When he’s not designing colorful inlays for guitars, Bob Crelin is a light pollution activist in Connecticut who helped push through a landmark bill to dim the nighttime glare in his shoreline town. Our ancestors knew thousands of stars in the evening sky, but now we’re lucky if we can identify a dozen—and the culprit […]
A review of Undermining Science, Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration by Richard N. ZareStanford University scientist Richard N. Zare writes, "We must be willing to speak out against the threat of making science just a matter of opinion." That is exactly what investigative journalist Seth Shulman does in Undermining Science, Suppression and Distortion […]
Last spring, when gasoline prices soared over $3 a gallon, Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that cheap energy was not their birthright. Almost overnight, SUVs became a glut in the market and alternative energy, from solar to wind, turned cool again. When prices dropped just before the November election (an oil company nod […]
Now available in paperback, Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger (Villard Books, $14.95) offers a cheap, entertaining way to travel to Australia and Tasmania and become intimately familiar with the local wildlife. Wombats, quolls, potoroos, little penguins, giant lobsters and pademelons all populate the pages of this eco-adventure with Brooklyn nature writers […]
A review of High-Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics and Human Health by Kellyn Betts“PBDEs are everywhere," said reporter Kellyn Betts at a recent Society of Environmental Journalists conference panel. "There are high levels in breast milk, blood and fat. Dust is the main route of exposure, and they’re coming out of products like computers […]
Peter Barnes, co-founder of Working Assets Long Distance and Credit Card Services, and writer for Newsweek and the New York Times, says capitalism needs an upgrade. In Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $22.95), he proposes an ingenious and feasible way of protecting the commons by giving it property rights. Barnes” […]
GOOD GROWING, BAD FOOD, LOST FARMS, TALKING COMPUTER TRASH, TIGER TRACKS, OUR ENERGY FUTURE, SCIENTISTS TAKE A STAND, FINDING THE STARS
They say you are what you eat, and that’s the premise of the new book by well-known Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer, writing with attorney Jim Mason.
