The CatBib Will Stop Your Cat From Catching Birds! video. Scientific proof. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on May 17, 2008 - 33 comments

New York City is the greenest city in America. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51st in per-capita energy use.... But this is not necessarily something people want to hear: In a conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to Sprawl, I said that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant features with Manhattan-whose most salient characteristics include wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings, and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade
posted by storybored on Apr 6, 2008 - 61 comments

Turbo stove busts the inventor. A handy stove that promises to save remaining forests can me made simply and cheaply for people who cook indoors with gathered wood. Others show how to make it yourself.
posted by Brian B. on Feb 20, 2008 - 10 comments

Kinder Morgan oil pipeline ruptured near Vancouver, British Columbia Thick, black oil dripped from lampposts, splattered across suburban lawns and crept into Burrard Inlet after a geyser of crude spewed from a burst Kinder Morgan pipeline Tuesday. [google news] Work crews ripped into the TransMountain pipeline about 12:30 p.m., causing the oil to "explode," as one witness put it, from the ground and burble up from manholes, pouring down streets toward the ocean, according to witnesses. Kinder Morgan bought the pipeline from a Canadian utility in 2005, and is known as a "poster child for pipeline problems." More Kinder Morgan accidents.
posted by KokuRyu on Jul 24, 2007 - 38 comments

..."I think I was always misunderstood. People just didn't seem to like me. I got on their nerves. I don't know why. It just the way it was. Maybe I was too intense..." (With a surprising end)
posted by growabrain on Jul 8, 2007 - 47 comments

The idea of treating everyday, ambient noise as music is not terribly new, but Noah Vawter's device turns ambient sounds into music (in a somewhat more traditional sense of the word):

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world.

posted by 2or3whiskeysodas on Dec 18, 2006 - 33 comments

Save the world with used books? A bookstore I sometimes go to in Boston is doing a Used Book of the Month Club...and apparently trying to save the world. Has anyone else every sold anything used-of-the-month? I think this is new retail territory. I could save a few bucks with a Used-XBox-Game-Of-The-Month. Or does this mean the economy is getting worse, if people can't even buy new books?
posted by UMDirector on Dec 12, 2006 - 33 comments

Ahmad Nadalian's work can be found all over the world. He is an artist that carves symbols on rocks and then leaves them at the site where they were created (sometimes burying them).
posted by tellurian on Aug 2, 2006 - 7 comments

the new urban jungle . . . is a growing movement led by cities like San Francisco, New York, and Leiden to restore active and vibrant natural systems in urban areas. Far from the eden-like depictions of nature of yesteryear, i.e. the garden of earthly delights (nonetheless, still attracting some dynamic new christian converts), the movement has morphed into today's backyard and grassroots environmental movement which is more and more a picture of hybridity, compromise, mixed-use, and ultimately, taking nature out of the walled islands of zoos, aquaria, national parks and other thick-walled institutions and offering a different kind of everyday "unmediated" community experience with the new urban wilderness. VIDEO LINK
posted by huckhound on Jul 6, 2006 - 1 comment

"Lost World" found in Indonesian Papua (with audio)
posted by Protocols of the Elders of Awesome on Feb 7, 2006 - 21 comments

Patriot Act used to arrest environmental activists
"Federal marshals arrested six environmental activists in a series of coordinated raids in four states yesterday, Dec. 8, in apparent response to a string of arsons in Oregon and Washington attributed to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)" ... has the patriot act produced any arrests in the country related to 9-11?
posted by specialk420 on Dec 15, 2005 - 105 comments

some lunch boxes have a DEADLY SECRET
stolen from metaefficient
posted by LimePi on Sep 16, 2005 - 13 comments

Around the world on 8 litres of fuel? I'd be more excited about this if the automotive industry hadn't been teasing us with cool, feature laden concept cars for years, and then actually producing boring combustion engine sedans.
posted by Fozzie on Jun 29, 2005 - 10 comments

The Rapanui (of Easter Island), the Mayans, and the Norse colonists of Greenland all share one similarity: each culture was brought down by preventable, human-cause environmental catastrophe. Sure, Michael Crichton says it's all bunk, but Jared Diamond (the author of the infinitely discussable, Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel) recently came out with a new book that suggests that maybe we ought to be worried after all. Hear him discuss it on NPR's morning edition.
posted by absalom on Jan 10, 2005 - 22 comments

Mountaintop Removal Mining. Now in High Resolution. Some amazing pictures of this mining process.
posted by grefo on Oct 1, 2004 - 8 comments

SITE Environmental Design did some pretty cool things for now-defunct big-box retailer Best back in the '70's and early '80's. Unfortunately, all but two of their Best stores have been razed or transformed into plain boxes; and one of those is under threat. They may not have been Chartres Cathedral, but they were certainly more interesting than the standard Wal-Mart or Best Buy architecture.
posted by ukamikanasi on Apr 4, 2003 - 12 comments

The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is preparing a grass roots campaign linking fuel economy to morality. The group includes members from the Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical faiths.

Why is this important? With BIG religion vs BIG Oil, where does this leave the Republicans?
posted by CrazyJub on Nov 19, 2002 - 21 comments

This Saturday is "Public Lands Day" in the US! You can volunteer to help clean up some of the 262 million acres of land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management! While cleaning streams and repairing livestock fencing, you can ponder how come in the 21st century the BLM still leases over 163 million of those acres to private ranchers for a pittance! This antiquated, marginal, money-losing institution has damaged 80% of the waterways west of the Mississippi, threatening entire species and ecosystems. A new book, Welfare Ranching, lists and illustrates the many problems with federal livestock grazing, and there's now a campaign to buy out ranchers' permits and turn the "wild" west back over to nature.
posted by soyjoy on Sep 26, 2002 - 12 comments

Three major environmental groups break with Nader "You pledged you would not campaign as a spoiler and would avoid the swing states,” [Sierra Club’s executive director] Pope added. “Your recent campaign rhetoric and campaign schedule make it clear that you have broken this pledge." (via the blorg.)
posted by rebeccablood on Oct 31, 2000 - 31 comments