FDR Biographer and noted conservative Conrad Black wrote recently from his Florida retreat about how Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America to work rebuilding the nation:

Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees clearing the land...

The view from my window

Every year we celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving with an extraordinary family that lives all year round on a small lake just outside of Algonquin Park in Ontario. They don't keep a TV or computer in the...

"lend them money and you get a rabble instead of a thrifty working class"

Usually when governments nationalize an industry they have a plan. Now that Hugo George Chavez Bush has nationalized the guarantor of all the mortgages and the reinsurer of all...

Slow food has evolved into slow cities, slow design and more; it is a useful meme for the idea that you take it slow, do it carefully, do it right and take the time to enjoy it. However I have come...

A scrivener at the National Review on why they like Sarah Palin instead of smug elites:

"So along comes someone who really is from the working class. She likes it--and finds snowmobiling, hunting, fishing and living in small-town America...

It's the Woodstock of Slow Food in San Francisco this weekend, celebrating a movement that " "that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people's dwindling interest in...

He says "Drill here, drill now!" to reduce the price of gas, but every time the price of oil goes up, more jobs return from China, and first to the basic heavy industries like steel. Why does he hate the rust belt states? Or, for that matter, Mexico?

...

In 1953, the State of Vermont passed the nation's first bottle bill banning the sale of beer in non-refillable bottles. That same year, a group of businessmen from the bottlers and packaging industry got together and founded "Keep America Beautiful." By the seventies, their...

Spirit Airlines ad

I am loath to comment on American politics in this space; I am a Canadian, an architect who usually writes about more trivial things. I have written posts for TreeHugger making fun of McCain's...

George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian earlier this year that a recession might not be a bad thing, and that perhaps there can be too much growth. He also wondered if we all have enough cars and cellphones, and don't need to keep...

What is wrong with this picture? It is a bucolic scene; one cabin, me and my daughter, -- and three notebook computers. Going off to the country isn't quite what it used to be. Not only that, fewer and fewer Americans are getting out...

Shoe Lake, near Dorset, Ontario

Over at Grist, the Biodiversivist does a driveby shooting of a rather nice green second home, complete with Durisol walls, recycled wood, Ice-stone counters, Kirei cabinets and a tracking solar photovoltaic array....

Lots of greens like the idea of a carbon tax, as a way of making users of fossil fuels pay the real cost of externalities like pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. When Al Gore proposed them in his book Earth in the Balance, " Republicans attacked him as a "dangerous...

Lord knows we have tried, Al Gore has tried, so may have tried to sell climate change as the big issue of the day. Unfortunately, poll after poll now shows that the price and availability of fuel has taken over. Peak Oil, Peak Food, Peak Everything are immediate concerns, while...

Eighty years separate the construction of these two Seattle buildings, but in fact they are very much alike. Both have high ceilings and big windows to let natural light deep into the building. Both have opening windows for natural ventilation. Neither has air conditioning....

They are everywhere in all the magazines: "Green" modern prefabs. But are they really green?

It is greener by design

Perhaps the greenest thing about prefab is the design process. The conventional model of the architectural business...