Cologne's New Smog Control
I live in a city with its own special breed of traffic jams – traffic that gets so snarled, it has its own label: stau. Cologne, a city of 1 million people, its geography divided in two by the Rhine River, can sometimes have traffic so backed up that it’s…
Lululemon & oqoqo in Chicago
One thing that’s driven me crazy since moving to Germany is the total lack of decent clothing for working out … and by decent, I mean that it had to fulfill at least one of my sustainability criteria: be made of organic or sustainable fabric, be recycled or secondhand, or…
Green for All
I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about Van Jones and his Oakland-based campaign, Green For All, and I’ve got to say, I’m intrigued. Premised on the idea that a clean-energy economy can help lift people out of poverty, Jones’ campaign advocates for the creation of what he calls green…
ReJEANeration
Last month, Starre posted about E Magazine‘s Eco Fashion spread (still on shelves and definitely worth the $!), which highlighted some seriously stylish new threads. Reading about all the hot fashion out there gave this hippie some hope … for years, I’ve been squeezing myself into my fashionista sister’s designer…
Mortgaging Planet Earth
Whenever I start to feel a little cynical (depressed?) about being an environmentalist (i.e. whenever I get the urge to put on some snakeskin sneakers, wear diamonds bigger than my eyeballs, smoke CO2 cigarettes, and hop on my mahogany-furnished private jet to hurtle me and my friends around the world…
Manufactured Landscapes
For a while now, I’ve been hearing about this incredible documentary that follows Canadian landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky as he embarks on a tour through China. And though I still haven’t been able to see it (it’s not being screened in Germany yet and is only in a handful of…
The Car-free Life in Paris
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the trend toward building entire subdivisions as car-free communities here in Germany; though these neighborhoods eschew cars and roads for bikes and courtyards, they also offer a bit of storage space to house the bikes (either as covered garages or, in the single-family…
Don't Believe the Hype
First, full disclosure: Unlike Starre, I didn’t watch LiveEarth. Not on TV or in person or on the Internet. It was held, admittedly, for a good cause. But I’m not a huge fan of pop and celebrity, so something about the whole spectacle turned me off. And that’s tough to…
Car-free living
Car-free living is unbelievably easy here in Germany; the country has one of the most extensive train networks in the world. Every major city has a subway or tram line to get you in and out of the city quickly. And bike paths are laid through cities and farm fields,…
Green Summer Reads
On Earth Day (I know, I know, that was April, but better late than never), The San Francisco Chronicle compiled a list of environmental books to read. A few of the picks were what I’d consider greeny standard reading: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. It…