Taking the Romance out of Environmentalism

My latest Green Chain column for the Record-Bee. Just after 7 p.m. on Sept 5, 2001, Mark Lynas, a writer and a member of the Green Party in Britain stepped into the Borders Bookshop in Oxford and “pied” former Greenpeace member Bjorn Lomborg with a sponge cake topped with whipped cream. Lomborg was at the

What the Frack? U.S. CO2 Output the Lowest in 20 years.

“The best is the enemy of good.” – Voltaire Good news travels slowly, if at all. Given headlines of the century you might think that good news does not exist. A newspaper will not stay in business without readers—and they need drama to get readers—so even good news often gets described as bad news. At

Green Games

  Here is today’s Green Chain column for the Lake County Record-Bee. “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes. It appears we are witnessing the crumbling of the green movement, as we know it. Dr. James Lovelock, who postulated the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of earth operating

Fried Green Sustainability

  In the movie, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cathy Bates waits for a parking space only to have it taken by two female twenty-somethings who blow her off with, “Face it lady, we’re younger and faster.” She rams her tank of a car into their tinier VW convertible. Bates’ parting shot is, “Face it, girls. I’m

Have one-half of the world’s forests been converted to non-forest use?

I posted recently “You’re pulling my Yang. Ten reasons to use dead tree stuff,” the Yang being half of the Taoist Yin-Yang concept of male/female, light/dark/ ebb/flow, action/reaction. The post’s message was that we can’t look at only one side of an issue as a Yahoo Green blog had done (10 big reasons to stop