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December, 2007
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Share, Don't Preach?
My friend Dan sent me an email today to ask if I'd seen the story the New York Times ran on December 8 about the decision by Canada's largest outdoor goods retailer to remove Nalgene and other polycarbonate plastic bottles from its stores. You may have seen it by now. I had, so at first I thought it was old news, a bit of a yawn at this point. But I changed my mind this evening.
By way of background: polycarbonate plastic contains the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA)-a chemical that our bodies can ...
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The Year’s Best Enviro Stories
To be honest, I didn’t intend to write a Year’s Best Whatever list. Reading about the Golden Globe nominees must have gotten me in the mood.
The first glimmer of my list came, oddly enough, when I read a recent story in The New York Times, “Oil-Rich Nations Use More Energy, Cutting Exports,” which offered a quick glimpse of how our crazed lust for oil is reaching new global heights. The result, reports Clifford Krauss: there will be “big market shifts, with the number of exporting ... -
A Search for Holiday Cheer
I had lunch the other day with a welL-known author who at times seemed almost morose. He had spent his life rhapsodizing, as he put it, about the natural world; he was arguably the literary heir of such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Edward Abbey. But he told me he was feeling somewhat hopeless. We have passed great laws to protect the environment, established beautiful national parks, saved sacred places, he lamented. But what use is it to have a Glacier National Park with no glaciers in i... -
Buzz Roundup: Talk in the Green Blogs, 12.12.07
Each day, I'm going to try to lasso at least a good chunk of the best and busiest conversations on our favorite blogs about the environment. (If we've missed a great blog you read -- or write -- regularly, please let us know! Leave a comment, or write to us.
"The Arctic Is Screaming"
So says NASA senior scientist Mark Serreze of new satellite data showing that summer sea ice is now half the size it was just four years ago, and that the Greenland ice sheet's summer melt was nearly 19 million ton...
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Nanotech Safety: More on How Little We Know
More news on how little we know about the risks of nanotechnology: The following excerpt is from the Economist, which ran “A little risky business” it its November 22 issue. The full text is free online, and it raises many of the same points that Robin Marantz Henig made in her OnEarth cover story, “Our Silver-Coated Future,” which was published in September. Since then, the U.S. House of Representatives’s Committee on Science and Technology convened for the third time to discuss th...
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Welcome to My Life on Earth
Welcome to my “Welcome to My Life On Earth” post. I have two things on my mind as I begin to think about what this blog might offer up in the coming months, and I share them with the hope that they might help you get a sense for who I am and what I'm doing here:
1. If you often struggle to understand why a nice girl needs a Second Life or an online profile full of pictures of herself hugging and mugging for the camera with everyone she knows, then you might enjoy the first thing on my min...
Behold, The Lord God Bird