-
Air Travel Is for Polar Bear Killers
Here’s a rather scathing PSA from Plane Stupid. (Note, if you get squeamish at the thought of seeing polar bear deaths depicted in a fairly gruesome—and slightly absurd—manner, or if you yourself are a polar bear, you might think twice about watching.) http://www.vimeo.com/7702530 Wow. Granted, each flight doesn’t literally kill a polar bear. This isn’t some sick inversion of the ringing bells that beget angel wings from It’s a Wonderful Life. But it does hammer home the increasingly… -
What Happens When Your Volt Runs Out of Juice?
Apparently very little. A Times reporter took one out for a test drive past its 40 mile battery range. What happens is that the gas-powered generator kicks in—silently—giving more battery power to the car. Its not as if you suddenly switch to a gas-powered engine; you’re still using electric power, just not stored electric power. Indeed, even while the generator is on, accelerating is silent, as you’re just putting more battery power into the engine, not… -
Sad or Cute: Hermit Crab Makes Home in Broken Bottle
From our friends at TreeHugger: We aren’t sure if this is in the wild, or someone’s pet crab to whom the owner gave an offering of a broken bottle as shelter. Either way, it’s kinda cute and kinda frightening. It doesn’t take much of a leap of though to figure this might be increasingly what our ocean critters look like—from crabs using broken bottles to octopi and eels using various discarded baskets and jugs for homes. Read… -
Cash for Caulkers
It makes sense to weatherize homes. Beefing up insulation and sealing leaks means less energy gets used to heat a house and less of that heat escapes. That translates to lower energy bills and a smaller environmental impact for homes. But weatherization doesn’t always look good from the consumer’s perspective. Dave Leonhardt tried to get his home weatherized and wrote about the experience in his New York Times column this week: For $400, an auditor spent hours scouring our… -
Plane Wrecks in the Primeval Landscape
Yesterday, we featured the work of the photographer Richard Mosse, whose series “Breach” documents U.S. soldiers living in Saddam Hussein’s former palaces. Today, Mosse’s striking new series “The Fall” opens at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. It’s a collection of plane wrecks from around the world, and it’s utterly breathtaking. You can see a few photos after the jump. Here’s the description from the Jack Shainman site: The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic… -
Tips on How to Reduce Food Packaging Waste
We can’t avoid all the wasteful packaging in our lives, but we can try to reduce it. There’s a Jack Johnson song called “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and we all know these three R’s are a good place to start when it comes to living a more sustainable life. While recycling tends to get the most attention, reducing and reusing can be equally effective tools in the battle to get by without creating a mountain of waste in… -
Business of Green – The Rooftop Garden Climbs Down a Wall – NYTimes.com
A new technology along the lines of green roofs, called edible walls, grows vegetables, fruits and herbs on the outside walls of urban buildings. Original article: Business of Green – The Rooftop Garden Climbs Down a Wall – NYTimes.com -
So What’s the World’s Fastest Supercomputer Up To?
It’s solving the world’s most important problems, of course. The Jaguar XT5, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a speed of 1.759 petaflops. Researchers have already booked time with the machine for 2010. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will use the Jaguar to make super specific predictions about climate change, and the University of Tennessee will use it to figure out how to make better ethanol from plant cells. Good news. … -
Organized Crime Wants in on the Green Boom
Our friends over at TreeHugger have a roundup of some recent examples of organized crime syndicates get their fingers on some of the new money being created by sustainable industries: There have been an increasing number of stories coming to light detailing how organized crime syndicates around the world have been getting their dirty little fingers into the green world. The latest: 1) Italian police have arrested two businessmen on fraud charges, linking them with Mafia in wind… -
Environmental Writers Disagree About Obama
On Monday, Bill McKibben, the writer, environmentalist, and founder of 350.org (and, let’s not forget, GOOD 100 honoree) took to the pages of Mother Jones to express frustration with Obama’s approach to our common climate problem: Despite the deadline of the Copenhagen conference, Obama placed energy second on his priority list, guaranteeing that health care would occupy most of the year…. And then—as with health care—he left it pretty much entirely up to Congress to write the necessary…
GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. Get involved.
Environment
How do we live in harmony with the natural world to assure the long-term health and biodiversity of the planet and its many inhabitants?
Contributing Editor
Ben is the author of The Big Green Apple and writes GOOD's energy and environment column, "The New Ideal." 
