“What? I’m not going without overhead lights for the rest of the week, you crazy hippy!”

Admittedly, Seattle is dark this time of year, but really?  Is Greg truly more attached to overhead lighting than he is to video games and 30 Rock?

I too have always considered overhead lighting mandatory. It’s just a reflex. As the sun goes down, lights go on. And in Seattle, where the sun doesn’t even come out much this time of year, the lights tend to be on all day, and usually up until bedtime. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. We need light to do the majority of things we do, and it’s not reasonable to suggest that people should sit in darkness from sun down till sun up. But do we really need as much light as we use? And does it have to come from a light bulb?

Greg and I have already switched over to green power with our utility company, unplug chargers that aren’t being used and plug our electronics into powerstrips that we shut ...read full post

Back in my post-collegiate salad days, a popular little paperback was published called "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth." If I'm remembering correctly, it was one of the first books to suggest that we could shop, reuse, and recycle our way to a better world.

This seemed pretty appealing during the era when President Reagan was heating up the Cold War to the point that a nuclear exchange with the USSR seemed not just possible, but practically inevitable.

With those ICBMs locked and loaded, recycling the Sunday paper felt comfortingly tangible -- just as likely to protect the environment as marching in one more fringe political protest rally that the TV news and politicians would ignore.

Well, the US survived the Soviet Union -- and so did the market for green advice books. Two decades after "50 Simple Things," just try to enter a bookstore (virtual or actual) without bumping into over a dozen tomes offering advice on ...read full post

The world ocean plays a major role in regulating the climate, in part by absorbing more than a quarter of the billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gas that humans put into atmosphere.

Scientists have suspected that even as these human-propelled emissions rise, the ocean's capacity to store them is maxing out. Research released this week in the journal Nature adds new strength to that argument.

In their study, Samar Khatiwala of Columbia University and colleagues developed an ingenious mathematical method for charting the history of how much CO2 the ocean has absorbed since the beginning of the industrial era in 1765: by tracing the amount of human-produced CO2 in water masses of different ages and different geographic origins.

According to their findings, the ocean currently holds around 150 billion tons of carbon. Just over a decade ago, their calculations suggest, it was around 114 billion tons -- a figure that ...read full post

There is an emotional side of losing everything, losing your community, and then not knowing when you can go back home.

There are so many things that New Orleans residents lost after Hurricane Katrina. In my case it wasn't just losing my house, it was losing all the pictures of my mom, who passed away in April 2005. I had a whole chronology of her life from when she was a little girl all the way till when she was 79. The whole memory is just wiped out.  These things can't be undone.

But there are other legacies from Katrina that can be undone -- that could be fixed to make New Orleans a better and stronger place. For example, there's still time to create a safe environmental legacy for our children. That is why I will be talking with the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today, and I will be giving her a letter signed by local and national organizations asking for her help.

Immediately following the ...read full post

In preparation for No Impact Week, my boyfriend and I compulsively had takeout five nights in a row, used the car to run close-by errands (well, it was raining…) and went on a mini shopping spree for things we “needed” around the house. That we were about to drastically reduce our impact for seven days in a row seemed justification enough for our splurges. Funny thing is, most days we would consider ourselves greener than the average Joe. We use reusable shopping bags, watch our water and energy consumption, buy organic… And we make the effort not just because it’s trendy, but because we understand the issues behind our choices and want our actions to be as healthy for ourselves and for the environment as possible. (Brief aside: I say “we,” but as the eco-writer and green thumper in the relationship, he’s mostly green to win points with me. But hey, whatever works.) Yet somehow, the nagging thought that we were about to enter ...read full post

A series of measures designed to overhaul California's ailing water infrastructure has come under increased scrutiny this week since being signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday. Some call the reforms a historic achievement; others say they don't go far enough to tackle the state's complex water problems.

The measures were adopted by the California state legislature last week after an all-night session and signed by Schwarzenegger in the Central Valley, one of the areas hardest hit by the water crisis.  The centerpiece of the package --an $11.1 billion bond measure -- will appear on the ballot for consideration by state voters next fall.

A three-year drought has caused severe water shortages, crop losses and damage to the state's fishing industry.  The plan aims to address these problems by developing new drinking water sources and repairing the delicate Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which supplies water to two-thirds of the ...read full post