September 2009

While the United States still debates whether global warming is real, even as walruses abandon melting ice for the Alaska shore, Russia and Germany are pioneering a shipping route across the world’s ‘newest’ ocean, the Arctic:
MOSCOW — For hundreds…

Despite stunning visual evidence of the decline of polar ice, some people refuse to believe it. Some point to a short-term increase in ice after an unprecedented melt in 2007 to refute the 34 percent long-term decline documented by scientists. But…

I stumbled across this poem in the waning pages of “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,” edited by Tim Hunt. Jeffers wrote it in the very early 1960s, while the earth was in the middle of a 20-year cooling trend, and about 15 years before…

A few months ago, the latest wall humans had erected between themselves and the animal world crumbled when scientists at the University of Colorado revealed evidence of moral sensibility in all mammals. At the time, I asked readers if they could…

If it meant the end of government service to call members of the opposing party “assholes,” a lot of promising careers would have ended this weekend with the resignation of White House Green Jobs Czar Van Jones. Some past careers would have been…

My parents fondly recall two features of Chicago life that I can only visit in my dreams: the corner bakery and the electric streetcar. Both were destroyed by the automobile.
The corner bakery was typically across the street, they tell me, from a…