"Organic food no better"
There's a controversy in Britain at the moment about a new report that claims to prove that organic food is no better for you than chemically agro-gro...

Civil Rights Goes Green
If you haven’t heard Van Jones speak, then do yourself a favour. Find an event where he’s keynoting, and go. Van is as American as Obama (and w...

What To Do With Bottles
Tired of filling the recycling bin with empty, perfectly good bottles, I went researching things to do with them instead: If you have a polyester...

Nature: Buy Now While Stocks Last
Whale watching tours in Baja are huge business. So are eco-lodges in the Amazon, run by indigenous tribes who now need English lessons so they can imp...

Type A Nation?
Where would America be without coffee? It's our beverage of choice, the one that boosts us out of bed in the morning, drives us to work, pumps us thro...

Whole Pie Politics
The appointments of Judge Sotomayor and Regina Benjamin are exciting for several reasons: 1. Their appointments show that Obama is bringing senior...

Why Food Waste?
This area of food waste has drilled into me for months, perhaps years.  The concept—truly something that can only happen in a "developed" country�...

Water, Water Everywhere and Ne'er a Drop to Drink
On Saturday a friend and I drove through coastal California, from Santa Barbara to San Francisco. Before we left, she began to fret about water. She w...

Snake Oil: Cheaper than Kaiser
A friend of mine recently came down with a hideous, unexplained rash on his arm. It kept him awake at night, itching and burning. I met him in the loc...

Is the Klunker Commission Really Just a Cash Cow for the Car Industry?
What could be better than the new Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS); a recent bill that lets you trade in your old, gas-guzzling klunker for a new, m...

Creativity as a Link to (Re)source
British psychologist Donald Winnicott coined the phrase 'transitional object', referring to the teddy bear or security blanket that a toddler carries...

Creating a World Together
Imagine waking up to a world where people were enthusiastic about their work. Where people made choices out of a drive to better their communities, no...

Toxic Veganism: Boycott Soy
I used to work with an evangelical vegan. He was radically concerned about farm animals. But he couldn’t see past the end of a chicken run in terms...

Institutional Education: Why We Want Out
The current education system has been under massive critique for centuries. Statistics show that more and more people are dropping out and cho...

A Better Way of Making a Living
Making a living in our modern culture usually requires that you participate in the destruction of the world. We can’t go back to Homo hunter-gathere...