The UK-based technology website The Register features the tagline, “Biting the hand the feeds IT,” to showcase its skeptical coverage of the claims that pour out of the computer industry. This week, it presented a case study of a company that is promising a revolutionary green PC (depicted here), while trying to grease the hands [...]

David Holmgren, who along with Bill Mollison introduced the concept of permaculture, has launched an insightful new website called Future Scenarios that assesses how the climate crisis and peak oil may interact and shape the prospects for humanity.
In exploring the future of energy, Holmgren outlines four possible futures, ranging from a wildly optimistic “techno-explosion” to [...]

Today’s Baltimore Sun describes the efforts of a small group of residents of Annapolis, Maryland to turn their city into an eco-village. Their interests range from lobbying for more environmentally friendly policies to green business networking to sharing tips to promote sustainable living.
While their actions are local, they are an offshoot of a loosely [...]

CNN is running a story with the provocative title, Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare? Its theme is familiar to those who have been aware of the climate crisis, the depletion of fossil fuels, and other converging problems, but has not often been addressed so explicitly in the conventional media. (ABC [...]

I recently read the latest in the popular series of Daily Kos diaries called Vegetables of Mass Destruction, which practically could have been ripped from the pages of hivethrive. The series was created by a writer known on Daily Kos as OrangeClouds115, who is writing an upcoming book on food policy and describes herself [...]

I recently read a description of a project called Earth 2100 at Celsias. It asks “environmental enthusiasts, film makers and creative minds” to produce videos that depict what the consequences of the climate crisis, resource depletion, and population growth will be for the remainder of this century if we fail to act. ABC News plans [...]

We are living in a time of tremendous injustice. The majority of people in the U.S. (and the world) lack the basic securities necessary for psychological and material well-being. All the while, a tiny minority of people have amassed huge piles of money. This gap between rich and poor demonstrates an absence [...]

Joe and I recently wrote a piece called Jujitsu in Action - The Smart Way to Fight Smears Against Obama. In it, we reflected upon the Obama campaign’s new Fight The Smears website, and proposed what we argue would be a more effective way of responding to false allegations.
This approach is also relevant to [...]

Where does genius come from? Is it an innate quality of exceptional individuals? Perhaps in some instances. But there is another kind of genius that emerges through the exchanges of people in a special place - a pub filled with poets, the coffee house at the edge of campus, or Silicon Valley.
This [...]

This week, the European Union’s Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, urged government and businesses to use software based on open standards. According to the International Herald Tribune, Kroes’ remarks were intended in part as a rebuke of Microsoft, which she has previously accused of anti-competitive practices. Microsoft, which has built much of its [...]