Remember the Alar scare? I’m not sure I ever saw it myself, but the legendary news clip lingers in my mind: suburban women chasing the school bus to try to retrieve a possibly Alar-sprayed apple from their child’s lunchbox. Health and the environment are closely connected, but we need to keep our perspective. My daughter [...]

While I’m feeling guilty about air travel, I guess the oil companies are feeling twinges of guilt, too. At least that’s what you would think, at the airport or reading the major financial papers. Chevron, Shell, and BP (British Petroleum) are all engaged in ‘peak oil’ PR, and it’s simply amazing to see. Greenwashing, according [...]

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 [...]

I do a lot of traveling, more than ever before, and I’m increasingly conscious of the impact of our excessive mobility is. I’m not sure just what to do about it, but there are certainly a few days we can do immediately.
First, we should wake up to the impact of trips by car and [...]

I was in London last week and found a spare hour to visit the Sir John Soane Museum in Holborn. I loved it just as much as I had as a student, and wondered if I had been unconsciously influenced by the memory of its rich red walls when I chose the paint for our [...]

Air travel is the most energy-intensive of all, and is definitely to be avoided when possible. But I’m afraid that I’ve been crossing the Atlantic–it’s hard to run an international business without doing some of this type of travel–so I thought I’d share some health tips from The Armchair Environmentalist’s chapter on Greener Transport. More [...]