We’ve been regulating air quality since 1970, and it’s a huge environmental success story. The air has been getting cleaner and cleaner, according to Tracy Holloway. She is director of the Environmental Studies Center for Sustainability and Global Environment (SAGE) at Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison, and she spoke this week at […]
I spent the evening of Independence Day sitting in front of my barn. The sunset was a gift of deep color fanning out across the entire western sky. The crescent moon set through narrow bands of cloud. And then the real show began as the fireflies lifted off from grass […]
Sometimes it makes sense to step back and look at the big picture. At a Wednesday Nite at the Lab lecture on the UW-Madison campus recently Todd LaMarskin of the Wisconsin Geological and Natural Survey detailed how paleoclimatology studies earth’s climate before we started keeping measurements with instruments. That means […]
I am away from my desk attending a family reunion. To get to bucolic Monticello, Illinois, I have driven through countless miles of land that was once prairie and then small farms and is now an endless stretch of massive sterile mega-fields servicing agribusiness. While I am reconnecting with […]
As former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Well, it’s a fact that most scientists believe that climate change is occurring. So which news outlets get it right and which get it wrong? According to a brand […]
Do you see all the signs that climate change is coming at us like a freight train while society dawdles and denies? If you fear for the future, and sometimes feel almost paralyzed by the magnitude of the menace, then The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding is the book for you. […]
We are not going to make it to the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair this year because it conflicts with a rare reunion of my far-flung family. I will miss it, and I will especially miss attending the workshops on compressed earth blocks by Midwest Earth Builders. Looking through the Energy […]
When you walk into a flower shop, does it smell like funerals to you? It does to me. Whose funeral? Nobody we know – just thousands of workers in places like Columbia and Kenya who labor long hours handling heavy bunches of blooms soaked in pesticides. Then those same workers […]
After losing our entire first tomato patch to deer last summer, we are focusing our energies on preparing some ground for a future fenced-in garden with cover crops. Last fall we rototilled a bit of land and planted the area in winter rye. This spring at the Midwest Organic Farming […]
Remember 2006 when suddenly everyone was afraid to eat spinach because there were reports of contaminated greens in a couple of taco restaurant chains. It turned out to be contaminated iceberg lettuce that caused at least 276 cases of illness and 3 deaths. How much good produce had to be […]
Digging in the Driftless 