Daily Archives: December 2, 2008

Photo by Lena Tashjian

Lonesome George slovenly lumbers out of the brush in his compound, painstakingly climbs the minor incline up to his pool, and collapses. The famed giant tortoise seems exhausted and lethargic, even by tortoise standards. And I can’t blame him—if I were 100 years old, the very last male of my species left in existence, and had little hope of fathering children, I’d probably have trouble getting out of bed in the morning too

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:: Make your holiday spritzers sustainably yummy with our How to Go Green: Cocktails guide.

:: Reuse old, mangled earphones to make this easy DIY speaker set-up.

:: Three delicious words: Cheddar Buttermilk Biscuits. Need we say more?

It takes years to get to be an exhibitor at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto, an institution every Christmas season where you can load up on the work of artists, craftspeople and artisans. (It is coming to New York and Chicago this year, don’t miss it) It usually has a big green section, but this show the pickings were thinner than usual in the green department.

One idea I liked was Botanical Art, where Diane De Roo starts with “real pressed and preserved vegetables and fruits, which are th

The stepwell at Chand Baori, India, is a hundred feet deep and has 3500 steps. Legend says that it has so many steps to make it impossible for someone to retrieve a coin if it is dropped into the well.

Earth image via Woodleywonderworks, and Dell images via Dell

Instead, it says taking smaller steps constantly is better.

With the economy tanking, doing major overhauls of data centers to make them efficient isn’t really an option for many businesses right now. And yet radically changing data centers is a key component of improving conserving resources nationally and world wide – something we discuss often. So how do businesses balance their need

A couple weeks back I highlighted a piece of direct action by Greenpeace activists in Indonesia which elicited comments ranging from praise to vociferous derision. Here’s another one which may have some of you scratching your heads.

Activists from Rising Tide North America invaded the Washington DC offices of Environmental Defense. ED was targeted “because of the organization’s key role in promoting the discredited approach of carbon trading as a solutio

Photo: Golden Millet, Beekeeper, St. George, Utah, July 2007 (Photo: Kate Kunath)
The mystery of bees disappearing all over the world is continuing to baffle scientists and beekeepers alike: is it parasitic mites? Or Bayer’s pesticides? Reports of bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) happening in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, France and Germany have prompted beekeepers to <a href=”http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/beekeepers-take-to-the-streets-

photo: SCE

You may not like big box buildings from an aesthetic perspective–I hate to say it but I’d prefer a whole city of Brutalist concrete architecture over a bunch of steel framed big boxes–but they sure do have a lot of roof surface area suitable for solar power.

Southern California Edison is taking advantage of that and is installing 150 rooftops with solar panels, the first of which have just been completed. Eventually the project will cover two square miles of roof space with solar panels, for a com

Electric bikes have never seemed appealing or beautiful enough to warrant their prices – they have always looked like what they are

a bicycle with an afterthought motor.

Japanese riders are pretty enamored of electric bikes, however, with the market estimated at nearly 300,000 electric bikes last year. Sanyo’s new electric-hybrid Eneloop bike has two features going for it: the frame looks pretty good (if a bit girly), and the motor works on the front wheel to give the rider triple the pedal power compared to a non-motorized bike. And the price is right in the middle of the