pro skateboarder Bob Burnquist ramps up his green work

Bob Burnquist at the X Games XI, where he took the gold medal for Skateboard Vert Best Trick. Photo: Jason Merritt/WireImage Bob Burnquist isn’t afraid of taking risks. In fact, he’s made a career out of it. The 30-year-old pro skateboarder is a 12-time medal-winner at the X Games, has developed and named a number […]

That’s it for me and industrial meat

The other day I went to Costco with my older boy — during the Super Bowl, for stealth. It took a bit of persuading to get him there, so I told him about the ladies who stand around and hand out food samples. Everything was going fine. A mozzarella ball, yum. A little square of […]

Popping your (organic) cherry

Hello again, fair, broke readers. Sorry to tease you with my column intro and then leave you hungering for more for all these weeks. Your resident brokeass took an unexpected journey to Utah to steal swag from well-heeled, earth-friendly-ish corporations and stalk eco-savvy celebs — and then returned and promptly got sick. So, the long-awaited […]

Is anyone still taking this stuff seriously?

President Bush’s recent pledge to raise the Renewable Fuel Standard to 35 billion gallons by 2017 dropped with a bit of a thud. David Roberts made a pretty good case that all the recent hype around ethanol may soon prove quaint: that, in essence, the ethanol craze will eventually likely crumble under its weighty political, […]

It’s only natural

About twice a day, an email from a mystery man/unflagging anti-ethanol crusader named Ray Wallace appears in my inbox, chock full of excerpts from the latest ethanol slams and, on lucky days, choice quotes from politicos and the like sounding less-than-smart about the whole business. I'm not sure how I got on his listserv, and I can't quite say how you can (but if you'd really like to, let me know and we can probably work something out).

Anyhow (I'm getting to my point), I mention Ray so as to credit him for alerting me to this quote, contained in today's edition:

Where farm subsidies came from, and why they’re still here

Note: This is the second of a three-column series on the 2007 farm bill. The first article is available here; the third here. Last week, I argued that it makes sense for society to support farming. Everybody needs to eat, and most would prefer to do so without devastating the environment or exploiting labor. Well, […]

The Airspeed Velocity of an Uneaten Swallow

Food imported by air may lose organic certification in Britain Foods imported into Britain by airplane may not qualify as organic if the country’s main certification body has its druthers. On Friday, the Soil Association announced it will spend a year considering a proposal to factor flight distance into its organic standards. While it will […]

Lettuce Eat Veggies

An occasional meat-eater faces the brutal truth Upon reading about the history of vegetarianism in the new tome The Bloodless Revolution, food writer and occasional meat-eater Tom Philpott wonders: will the consumption of sentient animals one day be widely denounced as immoral? It’s not inconceivable, he says — but for now, Americans eat a stunning […]

David James Duncan rows through a wheat field to save salmon — and we’ve got pictures

Photo: Frederic Ohlinger “The miracle meal after the Sermon on the Mount was both loaves and fishes,” says author and storyteller David James Duncan. “Not one or the other. Both.” It’s a sentiment that helps to explain why Duncan and a variety of compatriots were photographed in 13 colorful dories, rowing and casting lines — […]