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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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…

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    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,…

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    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…