Vanity Fair’s July issue is devoted to raising awareness in Africa. Guest edited by Bono, the magazine has 20 different covers featuring celebrities and cultural figures like Brad Pitt, Madonna, Maya…

Image Credit: Joshua Thompson via Wikipedia
This week's Weekend Grub is less a recipe for what to cook than some suggestions about how to cook it. If you're looking for recipes, check out…

Farmers typically live modest, if not downright poor lives, working unforgiving swathes of land to earn their keep and fill their plates. We romanticize the farm life from the fast-paced and crowded vantage point of the modern city, but the romance only goes so far. The reality of ceaseless hard labor and unpredictable profits makes a stable office job nice and comfy, which is why farmers have been moving cityward for ages, leaving the agricultural life behind and seeking more lucrative occupations. True, there’s been a resurgence of interest and enthusiasm for urban farming, but the reason for starting and maintaining urban farms still generally have more to do with either health benefits, gourmet cachet or plain survival, than with an entrepreneurial opportunity. Except, maybe, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where an urban couple, Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen, developed a well-defined, teachable farming technique they believe can function as a toolkit for a successful start-up business. They call it SPIN (Small Plot INtensive) farming — an approach that “makes agriculture accessible to anyone, anywhere.” They partnered with Roxanne Christensen of the Institute for Innovations in Local Farming to run a sub-acre test farm called Somerton Tanks, through which they demonstrated over… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Food and Farming at 3:21 PM)

Washing the car may make your ride nice and shiny, but all that water runoff might make you feel dirty.

When you wash your vehicle on a paved surface such as a driveway or parking lot, all that…

As global warming is at the top of the agenda, world leaders are asked to act immediately, from forced recycling to carbon offsetting and celebrities launching a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable. Are these efforts really improving the environment? What is eco-friendly living? When we live in a period where the worst climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle? Extreme Green Guerilla, Michiko Nitta’s graduation project at RCA, Design Interactions, brings the current green lifestyle to the extreme. Her “manifesto” looks at three important areas of our daily life: communication, food and death. The extreme guerilla adapts from a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green solution. They try to avoid being tied to big corporations and using electronic devices to send emails and SMS. E.G.G. are also against conventional posting service, as it leaves a great CO2 footprint. Instead, they resort to A.M.S., the “Animal… (more)

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Sustainable Design at 11:44 AM)

This is the final installment of my summary of our Green Design Dialogue discussion on May 25. I introduced the participating designers in my first post, and continued summarizing our discussion on…

Editor's note: This week, Ecotality's Bill Hobbs points to an interesting new development: Algeria, a member of OPEC, has plans for exporting solar power. This post was originally published…

Devils Lake installation: image courtesy of Green Museum

There is a little family of asexual plants commonly known as duckweed, and otherwise known in the botanical world as lemnaceae. These…

Starbucks announced yesterday that it has reached a licensing agreement with the Ethiopian government regarding the marketing use of Ethiopia's well-known coffee producing regions, most notably…

Editor's note: We're please to welcome Colleen Patrick-Goudreau to the Green Options writing team! Colleen has taught vegan cooking classes in Oakland, California, for seven years, and is a…