Tar Sands

There’s a fantastic video here about tar sands oil extraction. Sounds boring, but it’s actually crucial. This video stands out not just because it’s about an important issue, but also because of how impressed I was with the production values. If we have any shot at motivating people to change the world, it’s going to [...]

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What’s in a name

I’m sure only the most naive among us believe that there’s such a thing as “truth in advertising.” There are, of course, many truths in advertising, including all the ones we construct to explain our relationships to products and the reasons we buy them or not. But advertising is about persuasion, and persuasion has a [...]

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Invasive species and NAPPRA, Part 2

This is the second part of two posts. Read the first one here.
A few weeks ago I received a 2,500+ word email from the person behind J.L. Hudson. Turns out his name is David Theodoropoulos, and most of his comments (and any number of other interesting things) are available on his website (there is also [...]

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Emelle Hazardous Waste

Sometime you learn new things about your home state. Sometimes those things break your heart.
Emelle.
I’ve never been there. Evidently, the 2000 census says only 31 people live there.
Emelle: site of great sadness, threat to us all.
1978. Enter Waste Management. There is a lot to say about this company. What exists on the Interwebs is not [...]

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EPA: Everybody Paid Already

I have written before about the stocking of Obama’s cabinet. But much to my post facto puzzlement, there was nothing in my In Come the Ghouls post about the EPA. How could I have skipped over Lisa Jackson and the nation’s leading federal eco-agency? No idea. Let’s remedy that now.
Let’s remember, Bush appointed Christine Todd [...]

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People in the bottle

It’s been almost a year and a half since I wrote about Fiji Water here on Toxic Culture in a post that remains one of our most popular (If you haven’t read it, one of the highlights is the “discussion” in the comments section between me and someone I’m convinced was a Fiji PR person). [...]

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Heavy metals

Julian Simon has been dead for more than a decade, but he might be pleased to see how much his ideas live on in a new report by the UK’s Royal Society on the possibilities of engineering solutions to climate change. Simon was a famous “cornucopian” who dismissed doom-and-gloom claims about resource scarcity in favor [...]

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Bidder 70

It’s easy to get caught up in the negative. So many heroes are jerks.
Tim DeChristopher is a current hero of ours. He was an economics student at the University of Utah when he decided to take his environmentalism to the next level.
Tim underwent a transformation and became Bidder 70.
There’s now a website following the story [...]

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Buying in: Green Works and the Sierra Club

We were in the grocery store the other day looking at toilet cleaners with the little nozzles that angle under the rim. I know perfectly well that this can be accomplished with a solution of vinegar and baking soda, but we are sometimes very lazy and don’t mind the occasional use of chemicals around the [...]

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RIP Ozone Hole

Remember the ozone hole? Many of our readers may be too young to recall the halcyon days when you didn’t have to feel guilty about your Aqua Net habit. We used to use these things called CFCs until it turned out they were causing the Earth’s protective ozone layer to be depleted. We signed the [...]

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