Treehugger

GPS--So Many Uses We've already seen how GPS can be used to track global warming, make cycling more efficient and fun, document environmental destruction and even find lost pets. Now, the Associated Press is reporting that the curren...

Photo credit: Mountains of the Moon Designer Melissa Baswell was working with hemp and organic fabrics, and dyeing with low-impact dyes, long before "eco" became as buzzword and back when eco-fashion was saddled with the unsavory rep of being as fashion-forward as burlap. Her Chicago-based Mountains of the Moon clothing line, with classic lines that rise above fashion trends and an emminent mix-and-matchability, will soon be your new old favorites. (Ours is a tossup between the fall-ready Lar...

Earthfirst titles a post " Nokia Cell Phone Made of Sustainably Harvested Wood", thinks it a lovely idea and quotes Cellphone Beat, which writes in Nokia goes green with wooden body phone " This Nokia eco-friendly concept flaunts a wooden body made from sustainable timber. The design features an 8-megapixel camera, bluetooth, speaker and a Symbian S60 Operating System." ...

Bog Turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergi Earlier this week, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature reported that 25 percent of the world’s mammal species are at risk of extinction in our lifetimes due to habitat destruction and hunting. The IUCN is to be commended for its report. The untold story here, which is far more ominous, is that the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which in 2007 won the Nobel Peace Prize for its work) projects that even we if succeed at reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050,...

Last night we attended the preview of HEAT, a two-hour FRONTLINE investigation that will air Tuesday, October 21 EST on PBS. Produced by veteran FRONTLINE journalist Martin Smith, the investigation looks at what big business is and isn't doing, both in the United States and the other biggest polluting nations, to cut carbon emissions. It also explores the vast challenges that remain in developing a system to regulate those emissions and develop the technology to reduce them. The documentary sp...

Photo via PhysOrg Scientists have had spintronics in their sights for a little while now, aiming to uncover a way to use magnetism for battery power. Everyone wants better batteries, and magnetic batteries have the potential for using magnetic currents rather than electric currents. Now a breakthrough has been achieved that brings us closer to the possibility of using this phenomenon to run more efficient devices. ...

photo: Morten Mitchell Larød The US offshore wind market is finally ramping up: Though no projects have been completed yet, Oregon, Rhode Island, New York,

photo: Neil Franklin We may be squandering our children’s natural inheritance, losing up to $5 trillion a year in natural capital, by chopping down the world’s forests, but the Indonesian government has finally done something to stop the destruction. Announced yesterday at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Indonesian politicians have signed onto to a plan which it is hoped with protect the remaining forests and critical ecosystems on the island of Sumatra: ...

Greener Than a Drive By Scene Now that's how to kick ass with bicycles! From Youtube description: "Kara Hui Ying Hung and her minions fight off some men with bikes in this classic Shaw Brothers movie, directed by Lau Kar Leung." Via Cyclelicious See also: No Recession for Bi...

Navy Marine Corps Intranet is Second Only to the Internet The Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) has more than 660,000 active users, only the Internet is larger. It has around 50 classified and unclassified server farms, for a total of thousands of servers. The U.S. Department of Defense, to comply with federal "green" computing mandates, has been trying to reduce the footprint of this intranet, and so far the results are promising. Read on for more details....

Unlike other ocean power technologies, which use the movement of water to generate power, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion uses differences in water temperature to create electricity. Napali Coast of Kauai, photo: Jean-Phillipe Rebuffet. The US Department of Energy has just been doling out the money lately. The most recent announcement being that the DOE has awarded Lockheed Martin a cooperative agreement contract worth up to $1.2 million to “demonstrate innovative technologies to enable ocean thermal energy power generation.” The technology in question is Ocean Thermal Energy Conversi...

By: Alan Fortescue So I found this cool internet music service. For a small monthly fee I can play just about any song I want—a very useful feature when trying to work at the office. No matter what my mood, or whatever my task, I can find a song through which I can focus. For example, as I sat down to write this blog entry I could not quite put into words what I was thinking until I pulled up the Dave Matthews Band version of the Bob Dylan song, “All Along the Watchtower.” Fortunately for me (as is usually happens while listening to music) my id...

And now, something completely different... Okay, so it's Friday. We're getting ready for the weekend (our Canadian readers are getting ready for Thanksgiving). I think we can take a moment to smile a bit. The photo is from an unknown photographer (let us know in the comments if you know who took it). It's very hard not to anthropomorphize the bear because of its very human posture. Speaking of bears, check out these slightly more serious posts: Starving Polar Bears Turning to Cannibalism and

More Hybrids for Lexus Nikkei Business News reports that Toyota's managing officer Toshio Furutani said that he wants to accelerate Lexus' hybrid strategy and add hybrid models to the whole line-up as soon as possible, and that in the medium to long term, Toyota was "considering making the Lexus lineup hybrid-only." The cause of this change of strategy is probably higher fuel costs (even if they went down a bit lately) and, especially, the fact that the global sales of Lexus fell 9% on the year to 310,000 in the January-August period....

It's always frightening when a major advocate for clean energy gets blocked by mainstream media. ABC has blocked this ad by the We Can Solve It campaign, an ad that divulges true facts about the oil industry and our ability to switch to renewable energy - facts that of course have political implications, as do most things tied to oil. Keep reading for details and a quick way you can help out with this situation....

Like all industries, the non-profit sector has its fair share of pockmarks and blemishes. Yet while it seems easy to take unflattering insider accounts from certain industries -- say, the energy and chemicals industries -- at face value, it is much more difficult to fully accept the criticisms made of environmental non-profits like The Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, many of which some of us have either worked with or volunteered for in the past. In Green, Inc., though, veteran...

Jeffrey Sachs speaking at University of North Carolina, photo: Kevin Tsui. Both Barack Obama and John McCain think implementing a cap-and-trade system is the best way to decrease carbon emissions. On that one bit of policy, both candidates are in near perfect agreement, and many people tend to agree with the principle that a market-based solution is a better/more palatable method of reducing emissions than a direct carbon tax (particularly in the United States, a nation where the mere mention of the word ‘tax’ sends people into fits). Jeffrey Sachs, speci...

Perhaps it won't be nearly as flashy as the sustainable city that oil wealth is building in the United Arab Emirates called Masdar or even the Shanghai satellite called Dongtan, but in breaking ground on Tianjin's Eco-city, China is hoping to find a model for the many cities it needs to build to accommodate massive rural-to-urban migration. China partners with Singapore for wind and solar "prowess" As with the term sustainability, the idea of an eco-city is pretty murky - nobody's making cities conform to str...

Sony's 11" OLED TVs on display. Photo via Ed Kohler With so many people buying new TVs for the switch to digital, it’ll be awhile before a big chunk of the population really needs a new TV. That should provide us with a little patience when it comes to getting better TVs. But in a flash of Generation Now spirit, we’re wondering where on Earth are our OLED TVs – the greener boob-tube option that seemed just over the horizon a year ago? Apparently there are a number of issues that stand in the way....

Photo via Sabotrax Good news for folks living in Virginia and Washington .D.C. Metro: you can now get rid of your old computers for free through Reconnect. Reconnect is a recycling program run through Dell and Goodwill, helping to reduce the occurrence of e-waste. The program hopes to divert 2.7 million pounds of used computer gear from area landfills over the next year. The program is doing more than just recycling...