I can’t do better than copy here an email from Beryl Bender Birch about the Arctic Refuge. Unfortunately I’ve deleted her first message, which was full of the kind of righteous indignation that strikes all of us at times, and which should strike more of us more often. But you can find out all you [...]

We’re having a party today—-pan-Asian theme—-so of course it’s going to rain. The last two big summer parties we’ve had brought torrential all-day downpours, with fabulous weather the next day!
But there is one thing that no longer troubles us about rain. Our basement stays dry these days, ever since we did some major landscaping [...]

Though it’s supposed to rain here for the next 10 days, all I think about after work is planting. I know I have farming ancestors (actually, so do we all), but there’s something more to this compulsion. Gardening is definitely an antidote of a special kind to the pressures of modern business life. It’s physical, [...]

Some solutions are so easy and cheap that the question is why they aren’t adopted instantly. Two examples:
1. Refillable toothbrushes. The brand I use is Fuchs Ekotec and they’re readily available at natural foods stores and from many online natural products shops. You buy the toothbrush and an extra package of replacement heads, and just [...]

The Armchair Environmentalist is printed on 100% recycled paper, which is a wonderful thing. But as a publisher myself, I know that it isn’t just trees we need to think about. Publishing is moving online, and onto computers, and like all information industries we are completely dependent on computers. I haven’t had much luck–so far–convincing [...]

I went outside early this morning to fill yet more seed trays with potting soil. Guess what? We’d had a fairly hard frost, and the grass was silver-white, gleaming in the sunshine that brought temperatures up to a balmy sixty degrees.
I’ve really got the gardening obsession this year, and keep buying more plants and [...]

The words we use for this season are interesting to consider. In French and Spanish, the words for ‘spring’ relate to first life, a beginning. In English, we use a word that suggests both movement and a source. Life really does spring up before us in springtime, especially in a climate like ours in New [...]