Climate Culture
All Stories
-
Umbra on recycling beer bottles with lime wedges
Most Honorable Umbra, Knower of All Green Things: Am I unwittingly hampering the recycling process by twisting that lime wedge into my bottle of beer? The dang things are tough […]
-
Shouldering the burden of our environmental impact
Consider this: Friends of mine tell me that their daughter will only eat meat if she knows the name of the animal that died to produce it. She’ll eat the […]
-
Umbra on hybrid cars
Umbra, hi, With Honda having just released its gas-electric hybrid Civic in the U.S., many enviros are scrambling to buy one. But one question that hasn’t been answered to my […]
-
Umbra on grocery bags
Dear Umbra, At the grocery store, when they ask “Paper or plastic?” (and you have left your eco-friendly organic cotton tote bag at home), which is the lesser of two […]
-
Umbra on computers
Dear Umbra, I normally turn my computer off when I leave the office. However, I was recently told that the act of turning on a computer requires more energy than […]
-
They’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Gold
What if the environmental movement could do to gold what the animal-rights movement did to fur — convince the public that far from being a badge of success, it is […]
-
Bass Ackwards
It’s Marine News Day here at Grist Magazine and therefore our duty to report that more than 90 restaurants in Los Angeles and Orange counties in Southern California will pledge […]
-
Smells Like Team Spirit
Imagine a Tupperware party, but for the tree-hugging set. That’s the vision, sort of, of Global Action Plan, a nonprofit organization that is promoting the formation of EcoTeams, grassroots groups […]
-
Ec-static!
The newspapers aren’t covering it, but we just had to: An environmental organization has garnered second prize in a competition for the world’s best television ads. “Static Electricity House,” a […]
-
![]()
![]()
Gregory Gipson reviews Edward Abbey: A Life by James Cahalan
Writing a biography of an author can be a challenging task -- how much do you write about the subject's life, how much about the work? -- and reviewing such a biography even more so. That is especially the case when the subject of the biography is Edward Abbey, who wanted to be a novelist but wrote himself into several identities, among them wilderness Jeremiah and curmudgeonly cowboy. Abbey regularly complained that reviewers wrote too much about him and not enough about his books, a criticism that could be aptly applied to James Cahalan's new biography, Edward Abbey: A Life.
