Reporting
Agenda 21: a conspiracy theory puts sustainability in the crosshairs
Could right-wing attacks on a non-binding UN sustainability resolution put sustainable business at risk in some states? Green space, clean energy, increased urban density…and global dictatorship. It’s hard to see how all of these things could connect, but — according to a popular right wing conspiracy theory — a UN […]
Technology Is Ready For Synthetic Foods. Are You?
Driverless cars? Half of all Americans would climb aboard. Brain implants? Nearly 30% are open-minded. In-vitro meat grown in a laboratory? Hold the burger. Only two out of 10 Americans are willing to give lab meat – animal tissue grown without a living host – a go, according to a […]
The Great Climate Change Migration Has Already Begun
The island paradise is under attack. Thanks to destabilizing forces of climate change – rising sea levels and strengthening storms, particularly – some of Earth’s most picturesque locations are being scrubbed from the map. And the residents of these postcard settings are being forced to consider relocating to avoid being […]
Climate Change: America’s Most Divisive Issue?
In US politics, global warming has grown more divisive than abortion, gun control, or the death penalty. Children in the US are traumatized by a school shooting roughly every week. Radical religion-fueled vigilantes have bombed abortion clinics and stalked and killed the doctors who perform them. But it’s not gun […]
Pacific Climate Refugees Banking on Cocoa
The few small schoolhouses on the South Pacific islands of the Carteret atoll close at noon. Rising seas and increasingly violent storm surges have swept away most of the gardenable patches of soil here, meaning many children arrive in the morning with little more than coconut milk in their stomachs. […]
Companies Embrace Rainwater Harvesting Even As U.S. States Go Slow
Texas approved funding for a $50bn water plan, but left out a tool that has been growing in popularity among corporations (First published by Guardian Sustainable Business.) Texas voters last night approved the creation of a water bank expected to fund nearly $30bn in water infrastructure projects in the coming decades. […]
Can Advertising Save The World?
Amid crisis of confidence in corporations, ‘The Naked Brand’ argues advertising should focus on transparency (First published at Guardian Sustainable Business.) “Traditional advertising, I think, is finished,” Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard says in the documentary film, The Naked Brand, which premiered on cable TV for the first time last month. Drawing on […]
Eagle Ford’s Fracking Dumping Ground Learning To Stick Up For Itself
Frio County, Texas, Struggles with Fracking’s Leftovers (First published at the Texas Observer.) On a gravel road in rural Frio County, sheriff’s deputies are doing something they never thought they would—enforcing state environmental laws in the oilpatch. The truck drivers they were ticketing were certainly surprised. “No, I don’t understand,” a […]
Population Aplomb: Real Ecological Disaster Is In Oprah’s Purse
Carolyn Lochhead opens her recent sprawling indictment of human population growth as the driver of global environmental destabilization with a raft of Texas-specific statistics. Strung together with hardly a verb or adjective to buffer the cold facts, it imparts an unshakeable sense of despair: “196 endangered or threatened species, severe […]
Ozone, Coal, and Efficiency in San Antonio: EDF’s Elena Craft Elaborates
I haven’t had time to follow up with Elena Craft (right), health scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund’s Austin office, who served to keep a recent air-quality panel at San Antonio’s Rackspace on point about certain local and state-level policy failings responsible for fouling our shared respirable resource. I had intended to reach […]
‘Toxic Triangle’ Residents Refuse To Go Quietly On Anniversary Of Kelly Closure
A dozen years since the closing of Kelly Air Force Base, ailing residents and community activists gathered to decry contamination, injustice. Victor San Miguel presents a proud and defiant image outside the entrance of Port San Antonio, formerly Kelly Air Force Base, site one of the nation’s worst toxic contaminations. […]