Recent Articles

Actions, Conservation, Ecosystems, Energy, Fisheries, Human Landscape, Oceans

An Unsettling Experiment: Dispersants in the Gulf

On April 20th, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, kicking off a long summer of videos of crude gushing into the sea. Two years later, the offshore oil business is booming, and conventional wisdom has it that the Gulf has fully recovered from the disaster. Not so fast, says Sandy Aylesworth, in an in-depth investigative report.

Culture

Dear Earth: Happy 400th Birthday! Love, Groupon.

Ah, Earth Day: an opportunity for the country’s worst polluters to rise, phoenix-like, from puddles of industrial effluent and recreate themselves as environmentalists. An opportunity for America’s retailers to shamelessly hijack the words “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” and repurpose them to quicken the pulse of fetishistic shoppers. An opportunity for a free canvas shopping bag with every purchase!

I was hardly surprised when Groupon sent me an email proffering Earth

Culture, Reviews

Review: The Whale

arrived at the theater a little early. There were good seats left at the front, and the crowd – an older, calmer population than I am used to – was chatting and milling about contentedly. I expected this to be a routine assignment: show up, watch a movie, write a digestible review. What I didn’t know then, as I settled […]

Activism, Ecosystems, Oceans

OP-ED: European Union Must Strengthen Laws for Shipwreck Cleanup

Adele Faure and Anthony Moffa are J.D. candidates at Yale Law School, and Sandy Aylesworth and Ben Goldfarb are Master’s candidates at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. As part of Yale’s Environmental Protection Clinic, the students are partnering with Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation to compel the removal of the Sea Diamond wreck. This month they will […]

Culture, Reviews

Review: Big Boys Gone Bananas!*

Big Boys Gone Bananas!* documents the year-long battle between film director Fredrik Gertten and the crushing public relations and legal force of Dole Food Company. “If you have mighty enemies, then you need many friends,” said Gertten when introduced to the audience. He founded and heads a four-person film production company in Malmö, Sweden. Dole oversees 36,000 full-time employees worldwide […]

Nebulous

Turning Rio+20 into Kony 2012: Sustainable Development for the Facebook Generation

  Michael Davidson, Philip Goo and Yiting Wang of NRDC hosted a lively session called “Accountability in the Age of the Internet” on the second day of the Citizens Summit. This is their message to participants and for everyone interested in making Rio+20 a different kind of Earth Summit: http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/mdavidson/turning_rio20_into_kony_2012_s.html    

Culture, Reviews

Review: The Last Mountain

The Last Mountain, Bill Haney’s piercing new documentary about coal mining in the Appalachians, features enough explosions to make Michael Bay blush. In shot after shot, violent plumes of rubble erupt skyward from the side of denuded mountains, leaving malevolent clouds of dark ash lingering behind to coat the inside of West Virginians’ lungs. The explosive montages are brutal and […]