I happened to pick up a copy of Audubon magazine over the weekend. I admit that I’d thought of it as rather dull, a publication for retirees with too many pets and obsessed about animal protection above all other environmental concerns. But I was wrong. It was full of beautifully written articles about a wide [...]

I’m a little shocked by the results of this Earth Day Footprint Quiz. Try it out: a salutary reminder of some of the things that have most impact. I’ll be digging a little deeper to find out how their measurements work. BTW, the programming on the front page doesn’t work very well, so be patient. [...]

David and I flew to Iowa just over a week ago to see our son Tom, who has just started college there. To my surprise and pleasure, he has decided to get involved with the campus garden, and says he has blistered hands today from digging over some of the beds. I imagine that college [...]

I was in the bookshop picking up Teach Yourself German, because I’m leaving for Frankfurt on Monday, and happened to spot a book called Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. What a pleasure to see that such an important subject is being tackled, and published. The jacket copy is a [...]

My daughter’s taking a class in environmental management and I’ve learned two important things from her. First, Richard Nixon’s looking better and better: he signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970.
One of the most important demands of this law is that Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be produced. As Rachel points out, creating [...]

I can’t believe I missed this when it came out in October, and that I found it only because the lines were long at the food coop before the holiday weekend (today is Presidents’ Day, here in the US, and the radio hosts make terrible jokes about not being able to tell a lie, an [...]

It always amuses me that corporations would tell us to trust them, as if they were priests or surgeons instead of merchants, hawking their goods as best they can. They talk as though their leadership role model is Mother Teresa instead of Henry Ford. They want to feed the developing world, right? Rice with Vitamin [...]

The newspaper I picked up in London this morning announced that global climate change, or global warming, is now thought likely to be twice as bad as previously projected. This came from an article published in the very respectable scientific journal Nature, and got quite a lot of press in Britain (along with the woman [...]

I remember one year when spring came far too early in London, daffodils and forsythia started to open in January. Environmental issues were getting a lot of attention in the press, and people were confused. “Funny weather, innit?” said an operator, “I think it must be that ozone you keep hearing about.”
Yesterday my brother flew [...]