This is the perfect time to harvest herbs from the garden, but I never think of it because summer seems barely to have arrived. But Rachel happened to ask about mint tea, which inspired me to locate, under some boxes of books, the drying rack I picked up at a tag sale last summer.
We’ve [...]

Another intriguing article in New Scientist, this time on Clean Solvents. Get this: “Because to make medicines, cosmetics and bathroom cleaners, as well as paints, inks, plastics and lubricants, you need vast quantities of solvents to dissolve the chemical reagents. For every little pill, for example, you may produce 25,000 times its volume in solvent [...]

I was looking through a pile of green magazines and clippings and came across some things about “simple living.” I have mixed feelings about that whole movement because it’s so much a product of, and dependent on, privileged Western economies. But I started writing in an anticonsumerism vein in my very first book, because there’s [...]

I love hearing from readers. Every author does. But write an environmental book and 90% of the letters will be from crackpots—people obsessed with one specific cause that for them looms larger than the big issues I’m trying to help readers focus on.
There was the person whose worry was the chemicals used in mushroom farming, [...]

I’ve been in California all week, driving and in meetings, and falling into bed at night. I have a travel yoga mat and CDs, too, but I just wasn’t getting to it. This morning I looked on the web and to my astonishment there was an Iyengar studio only blocks from my motel; even [...]

I moved to Great Barrington in part because it had a nice coffee shop, and we are a long way from the nearest Starbucks. But I’ve long been intrigued by Starbucks as a business, especially because of the community angle: plenty of people argue that chains destroy the sense of community and local economic interdependence, [...]

I occasionally get enquiries about where to purchase items–like the Fuchs replaceable head toothbrushes I mentioned recently. I live in the U.S. now, and there do seem to be more sources here (it’s the consumer society, right?). But I can recommend a couple of prime sources in the U.K. for environmentally-responsible products:
Out of This World [...]

The first book I wrote about environmental issues was called Home Ecology, and was published in London in 1989 and in the United States in 1990. In it, I was something of a hairshirt environmentalist, critical of microwave ovens and also of dishwashers–neither of which, you’ll not be surprised to hear, I had in my [...]