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An organic company in upstate New York is concerned that all 1,600 organic farms in the state could be in jeopardy of losing organic status.
From the rooftops of Queens via an upstate farm to an urban community garden. The term "farm" can mean many different things.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been outspoken on the subject of obesity even stating that "[i]n spite of the great gains we've made over the past eight years in making our communities healthier, there are still two areas where we're losing ground -- obesity and diabetes." In an effort to reduce consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages like soda, Bloomberg asked the Federal Government for permission to ban the purchase of sugar-sweetened bev... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Last weekend I had the pleasure of racing WITH a bunch of fast friends that I normally have to race against. When I heard 24 Hour Nationals was being hosted in Colorado Springs, home of Rockshox and Truvativ, I wanted to pull together a SRAMwomen’s team. Sonya Looney, Jenny Smith and Kelly Boniface all stepped up to the plate to race with me. As with any 24 Hour race, it was a bit of a logistical puzzle pulling it all together with bikes, food, camping gear, cooking gear for a whole day of racing. We pre-rode the course at Palmer Park and were all blown away by how amazing and technical the riding was right in the middle of the city. The 13.5 mile loop they pulled together was technical and fun. There would be no zoning out on this course. I rode my Era because I really wanted the full suspension on this course. I also outfitted it with a Reverb dropper seatpost to add some security on the techy stuff.
Jenny led us off with the fastest women’s lap of the whole race and set the...
While thousands of people participated in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the New York City over the weekend, on Saturday a smaller group of activists set out on a 313-mile march to Washington DC, taking on corporate control of the US and (increasingly) international food supply. Beginning in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, the Right2Know March is demanding a "reset" on genetically modified food labeling.
... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Honeybee Baby and Mom at the Honey Festival Photo By Bonnie Hulkower
With Rosh Hashana just a few days ago, I am still remembering the taste of honey drenched apples and challah. There have been plenty of apples and honeys all over NYC in the past month, with festivals to honor each. On September 18th, there was the first-ever NYC Honey Festival on the boardwalk at Rockaway Beach and on September 19th there was the annual NYC Apple Day, celebrated in the historic Lower East Side. ... Read the full story on TreeHugger
In the last few years, New Yorkers have developed quite a taste for locally farmed fruits and vegetables. Much of the thanks go to the efforts of GrowNYC, the non-profit whose GreenmarketRead the full story on TreeHugger
Earlier today I posted about a composting "shuttle" service that collects food scraps in and around the Triangle area of North Carolina, and returns them to homeowners as finished compost. While the idea has undoubted appeal to those without the time, space or disposition to compost themselves, one commenter was concerned about the energy footprint of hauling food scraps. Given that bike-powered compo... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo: eatst.
It used to be that street food meant a greasy hot dog from a stand on a busy corner. Things have changed, now it's some of the hippest and most interesting food around; served from recycled and re-fitted vans, ambulances and trucks.
From London to New York to Portland, exotic snack trucks are popping up and bringing with them some civic issues.... Read the full story on TreeHugger
From the joys of legalized beekeeping in New York to London's ambitious plans to promote urban bees, honey bees are returning to our cities in significant numbers. But while some research suggests the
Last summer the battle in the New York City community gardens scene was to ensure that the 600-odd community-run green spaces across the City's five boroughs got a fair deal as the regulations governing them got renegotiated. Permanency was the watchword, ensuring that the battles over them that occurred in th... Read the full story on TreeHugger
Since New York legalized beekeeping within city limits last year, the practice has become more and more popular. On a quest to explore the growing beekeeping movement in New York, filmmakers Adrian Bautista, Martha Glenn and Brooke Tascona made a documentary, simply titled "Urban Beekeeping: NYC." It's a short, simple film that perfectly captures what makes beekeeping so fascinating and satisfying.
Watch the video after the jump:
... Read the full story on TreeHugger
U.S. officials do whatever they feel like and then dress up their brazenly illegal acts with perverse Orwellian propaganda.
by Ted Rall
NEW YORK--President Barack Obama murdered Osama bin Laden, suspected of ordering of one of the most horrific crimes of the decade. He might have been taken alive, yet Obama's commandos killed him.…
[ Read more ]
When Zeiss Stange and her husband, two academics from nonagricultural backgrounds, buy their approximately 4500 acre ranch in 1988, their neighbors immediately label them as differnt, which Zeiss Stange points out, isn't exactly complimentary. When they decide not to raise cattle in the midst...
There are principled ways of cutting the deficit ... putting Americans back to work, the Columbia University professor recently said in a speech, as quoted in the Nieman Watchdog. He said this is essential in a country where economic inequality is growing and where one percent of the population controls 40 percent of the wealth and takes one-fourth of the nation's income every year.
He adds: The deficit didn't cause the downturn. The downturn caused the deficit.
I wish this was the official line from the Obama Administration. Instead, both Republicans and too many Democrats are proposing policies of contraction. We should be shouting: Invest in people! Invest in infrastructure! Invest in ourselves!
After the Sacred Arrows ceremony was given to blind the enemy, a crier gathered the warriors and Tall Bull spoke, Our territory is vast, and it is ours to defend: from the northwest at Fat River, up Elk River and the Bighorn to Heart Mountain. From there along the Backbone of the World, down by the Medicine Wheel and through the Tetons to the south end. Then to Ghost River that empties into...
Which is why John F. Kennedy called for a New Frontier in 1960 and Gene Roddenberry called outer space the Final Frontier in 1966. Conquering frontiers keeps the American soul from stagnating.
In 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur called Orange Country, N.Y. the frontier. In 1823 James Fenimore Cooper moved the frontier eighty miles west to the Susquehanna River in The Pioneers. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the actual American frontier was wherever civilized custom ran headlong into savage necessities. At that point, he postulated, Americans were made.
Jim Angle’s goal at St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center is
simple: Provide the leadership to the four core groups that make
the Twin Falls hospital work.
follow St. Luke’s Magic Valley Medical Center’s northbound
migration in May.
Here’s my Oscar prediction: the biggest break-out stars in tonight’s ceremonies will be ... the students at PS 22.
If you haven’t heard of these amazing elementary school kids from Staten Island, N.Y., you’re in for a treat.…
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Idaho is running out of smart people, according to the editors of 24/7 Wall Street, a web-based clearinghouse of financial news and opinion. Worst in the nation?…
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The average band might last two or three years. Maybe, they play a few local gigs.…
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by Orlando White
Red Hen Press, 64 pages, $15.95
When I heard the title of Orlando White's first book of poetry, Bone Light, and learned that White was a Navajo poet who had grown up on the Navajo Reservation near Tolikan, Arizona, I wanted to connect this intriguing juxtaposition of words in this title to the austere landscapes that I associate with Navajo country. I naively imagined something like a Georgia O'Keefe painting, maybe a ghostly skull of some buffalo hovering over a distant mesa.
What I found inside the pages of Bone Light, however, was a poetry that unsettled the sort of easy assumptions about the relationship between poetry and identity that my first musings on the title had inspired. White's tightly focused poetry is devoid of the representations of landscape and the coherent sense of rooted identity they are often associated with in the poetry of the Southwest.
By Judy Pasternak
317 pages, Free Press, 2010
The deserts of the American West were about as far-removed from the battlefields of World War II as any place could be, but they played a key role in the war, and in shaping the atomic age that followed.
The first nuclear mushroom cloud rose over the Trinity bombsite in New Mexico. The uranium used for the nuclear bombs was processed in Colorado and Utah. Some of the ore that provided the uranium came from Utah and New Mexico, particularly the Navajo Reservation. The Manhattan Project may have been based in New York, but its work was carried out in the West.
Navajos famously provided their language for the war cause, their code talkers turning their mother tongue into a code undecipherable by the Axis. But the Navajos who remained at home working in the uranium mines also became unexpected war victims, beginning a toxic legacy that has plagued the tribe ever since.
In the annals of the Cold War, the...
Photo: Chef John Mooney With His Hydroponic Tower Garden Tomatoes
From the unassuming entrance to the below street level seating area, it is hard to appreciate the main draw of Bell, Book and Candle, Chef John Mooney's new restaurant in the West Village. This is because the peaceful 94 seat dining room doesn't highlight that on the roof, just six stories above you, the majority of restaurant's produce is grown in multiple
Influenza viruses are beginning to make inroads into Idaho’s
population, but people can still shield themselves with a shot.
We hit the State Line around 1230 or so, as I had hoped.... The only thing more beautiful than the Teton Valley in August might be the Teton Valley in early January.…
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The 25 bison would be marked, tagged and allowed onto some private land to reach Gallatin National Forest. Nash said the move is part of a process to eventually allow up to 100 bison to roam outside the park, though the timetable remains indefinite. Bison are currently kept within Yellowstone park boundaries with hazing, hunting and occasional slaughters.
Park officials estimate about half of its bison population has been exposed to brucellosis, which can cause cattle, bison and elk to have health problems including abortions. While it's not proven whether wild bison transmit the disease to other species, preventing contact between bison and cattle is a primary tenet of bison...
by David Roberts.
Yesterday I wrote about the policy question of “getting rid of all energy subsidies,” as proposed in a new Washington Monthly piece by Jeffrey Leonard. My conclusion, in a nutshell, is that subsidy reform is richly warranted, but we shouldn’t be under any illusion that we can get to a “free market” in energy. Government is always and everywhere involved in energy markets and progressives should be fighting for energy outcomes that reflect their values, including, in some cases, supporting smartly crafted subsidies. Even if it makes sense as a political gambit, we shouldn’t mistake a blanket anti-subsidy stance as smart policy.
But does it make sense as a political gambit? Could a massive subsidy-sweep actually happen?
Leonard argues that it could, that “we find ourselves in a new political moment when for the first time it is possible to imagine an alliance of GOP libertarians, disaffected environmentalists, and budget hawks coming together for a grand deal that would sweep away sixty years of...
Tonight at 6 p.m. MST, you can watch Iron and Wine's Sam Beam perform his entire new album Kiss Each Other Clean live at the The Greene Space in New York City.…
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by Sarah Goodyear.
Meet Linda Mainquist, my new personal hero.
A resident of St. Paul, Minn., Mainquist was disturbed by
the condition of the city’s sidewalks during the snowy season. She finally got mad enough to act when she saw a young woman rolling her wheelchair down the street because the sidewalk was impassible.
Inspired by her memories of her father shoveling a
neighbor’s sidewalk, Mainquist did something. “Something magical happens when you
say, ‘I’m the one who should do it,’” says Mainquist in this video. So true.
She called her local council member, who suggested she
contact St. Paul Smart Trips,
a nonprofit that advocates for sustainable transportation—walking, biking, transit—in the city. They put together a
door-hanger that clarifies the city’s rules about when sidewalks have to be
cleared by businesses and property owners. Now Mainquist goes door to door asking
people to shovel, and leaving the door-hangers when no one’s around.
Simply by deciding to do something, she has inspired the creation of a tool
anyone...
Those who want to do away with liquid currency are stepping out of the shadows, talking about increased efficiency and profit potential, but their real agenda is nothing less than enslavement of the human race.
by Ted Rall
NEW YORK--For years, figures on the political fringe have claimed the government and its corporate owners want a cashless society. Their warnings about the conspiracy against paper money fell on deaf ears.…
[ Read more ]
Growth versus value investing is shaping up to be a horse race in 2011.
While growth stocks had maintained the lead throughout much of 2010, the performance margin between the two narrowed later in the year.
Growth stocks represent companies whose better-than-average earnings gains raise the expectation that they’ll continue to deliver high profit growth. You’re betting [...]
More and more of us have committed to hitting the farmers' market each and every week to pick up produce, dairy, bread, meats, etc. But once the farmers' market ends for the year, then what? Do we switch back over to the grocery store and settle for perfectly round albeit tasteless produce? Not so fast. It seems farmers' markets across the country are going year round.
... Read the full story on TreeHugger
by Lisa Hymas.
Childlessness is nothing new—for as long as we’ve had
parents, we’ve had people who are not parents. Across centuries and cultures, at least 10 percent of women never have
children, writes
Elizabeth Gilbert.
But it is relatively new to have a cohort of people who are deliberate, outspoken, and
even proud about being childless—or, as we prefer to say, childfree. We nonparents have traditionally been a quiet
minority. And we’re still a minority—albeit a growing one, now about 20
percent in both the U.S. and the U.K.—but we’re no longer so quiet.
In 2010, the childfree started making some real noise. Get
used to it; you’ll be hearing a lot more racket from us in the future. Here are
some of the cultural signals and media moments that have rung out during the
past year, putting the childfree lifestyle in the spotlight as never before.
Oprah’s having a baby! (No, not that kind)
Oprah Winfrey is probably the most powerful and
influential childfree person on the planet. She doesn’t harp(o) on her decision
to skip motherhood,...
by Todd Woody.
As we entered
the last month of 2010, the prospects for generating thousands of megawatts of
electricity from solar power plants in the California desert looked bright. State and federal regulators green-lighted nine massive green energy projects.
Now the rubber
is hitting the road. The K Road, in the case of Tessera Solar’s 663.5 megawatt
Calico solar dish project. A week
after utility Southern California Edison abruptly canceled a five-year-old contract
to buy electricity from Calico, Tessera has sold the project to a little-known
company called K Road Power.
The fire sale—terms of the deal were not disclosed—came as Tessera struggled to raise money
to finance $4.6 billion in construction costs for Calico in the Mojave Desert
and its 709-megawatt Imperial Valley solar power plant near the Mexican border.
Tessera’s
abandonment of one of the United States’ biggest solar projects is a setback
for efforts to meet California’s mandate to obtain a third of its electricity
from renewable sources by 2020. It underscores...
We are a secular nation. So why is Christmas a federal holiday?
by Ted Rall
NEW YORK--We are a secular nation. We enjoy the constitutional right to exercise any religion--or none whatsoever.…
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by Tom Philpott.
I
travel a good bit for my job. It may sound glamorous, but it can be
quite grueling: long days in conference halls and meeting rooms tend to
suck my brain dry. My consolation comes when I hit the streets in search
of food. Over the past year, I’ve had terrific meals at unique,
local-minded restaurants from Austin to Seattle to Boston. I’m usually
too worn out from meeting-world to write much about them. (Exception: a paean to sandwich shops in Brooklyn and New Orleans; and a tribute to the street food at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Market.)
The
holiday lull has given me the chance to reflect on another good year in
road grub. On the following pages I rave about my favorites, in no particular order.
Slows Bar-B-Q
Detroit, Mich.
Not
far from downtown, on what was until recently just another abandoned
block, Slows Bar-B-Q brings a burst of fabulousness and community
spirit to central Detroit. The place is owned and run by Phil Cooley,
who grew up in the city’s suburbs before heading off to New York...
only cure is to cut it out. But such drastic treatment doesn’t come
cheap.
In a novel, the plot is driven by one of two questions. One is, What is the character thinking? The other is, What happens next? Thanks to a very complicated interplay of literary supply and demand, the nineteenth and early twentieth West produced an inordinate number of What happens next books. Adventure books, romance books. In 1902 Owen Wister called his own novel, The Virginian, a colonial romance. And...
by Population Media Center.
Writer and activist Gloria Steinem has been involved in feminist and other social-justice movements for more than 40 years. She cofounded New York magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and Voters for Choice, and she’s an advisor to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Equality Now, the international human rights/women’s
rights organization. She also serves on the program advisory board of
Population Media Center.
Q. What do you think are the biggest challenges the world faces today, and why?
A. The biggest short-term challenge is violence. Our
first normalizers of violence are gender roles that convince us that
dominance and submission are normal, and that allow child abuse and any
violence within the family. If we raised even one generation of children
without violence, we have no idea what might be possible.
The biggest long-term challenge is the degradation of our water and
air and environment. All are linked to overpopulation...
