Image from ESA There is still no light at the end of the tunnel for fire-besieged Northern California. According to some reports, there are still over 1,000 wildfires burning in the region with little hope for improvement in the near future. Over 1,400 square kilometers of land have already been burnt, and there are more than 19,000 firefighters on hand, many from around the country, helping to put out the blazes. The image was captured by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite on June 2...

Image from petrr Given all the recent backlash, it seemed inevitable that the EU would be forced to revise its misguided biofuel targets. The final push may very well have been provided by a World Bank report concluding that biofuels may have caused global food prices to rise by up to 75 percent. Four percent from renewable sources by 2015 In light of this, Claude Turme...

We know it sounds like putting a square watermelon in a round hole: but Wal-Mart claims it is the nation's largest buyer of locally grown produce. The scaling of centrally managed industrial agriculture in the USA will be transformed. More changes are coming.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to buy and sell $400 million worth of produce grown by local farmers within its state stores this year, an effort the company says will only grow.

It's that time of year again, and with the official G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit finally getting under way here in Japan next week, the question on everybody's lips is, "will the G8 see a formal commitment to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions cuts?" The G8 Summit is the source of no end of speculation on this policy or that policy, but with news items like such as MSNBC's piece on the possibility of an ice-free arctic by the end of this summer, climate change is looming large on everyone's lips, and t...

Ray Anderson started his company, Interface, back in the 1970s to make carpet. Like any business man, he wanted to shake up the market and make a healthy profit, which he’s done, and Interface now has 17 manufacturing locations on four continents. But this is not business as usual. Not anymore. Since having a sustainability epiphany, as he calls it, Ray has starting steering Interface toward one hell of a goal: zero negative effects on the planetary ecosystem by the year 2020, a goal he admits no corporation has yet reached. TreeHugger has long found inspiration in Interface’s elegant design solutions—products li...

Bike-Share Put on Hold After eight months of reviewing potential contracts "aimed at finding a company to provide the service and maintain a fleet of rental bicycles," Portland, Oregon has put its bike-share plans on hold due to nagging logistical and funding issues. In essence, the city wants to spend more time studying other bike-share models in Europe and the U.S. before it starts its own program. Two companies--ClearChannel Outdoor and Portland Bike Co.--had already entered ...

Both Don and Don expected that it would have been harder to do, both the off-grid experience and the local eating. We learned that food is available if you look around you and the internet is a big help in the research. In Sherbrooke there is the Marche de Solidarite promoted by Les Amies de la Terre de l’Estrie (Les Amies de la Terre) You order on-line and then pick up local produce and products at a spot on King Street. A similar set-up, Les Amies de la Terre du Voisinage de Waterloo, is being developed in Waterloo, Quebec (atvwaterloo.com). With a little creativity (s...

Stealing some of California's thunder, which itself outlined a new plan to significantly reduce its carbon emissions, Massachusetts' governor, Deval Patrick, unveiled the Green Communities Act a few days ago to great fanfare. The bill's primary aims are to encourage businesses and homes to become more energy efficient and to stimulate clean energy development in the state. The Green Community Act's major provisions Some of the provisions detailed in the legislation, as

Because of the price of gas, Americans drove 1.4 billion fewer miles in April then they did in the same period a year earlier. Nearly 20 billion fewer miles have been driven this year than last. That is a problem for Mary Peters, the Secretary of Transportation, who is getting less gas tax money and complains "We're burning less fuel as energy costs change driving patterns, steer people toward more fuel efficient vehicles, and encourage more to use transit. Which is exactly why we need a more effective funding source than the gas tax." What, change the fixed gas tax of 24.4 cents a gallon? How about making it proportional so that it goes up with the price...

Summer is in full force and so is our desire to head to the beach and pool. We've heard about the dangers of chemicals in sunscreens, and for many reasons want to avoid them or limit their use. TreeHugger has also reported that sunscreens are causing bleaching in corals -- another reason to limit their use. And that sunscreens can transexualize fish. Ew. A company which focuses on plant extracts

Here's the winner of Earthworks 2008, a global cartoon competition, with 600 entrants from 50 countries. Earthworks organisers " hoped that the competition would stimulate cartoonists to use their pens and wit to help combat environmental devastation and give new impetus to our desperate fight to stop global warming." The winning cartoon, "Coat Star", is by Mikhail Zlatkovsky from Russia. Judges felt that this cartoon of a man indecently exposing himself to a pure and pristine universe says " 'This is the disdain we've shown our world'...we felt the sleaziness was appropriate to the topic." Often cartoonists are putting themselves on the...

Malls like this one in Oslo, accessible by tram and on foot, are still okay. In Norway wages have kept pace with fuel and food price hikes, so car trips haven't yet dropped drastically. To discourage driving, Environment Minister Eric Solheim has now proposed a bill that would forbid shopping centers of 3,000 square meters or more from being built along highways in Norway's suburban centers. Norwegian research has shown that 95 percent of shoppers to suburban malls arrive by car. Shopping centers would still be allowed in areas where public transport is existing or possible. The regulation, if passed, would be retroactive to this July. That 3,000 mete...

If ever a picture told a story... No matter what curve fitting equation you use to project a trend; no matter what mental model you frame this chart with; no matter what your employer demands, you can see where this slippery slope is heading. Up....

Good Computer, Bad Computer The Global eSustainability Initiative has released a report showing that while information and communications technologies (ICT) use a lot of energy and have an impact on global warming, that impact might not be negative. It is true that electronic equipment worldwide is about on par with aviation for CO2 emissions with 830 million tonnes (or 2% of total), but the other side of the coin is that these technology could help avoid 7.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020, or 500% more than what they caused. How Computers Make us Greener The most obvious way that electronic equipment c...

It is a common misconception that communities of faith and environmentalists have little in common. In the United States today, 67% of Americans say they care about the environment because it is "God's creation" - and close to half of our members say they attend worship services at least once a month. Most of the world's major religions have long-standing traditions and teachings that inform how humans should interact with the natural world. So make no mistake - "creation care" is certainly a growing movement. In the face of unprecedented environmental challenges like global warming, people from all walks of life are coming together to...

David Brussat of the Providence Journal reviews Jim Kunstler's World Made By Hand more coherently than I did, and concludes with a lovely description of how buildings should be designed for a world without oil. " We must start to think about an architecture that makes environmental sense, or someday we will indeed be forced to make our houses by hand. Architects must embrace new buildings with windows that open and close, rooms arrayed around courtyards, designed to take advantage of natural air and natural light. They should use natural materials that take less energy to make and transport to building...

The article starts off really badly, with a picture of farmer Dan Gibson's modest little farmhouse with a porte cochère big enough to park a combine harvester, and a description of how the former VP of Starwood Hotels raises Angus cattle but spends his spare time in house that "has a theater that wouldn’t be out of place in a Steven Spielberg residence, a wine cellar and a log cabin annex with a magnificent dry stack stone fireplace, a billiards table and a stuffed bear and bobcat glowering down between beams made of North Carolina pine — each beam an entire mature tree." It gets slightly better though, as Ralph Gardner describes how "In recent years, as the local fo...

Image from Jesse Bikman Can you imagine a future in which current record high temperatures will be considered "lovely and cool"? If not, you might want to get used to the idea, says Andreas Sterl, a climate modeler with the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the author of an upcoming study published in Geophysical Research Letters. As the AP's Seth Borenstein reports, Sterl's model predicts heat wave temperatures will rise twice as fast as regular average global temperatures by 2100....