Staff

Dandelions

by

Dandelions are particularly high in Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium and Iron. Most of all, it is extremely high in Vitamin K – one cup has more than five times your daily needs. Unlike many wild foods that take a long search, dandelions are found in almost every garden, green and field. And while many wild plants require special training to identify and discriminate from similar-looking poisonous plants, dandelions can be readily identified by every schoolchild.

Wind industry growing in blue and red states alike

by

As Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine cover story on environmental economics, “Building the Green Economy,” was ricocheting around the enviro blogosphere last week, the American Wind Energy Association released its annual report on the state of the wind industry.

Some thoughts on walking and our ability to cope

by

Raymond De Young (Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning at the School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan) sent me a recent paper he wrote called Coping With Environmental Transitions: Some Attentional Benefits of Walking in Natural Settings, published in Ecopsychology, Vol. 2, No. 1, March 2010. For tonight’s Campfire post, I thought I would quote some sections from it.

It can’t possibly be that easy

by

Over the weekend, I read Paul Krugman’s big essay on climate economics, Building a Green Economy. Now, it’s important to note that the goal of the Waxman Markey bill is to reduce US carbon emissions by 83% by 2050. So essentially, the CBO is saying, and Krugman is endorsing, that this level of emissions reduction will have so small an effect on economic growth that it’s going to be indistinguishable from noise. I don’t dispute that environmental economists think this, but I find it to be a completely facially implausible conclusion.

The natural world vanishes: how species cease to matter

by

If you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States or of Western Europe, when did you last attend a shad bake, eat an eel, or watch Atlantic salmon vault a waterfall? Community shad bakes once celebrated the return of American shad to rivers as a marker of spring. Recently though, a dearth of shad led to a “shadless shad bake” on the Hudson — a river that in its glory days supplied more than four million pounds of shad in one season.

The Colosseum and energy flows

by

First we can state that powerful and wealthy leaders always have – and presumably always will – build monuments to their greatness. Building arenas to provide the populace with entertainment has always been high up on the agenda. These can be an opera house in Oslo, an Olympic stadium in Beijing, an enclosed arena for skiing in Dubai – and today’s edifices are being built higher and higher the world over. Today, the energy required to build these monuments is provided by fossil fuels but 2000 years ago it was provided by slaves and the food that allowed these slaves to do work.

Making nickels squeak: clothing edition

by

Due to the weirdly warm weather (which has now departed for a few days of normalish April weather) that we had last week, I saw a spring sight to gladden the heart of almost anyone – a yard sale. It wasn’t at a time I could shop, and it wasn’t like I wanted anything they had – but still, the re-emergence of yard sales is like the return of the redwing blackbirds, a sign of hope.

The imperative of reforming U.S. foreign aid to empower women

by

Perverse incentives provided by tax codes and government subsidies are an ongoing theme of my articles in The Daly News. These perverse incentives pervade all sectors of the economy and undermine the hope for a prosperous and healthy civilization that lives in harmony with the earth. A paradigm shift away from the present destructive global economic model must entail the elimination of taxes and subsidies that reward pollution and injustice.