“From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God.” (Romans I: 20)

“Have you not seen how God sets forth a parable? A good word is like a good tree whose roots are firm and whose branches reach heaven. It gives its fruit during every season, by leaves of its Lord. And God sets forth parables to people that they may remember.” (Al-Qur’an I4: 24-25)

As ...

In the international marketplace of ideas, Lyle Estill is not a widely known expert on human-scale, local economies. He may never attain that status, if only be because he’s too busy making economic theory a sustainable reality in his little corner of North Carolina. This article was written by Brian Baughan brought to us by our good friends [...]

Responding to a blog I posted earlier about governmental preparations for peak oil, one self-labeled “alarmist” commented with a plug for his own resource, a networking web site called Bright Neighbor. I thought the site was worth checking out.

According to the peak oil experts, we need better personal and collective plans for fossil fuel depletion. Randy White, an early member of Portland, Oregon’s Peak Oil Task Force, agrees. His Bright Neighbor is taking on the practical functions that he believes should be executed by the powers that be—were they up for the job.

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Bailing out the entire human race might turn out to be cheaper than bailing out Wall Street:

Spray gigatons of seawater into the air, mainly in the Northern Hemisphere, and let Mother Nature do the rest, suggests inventor Ron Acer in a patent petition for “a colossal refrigeration system with a 100,000-fold performance multiplier.”

“The Earth has a giant air-conditioning problem,” he said. “I’m proposing to put a thermostat on the planet.”

He estimates that his design would cost only a few billion dollars to implement on a global scale. (Much less than $700 billion)

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If you’re dead and worried about the carbon emissions created from your cremation, relax. The Swedish town of Halmstad has a solution. After an environmental review showed that Halmstad’s crematorium was pumping too much smoke into the air, the facility’s director decided to re-use heat from the cremations to warm up the crematorium’s buildings.

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The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting severe bleaching for parts of the Coral Sea, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle, causing immense damage to an important global marine environment over the next few months.

“This forecast bleaching episode will be caused by increased water temperatures and is the kind of event we can expect on a regular basis if average global temperatures rise above 2 degrees.” - Richard Leck, Climate Change Strategy Leader for WWF’s Coral Triangle Program.

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Most of the new California electric car start-ups were started by the auto-design equivalent of fashionistas - auto afficionados who love cars for gorgeous design, the thrill of the torque and the 0-60 in whatever seconds. So they build electric cars able to attain speeds that only those of us who can afford speeding tickets could ever afford to drive at.

So it is ironic that Miles; the one electric car startup started by someone with some exposure to actual fashionistas - Miles Rubin had been a Ralph Lauren executive - for a long time didn’t even bother with fancy mockups of ...

As a part of the national action plan on climate change the Indian government has obligated the power utilities to buy 5 percent of their grid purchase from renewable energy sources from 2009-10 onwards. The power companies are required to achieve this minimum standard by 2009-10 after which it will be increased by one percent every year for ten years.

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According to the Ernst & Young’s latest Renewable energy country attractiveness indices, Germany has overtaken United States as the most sort after market for investment in renewable energy. The auditing firm blames the economic downturn for what has been a challenging year for renewable energy investment across the world.

The indices - which track and score global investment in renewable energy – also reveal that there has been a record reduction in the attractiveness of all 20 countries included for the first time since its creation five years ago.

Germany has been successful in attracting foreign investment due to its feed-in tariff ...

A team of UK scientists have discovered a natural process that could delay, or even end, the threat of global warming.

The researchers, aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to create huge ‘blooms’ of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths, effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

According to lead researcher, Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, “The Earth itself seems to want to save us ...

Last year, the Green Options writers shared their New Year’s Resolutions. In the course of the year, our blog network has grown and grown and grown.

This year I decided to continue the tradition by asking the writers at Eco Child’s Play to share their green resolutions for 2009.

Here’s what a few of our writers shared:

• Jessica  Gottlieb

I’m only walking the grocery store in 2009. Driving meant that I could pile more in my car that we’d needed to consume, and, of course, I was in the car.  Less stuff will come in ...

In the international marketplace of ideas, Lyle Estill is not a widely known expert on human-scale, local economies. He may never attain that status, if only be because he’s too busy making economic theory a sustainable reality in his little corner of North Carolina.

In Small Is Possible: Life in a Local Economy, Estill chronicles the failures and victories of an ongoing movement for sustainability and local resiliency in Chatham County, located in the piedmont region of North Carolina. Estill is a legitimate source on the subject: he co-founded Piedmont Biofuels, a biodiesel co-op that went from backyard operation ...

ExtremeCraft.com has a contest going but, as they say in the infomercials:Time is limited! Act now!

From the Web site:

We are seeking submissions for 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse, an upcoming book by Garth Johnson of ExtremeCraft.com, which will feature 21st Century craft and design, all made with recycled, upcycled, repurposed and reused items. We are looking for the best examples of paper and book arts, jewelry, clothing, home and personal accessories, furniture, art, and miscellanea for possible publication. We invite designers, artists, visionaries and crafters of all stripes to submit their work.

To submit ideas ...

Somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s likely an idea for a startup that rears its head from time to time. Perhaps it’s an iPhone app that reads minds, a search engine that’s better than Google, or it could even be the best way to buy music online. I can’t tell you how to [...]

Editor’s note: The following post was originally published on Green and Clean Mom. “Green & Clean Mom can inspire you to try a little harder, be a catalyst for change and to offer you some new tips and news on how to be the green, sexy and sassy mom…I know you are!”

Science has no doubt given us some miraculous medicines. Healing a wound, cut, cold or sore it is amazing how the body works. The medicines we use today came from humble beginnings and I believe we forget this, I do.

Herbs and medicinal plants have served civilization ...

2008 was an exciting time for solar energy, and 2009 is shaping up to be even better. Earlier this week, the China Technology Development Group Corp. and Qinghai New Energy Co. announced plans to build a 1 GW solar farm in China— the largest in the world.

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Barack Obama faces conflicting views among his top advisers on the balance between the environment and the economy.

In the market for a new ride, but looking for a company that uses environmentally friendly manufacturing? Venture Snowboards might be the one you’re searching for. They make buying your new board a “green-guilt”-free experience. Venture is located in Silverton Colorado, one of the coolest high-country towns that hasn’t become completely gentrified yet, and they’re [...]

Image courtesy of Domain Barnyard digg_url = 'http://www.thechangeblog.com/monomaniacal-obsession/'; If you really want to see the kind of success that others can only dream of then there actually is a surefire way to achieve it. The evidence of this methodology abounds but most people don’t recognize its inherent power because it seems unreasonable and way too hard. The [...]

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Rotterdam-based marine-engineering firm DK Group has been quietly testing one of the strangest-sounding technologies to come along in the recent past— a ship that floats on air. This past September, the company let loose a 272 foot long cargo vessel in Norway’s Oslo Fjord. 25 feet below the ship’s surface, recesses built into the underside of the vessel’s hull created drag-reducing pockets.

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I live in a rural, mountainous area dominated by low income families.  It is not uncommon for these families to be driving old cars that are barely running and emit black soot from their tail pipes.  They often leak oil and are certainly not fuel efficient.  Most of these families’ yards are littered with old cars up on blocks. We joked when it was announced that John McCain had 13 cars that mountain people would not find this shocking, except if the story reported that all the cars ran and had four tires.

All jokes aside, the Senate realizes low ...

By doping up honey bees with cocaine, researchers at the University of Illinois have discovered evidence that the insect brain has a reward system.

The famous “waggle” dance of honey bees is a complex language that allows foraging bees to communicate the distance, direction and quality of a food source to the rest of the hive. The study showed that honey bees on cocaine tend to dance more, without relation to the quality of food or state of the hive. Given the effects of cocaine on people, hyperactivity may seem like a fairly obvious reaction. However, the implications of the ...

2008 was the year that saw elements of green building become mainstream and increased interest in green technologies.  But for those of us who are not building a new house or who don’t keep up with all the new technologies, there are many simple, inexpensive (or free) ways to green your life that you can do right now.  The result will be a more energy efficient, healthier, and more sustainable environment for you and your children.  Do yourself and you family a favor, take one or more of the following resolutions to go green:

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By Lester R. Brown

As of 2007, the shrinking forests in the tropical regions were releasing 2.2 billion tons of carbon per year. Meanwhile, expanding forests in the temperate regions were absorbing 0.7 billion tons of carbon annually. On balance, a net of some 1.5 billion tons of carbon were being released into the atmosphere each year, contributing to global warming.

The tropical deforestation in Asia is driven primarily by the fast-growing demand for timber. In Latin America, by contrast, it is the growing demand for soybeans and beef that is deforesting the Amazon. In Africa, it ...

As is tradition, a new year brings extra cause for moments of introspection. It’s a time to plot goals for what’s ahead, partly based on self-assessment of how we handled the year that’s just passed.

For me, one aspect of the environment-minded life stands starkly clear from the rest: personal transportation.

From time to time, since joining the sustainablog team in August, I’ve written about my varied ways of getting ’round town. Now that winter has set in and I’ve made another recent adjustment or two, I realized I’ve built a list of wheels ...

KPMG’s International Survey of Corporate Responsibility Reporting came out over a month ago, but at 118 pages, it has taken me a while to go through it. If you’d like to check it out, download the report from the KPMG site.

But if you’d like a quick summary, here are some highlights that stood out to me:

First, some good news: The report says, “Corporate responsibility reporting has gone mainstream - nearly 80 percent of the largest 250 companies worldwide… issued reports.” However, the continuation of that sentence says, “…and an additional four percent integrated corporate responsibility information ...

The toxic coal sludge impoundment that broke in Tennessee last week is a tremendous disaster–and the finger pointing has begun.

I’m reminded of GreenPeace’s New York Times ad in 1990 after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill: “It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.” That’s not to say the drunken captain wasn’t to blame, but the consequences from the overuse of oil–much like the overuse of coal, are a fault of the demander (sounds like a Bush-ism) as well as the supplier.

Of ...