I heard Bill McKibben speak last night at the New School, in New York City, and he was predictably gloomy (he always starts these talks with the latest bad climate news). But then he switched to cheerleading for 350.org, the climate-action group he founded with seven students. Why does...

The New York Times ran a front page story yesterday on atrazine in drinking water (part of its series on worsening water pollution) and the state of federal tap-water regulation of this super-common weed killer (not good). The chemical is worrisome because of its ubiquity, its links with birth...

It's easy to be disdainful of bottled water if you've got no problem with tap. I live in a city with excellent municipal water. I've got lead-free pipes, a nice reusable bottle (which I almost always remember to bring with me), and I have no qualms about refilling it from...

Last week I got an e-mail from Laurie David, of StopGlobalWarming.org, that announced two new partnerships. The first came as an "action tip," which told me I could reduce my junk mail for five years by sending 41 bucks to a group called 41 Pounds, which would then funnel...

You don't drive or fly much, you heat your home with renewable energy, eat meat rarely and already changed every light bulb you reasonably could. Your carbon footprint is admirably faint, but have you looked into your kitchen trashcan lately?

In the United States, food scraps account for 12 percent...

When I was asked to speak at something called BagFest at Indiana University South Bend, last week, I was initially skeptical. Why did we need a festival to collect bags for recycling, and what good did recycling them do, in the larger scheme of troubling environmental problems? But when...