Last week, my husband posted to Hacker News a link to my video about a guy who lives in a 96-square-foot home. It seems hackers like small houses. Within hours, a couple thousand of them had visited the video.

Their comments were different from the average green blog crowd....

If this summer was the coming out party for the electric car, Washington was the host. They would seem unlikely bedfellows, but after visits with a couple of the hottest Electric Vehicle [EV] makers in the country, I'm convinced that electric vehicle companies have learned how to play politics.

A...

My mother-in-law stands a good chance of surviving a natural disaster. Be it nuclear war or a climate change catastrophe, she has the skills to survive: she plants her own food, bakes her own bread with homegrown yeast, forages for wild seasonal vegetables, has raised her own meat,...

At my moms' group a few months ago, another mother noticed my then 2-year-old & 1 month daughter wasn't wearing a diaper and said, "She's young to be without a diaper". Used to hearing this since we'd started her on the pot at 16 months, I just said "oh". She...

Blame it on the recession, the Internet, or a rejection of consumerism, barter markets are no longer fringe in Barcelona (see video Barcelona's barter markets: an antidote to overconsumption).

I first heard about this world without money a couple years ago from a friend who had just exchanged a...

My sister, pregnant with twins, emailed me last week saying she was overwhelmed by all the options for non-disposable diapers and asked if there was a particular type I'd recommend. My sister is an idealist, a perfectionist and usually overworked, so I wrote back suggesting she first buy a big...

The fight against climate change has taken a rather low-tech turn lately.

• Obama's Energy Secretary Stephen Chu wants to fight climate change by whitewashing the world's roofs roads and pavements.
• California's air regulators are requiring automakers, beginning in 2012, to install sun-reflecting glass in the windows of new cars...

It's significant that one of the world's "sexiest" women has gone public that she may never have children. When Cameron Diaz told the UK's Cosmopolitan Magazine this month that the planet doesn't need any more children, she acknowledged it's not easy for a woman to address the topic. "I think...

By the middle of this century we may be getting a quarter of our energy from concentrating solar power, according to a new study by Greenpeace and solar industry groups, but most of us have never even heard of this low tech cousin to photovoltaics.

Two years ago, neither had...

Build it and they will come. This could be the lesson Spain's high-speed rail service offers America (recently U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood visited Spain on a fact-finding mission, and to ride the ultra-fast rails).

Spain's slow trains and frequent fliers

While it's easy to discount the success of...

When I read in the gossip columns that "Eminem brushes his teeth with pest spray", I thought for a moment he'd started to mix his own chemical-free cleaner- baking soda can both clean your teeth and repel bugs-, but it turns out he has joined the ranks of other...