Articles by Adam Browning
Adam Browning is the executive director of Vote Solar.
All Articles
-
Make a video on how to improve the world
Davos. You know, the big important event to which you and I aren't invited? Well, if you have a suggestion for the world's leaders on how to make the world a better place, YouTube is sponsoring a contest and the winner gets a free, all-expense-paid trip. The winning video, that is. Not you. You still aren't invited.
Hat tip to Project Better Place, who submitted this spot-on if treacly video:
-
Why Omnivore’s Dilemma should be avoided
If I was a pig, and I was president, the first thing I'd do would be to ban The Omnivore's Dilemma.
I have a friend -- let's call him PJ -- who'd been a vegetarian for over a decade. Then he read The Omnivore's Dilemma -- which, if you haven't read it, is manifesto of the local-food movement that culminates in a self-sourced meal starring a locally shot feral pig -- and in short order got a hunting license, bought a gun, and started learning how to make salami, bam bam bam.
A couple weeks ago, PJ and my other friend -- let's call him Aviday -- made a hunting date. Except the night before, PJ got violently ill. Aviday -- who'd done nowhere near the same kind of preparation -- decided to continue on alone. He drove to Big Sur, spent the day bushwhacking without luck, and then as the sun flirted with the horizon in the dusky loaming -- a husky boar, at 100 yards. He squinted down the iron sights, held his breath, steadied the steel, exhaled, and with a gentle squeeze of the trigger, turned the boar into bacon.
Driving home, it occurred to Aviday that he had a 200-pound boar in the backseat of his Golf, slowly stiffening with rigor mortis, and no idea what to do with it. He ended up cutting it into quarters, putting the chunks in garbage bags, and driving around the city to friends' houses at midnight: "Hey man, can I put this in your freezer? It's, uh, pig."
And PJ and Aviday are not isolated instances. A friend, a promising young bureaucrat at the California Public Utilities Commission, now sports an "I'd rather be hunting" belt buckle.
We've heard a lot about the hook and bullet crowd becoming active environmentalists. This book is turning environmentalists into hook and bulleters.
-
Swedish company to warm buildings using body heat
The legendary hotness of Swedes is now useful for more than getting dates. Calls to the French Embassy about plans for using the famous Gallic "icy superciliousness" for air conditioning were not returned by press time.
-
Drown my sorrows in rivers and celluloid
Ugh. That was rough. I need a pick-me-up, and the Wild and Scenic Environmental Film Festival can't come soon enough. I've never been, but Nevada City is special and the South Yuba River Citizen's League does great work.