Has anyone visiting the Eden Project in Cornwall? Built out of an abandoned mine, it claims to be the world’s largest greenhouse.

http://www.edenproject.com/

The Eden Project in Cornwall

Here’s my latest piece from The Atlantic.com

Small Initiatives, Big Impact:

What Will Drive Sustainability in 2011

2011 will be the year of small sustainable changes. The year has barely started and a raft of new sustainable initiatives among companies and municipalities is rocketing forward.  Read more...

• British Columbia is banning incandescent light bulbs.

• P&G’s Auburn, Maine plant achieved zero-waste to landfill.  Caterpillar announces two plants in the UK achieve the same distinction.

• Kun_Tiqi is releasing a surfboard made out of 90% renewable and natural materials.

Happy New Year to you.

The beginning of a year is always a great excuse to start a new sustainability effort at your company or organization. There’s something hopeful in the air at the beginning of the year, before the screws start tightening around budget controls and legal restrictions.  Read more...

Here’s a new piece I’ve written for The Atlantic — I’ve pasted it below — you can see the original here.

Cracking the Corporate Anti-Regulatory Consensus

By Adam Werbach

Could the closely watched ballot vote to repeal AB32, California’s landmark global warming emissions law, signal a historic shift in the corporate coalition? The battle appears to be the latest front in the war of the emerging clean economy against the incumbents.  Read more...

Asian Carp

Trend

The spread of exotic species is familiar by now to most people on the planet. Global commerce has only increased the speed of travel of invasive plants and animals that crowd out the native flora and fauna. The costs can be almost incalculable.  Read more...

Jamming phone lines, fax machines or e-mail boxes with messages has been a key tactic ever since I first became an environmental activist. I remember one Senator telling me in 1994, before the internet existed as we know it today, before Facebook and  Twitter and mass e-mails, that his staff was literally weighing the letters on a scale that we were sending from Sierra Club members to gauge the interest of his constituents. It was back during the fight to save the California Desert. All of those letters did their part, and we eventually passed the California Desert Protection Act, creating Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley National Park.  Read more...

What did you think of the Audi Superbowl ad?

We’ve all been writing and talking a lot about the devastation in Haiti and it’s been heartwarming to see the collective response.  But here’s a different, non-earthquaked view of Haiti.

Harte Recordings, together with the estate of Alan Lomax, and in collaboration with The Library Of Congress and the The Association for Cultural Equity has just released a new box set of Lomax’s original recordings of Haitian music in the 1930′s.   You can learn more about the project on their blog.   This is a wonderful example of a cultural sustainability project.  While so much in Haiti has been destroyed, these recordings will live on.  Read more...

Scott Brown, the new Senator from Massachusetts who was elected last night, made the greenhouse gas cap and trade bill a key plank in his campaign.   As Democrats in the US try to figure out what happened, a number of people are asking whether the push for a cap and trade bill (which was positioned as a giant tax by Brown) is a strategic mistake by Democrats.

Here’s a short video of Scott Brown talking about the cap and trade bill forwarded to me by Jesse Jenkins.  Read more...

There’s a nice piece in the NYT by Sean Carroll that summarizes recent research on the anti-freeze strategies of bugs and fish.   Here’s a short snippet:

“The first animal antifreezes were identified several decades ago in the blood plasma of Antarctic fish by Arthur DeVries, now at the University of Illinois, and his colleagues. The ocean around Antarctica is very cold, about 29 degrees Fahrenheit. It is salty enough to stay liquid several degrees below the freezing temperature of fresh water. The abundant ice particles floating in these waters are a hazard to fish because, if ingested, they can initiate ice formation in the gut and then — bang, you have frozen fish sticks. Unless something prevents the ice crystals from growing.  Read more...