Ian Wilker - OnEarth Magazine, from NRDC

Social Technologies and the Environment: Has Big Coal Met Its Match?

We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.… By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools [ed: web-based social technologies] have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication and scope of unsupervised effort.
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

In the first half of 2008, the fossil-fuels industry spent $427 million to influence public opinion and public policy. Over the whole of last year, one industry group -- ACCCE, the clean-coal flacks -- spent $45 million ...read full post

Comments (1) | January 19, 2009
Will Large Institutional Investors Green Their Portfolios?

Two years ago, OnEarth ran an interesting article and podcast on socially responsible investing. Remembrance of those pieces quickened my interest in an article in yesterday's New York Times on green investment funds; the Times story provides something of a yardstick re how socially responsible investing is evolving.
Most significant is that the institutional-investing heavyweights -- pension funds, foundations, universities and the like -- are beginning to get involved:

Until recently, green investment funds were mostly a niche for individual investors. But now investing with the idea of improving the environmental actions of corporations, not just maximizing profit, is catching on among some big pension funds and ...read full post

Comments (1) | November 29, 2008
Around the Web: Tar Sands Oil and "Climate Change Pact" Don't Mix

Clearly there's no rest for the weary victors of the long presidential campaign. What seems like thousands of interest groups are jockeying for position on the new administration's agenda, evoking nothing somuch as a cloud of gnats billowing around the president-elect's head.
One of those is Canada's oil industry, which (via Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper) leapt forth last Wednesday with a proposal it is spinning as a "climate change pact" but is in truth an effort to lock in U.S. support for continuing rapid development of tar-sands oil from Alberta.
Well, as regular OnEarth readers will know, extraction and production of tar-sands oil carries some severe negatives. It releases three times the carbon emissions involved in conventional oil production. And it exacts a scorched-earth toll on the environment -- "remediation" of land after tar-sands ...read full post

Comments (1) | November 10, 2008
Big Boxes, Reborn

In any ecosystem, species either evolve or vanish. And in some parts of the country, shuttered malls are mutating into developments rarely seen in suburbia: compact, well-planned, walkable communities with a dense mix of homes and small businesses. Ironically enough, malls, icons of a car-centric, fossil-fueled culture, could become the sites for smarter, greener places to live and work.
-- "The De-Malling of America," OnEarth, Summer 2008

I've seen several new stories about redevelopment of abandoned malls and big-box stores, and so I thought this an opportune moment to follow up on Tim Folger's recent OnEarth report on this subject.
Few things cast a pall over a suburban landscape as thoroughly as an abandoned retail behemoth. Often these buildings are left behind when giant retailers, like "...read full post

Comments (0) | October 22, 2008
Concrete Canyons, Hanging Gardens: Patrick Blanc's Green Walls

With the exception of a few indispensable classics I'm not the type to acquire stacks of large-format coffee-table books, but a just-released tome from French botanist and landscape designer Patrick Blanc is now item #1 on my Christmas list.
If you haven't run across Blanc's work before, prepare to be wowed. He's the creator of Le Mur Vegetal -- the remarkable "vertical gardens" that now adorn the exterior walls of buildings in Paris, Manhattan, Bangkok, and other cities. One notable example is the Musée ...read full post

Comments (0) | October 15, 2008