Sadly, roses have fallen out of fashion. Landscape designers now understandably laud sculptural, undemanding succulents, drought-tolerant grasses and thrifty natives that feed local wildlife. Sustainability advocates rightly focus on the need to use our disappearing water to grow our own fresh food close to home (but forget that rose petals...

A new conference and events model is being born that combines local wisdom and talent with Internet knowledge. It's designed to be place-based, inexpensive, sustainable (including financially sustainable) and cooperative, rather than operating on a more corporate, top-down model of importing celebrity "stars from afar" and charging high fees to...

It may be a few pots on a balcony or patio. It may be a small backyard where you lovingly nurture your veggies, fruit trees or flowers. It may be a 10x12 plot in a community garden or the section of a public garden that you tend. But no matter...

Over the years I've watched people struggle to build community and community organizations in a culture that has become more and more hyper-individualistic. "What's in it for me?" trumps "What's happening with us?"

I've founded organizations from scratch (The International Documentary Association, a professional organization for documentary filmmakers)...

We already knew that conservatives have some kind of a weird grudge against women, but this latest jab at the CPAC Conference proves they learned absolutely nothing from the last election. (Hint: women are 53 percent of the electorate).

When Paul Begala spoke about what Hillary is...

Don't you just hate Daylight Saving Time in the spring? Suddenly everything is an hour earlier and you just feel "late" all day for at least a week. Sleep cycles are disrupted, people get grumpy and more accidents happen.

The goal of Daylight Saving Time seems to be about somehow...

2013 marks the 50th Anniversary of Betty Freidan's world-changing book The Feminist Mystique, published in 1963. As we approach Women's History Month this March, will this contribution be celebrated as the contributions of other society-changing leaders of the era have been?

Perhaps no civil rights activists from the 1960s and...

We're now officially a post-reality society.

Far too many Americans seem to have become persuaded that what's true is what you say is true -- not what exists in actual reality. Facts are seen as fluid, flexible and adjustable according to one's personal beliefs, political inclinations or business interests....

Take a minute and picture the kind of folks who shop at Whole Foods: they love organic and free range everything, they're on special diets for their health, they're environmentally conscious and yes, more than a few are crunchy granola types.

So what's the best way to really piss off...

Just when you thought you'd survived the fears raised by the end of the Mayan calendar, eminent Stanford University scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich have issued a report titled "Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be Avoided?" in the Jan. 8, 2013 issue of Proceedings of the Royal...

When neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke that put her logical, sequential left brain temporarily out of commission, she experienced a temporary state of peaceful, all-connected consciousness that changed her forever. She described this in her best-selling book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. At...

As Bob Dylan once told us and the TV series Mad Men continues to remind us, things can remain the same for long periods and then... everything changes.

As we watch Mad Men it's hard to believe there was ever a time when doctors smoked as they chatted with...

Humans seem to have an unfortunate tendency to be short sighted. We have evolved to respond to the immediate, local crisis while ignoring larger, more general threats to our collective survival.

We're still cleaning up the expensive messes left by this year's storms, droughts and wildfires but can't seem to...

As the GOP frantically searches for new ways of reaching the American electorate now that they've failed to convince a majority of Americans that supporting the wealthy is good for everyone, I'd like to suggest a novel idea: what if the Republican party actually supported conservatism?

As in conserving and...

The world has a new favorite sport, and it's not soccer or one of the Olympic games. It's the ancient game of kicking the can down the road, and it's gaining popularity all over the globe.

We see it in economies that run up debts that the future will have...

Last week Newsweek dubbed the millennials "the screwed generation." But this doesn't have to be the case.

While it's true that new graduates are now competing for shrinking numbers of jobs in a stalled and even disintegrating industrial economy, opportunities are also opening up -- some quickly, some more slowly...

I meet a lot of people who tell me "I'd love to grow some of my food this year, but..." or "I can't do permaculture where I live because... " or "I wish I had chickens but..." Way too many of us believe we can't go green because we live...

If you want to start a fight, just raise this question in a mixed group of meat eaters, vegetarians and vegans!

One of the core problems modern Western people have is that we've forgotten that the rest of nature is alive. This is why we feel free to mistreat the...

I just finished reading a delightful book about the founding fathers and their love of gardens, agriculture and nature. British garden historian Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation offers surprising evidence that the early presidents we honor each February were some...

Winter and early spring are the seasons when many gardeners, orchardists and farmers -- fancying themselves surgeons -- approach their trees, shrubs and roses with knives, pruning shears and saws in hand, seemingly unaware that these plants are, as the Buddhists would say, sentient beings.

Most pruning is less a...