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Thanksgiving Day game will be carbon neutral

Plan to watch a little football tomorrow? Like, um, all day long? Well, be sure to tune in to watch the Lions play the Packers in the first carbon-neutral football […]

Congo nature preserve set up to protect bonobos

A swath of Congo rainforest larger than the state of Massachusetts will be designated as a nature reserve in a collaborative effort between American and Congolese environmental groups and agencies. […]

Midwestern governors sign greenhouse-gas reduction pact, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Breaking News: Climate Changing Is It Hump Day Already? We Love It When This Happens! The Consent of the Governors […]

From Condoms to ‘Cakes

Unfit to be tied Jimmy hats are one thing, but jimmy hair ties? Gross. It’s enough to make us want to pull our hair out — then take some ‘shrooms […]

A review of The Host

What is an environmental movie? Is it a movie that uses the beauty of wilderness to make us fall in love with the earth, as for example Into the Wild, or Brokeback Mountain? Is it a movie that explicitly tackles an environmental issue, such as Erin Brockovich, or The China Syndrome?

Or is it a picture that exploits the power of raw film to open up an environmental theme -- such as the risk of radiation -- with sheer imagination, such as (the original) Godzilla?

It's a rhetorical question, but one with an inescapable answer: all of the above count as environmental movies, each in its own way, some better than others. And if this is true, as it surely is, than the best environmental movie of the year may turn out to be an unlikely candidate: the mesmerizing -- and funny -- Korean movie released internationally this year, The Host.

Though essentially a cheesy horror movie, it's phenomenally well-directed, and to date has been the best-reviewed foreign film of the year.

Gulf State forests ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, says study

The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the people of the Gulf States is well known (if occasionally ignored), but the storm also brutalized the region’s forests. A new study published […]

A bottom trawler scores underwater pot, and it’s open season for Japanese whalers

... a study found that just 79 percent of known fish species has been formally described, and that the largest gaps in knowledge centered on the oceans' most diverse habitats ...

... California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suspended all fishing in the San Francisco Bay after the area's worst oil spill in two decades. The governor called the 58,000 gallon spill, which occured after a cargo ship collided with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, an "unbelievable human failure" ...

... German scientists developed LOKI, a device that can recognize and count organisms as small as 0.2 millimeters across. It will be used to study zooplankton, a critical food source for juvenile fish ...

Hybrid Chevy Tahoe wins “Green Car of the Year” award

The Green Car Journal has awarded the “Green Car of the Year” prize to … drumroll please … the hybrid Chevy Tahoe. An eight-passenger SUV not yet on sale? Whaaa? […]

How one group is convincing U.S. colleges to invest responsibly

It doesn’t take long to gauge the depths of Morgan Simon’s passion: you can hear it in her voice. Or what’s left of her voice, anyway. The first time I […]

Umbra on green hotels

Dear Umbra, My husband and I are Americans who own a small budget hotel in Rome, Italy. We try to be as eco-friendly as possible: our cafe is local, organic, […]