Off-grid

Photo via C.E. Bucephalus They´re the insect that everyone loves to hate - but one day a cockroach just may save your life. Typically despised for being ugly, dirty, and icky, the hearty critters actually possess powerful antibiotic properties inside…

This image shows an area of road building and development adjacent to primary forest in red tones, and secondary forest regrowth in green tones. Credit: Carnegie Institution. You can see the effects of global warming in a new high-resolution map that…

image via Gasland I lived in Wyoming for 8 years and it breaks my heart that the state’s landscape is being so significantly altered by the oil, coal and gas industry. I never visited the town of Pavillion when I was in Wyoming, and now I don’t have much…

There is a price to pay for cheap energy and gas for our cars that goes beyond dollars, as we saw this year with the 29 dead miners in West Virginia and the 11 on the Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf. American labor used to make things and fix things,…

Image credit: Roddas From the very beginning, TreeHugger has been a huge advocate for local food. Ever since Time Magazine declared that local food was going mainstream back in 2007, there’s been a steady stream of retailers and restaurateurs getting…

by Throwback at Trapper CreekThere are so many buzz words out there today in the simple green movement, some are fitting, and some are well, just buzz words. Sustainable, local, locavore, green, and the list goes on. But many times the words are just…

By: Notes From The Frugal TrenchesJust shy of a month ago, I moved abroad. I left my little eco friendly car behind (no room for it on the plane you see!) and arrived car-free, but not quite care-free. The decision to go car-less for as long as possible…

By Abby of Love Made The Radish Grow I have been thinking a lot here lately about education and passing on knowledge. I submitted the forms necessary for our area to be “official” homeschoolers this year, as my daughter is of the mandatory reporting…

by Gavin, The Greening of Gavin As Burt Bacharach wrote “What the world needs now, is love sweet love”! Not in the physical sense, but in the community sense. Things like pride of place, which is a sense of community love or to put it in a better…

Photo via kasei.co.uk It turns out that a surprisingly high number of grade schools in Japan are serving their students more than just a well-rounded education. According to the results of a survey released today, whale meat is back on the menu at about…

Sharks are normally considered solitary hunters, but one incredible video shows that sometimes they do get together — and in a big way. Off the Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo from one of Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Safari Boat Tours In the past week, copious amounts of planktonic krill have drawn large groups of blue whales off the coast of Long Beach in Southern California. As many as 25 whales have been spotted…

MIT’s Test Cell Patrick Gillooly, MIT Solar cells are intended to mimic the photosynthesis of plants — converting light into energy in the most efficient manner possible. But what other characteristics of plants could be handy for the renewable energy…

Image Credit: Captain Planet @ 20 If you’re like me, when you think of Captain Planet, you’re hit with a wave of nostalgia for your 1990s childhood. But even if you’re a bit older (or younger), I’ll bet you’re excited to hear that the world’s first and…

Image credit:Colorado Trout Unlimited. Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes seems to have a habit of hitting the xenophia-flavored cool aid. April’s recent post covered his ranting about how promoting bike riding is part of a world government…

Image Credit: Mehgan Murphy, National Zoo If you’ve been to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. lately, you may have noticed that they’ve been working on the first stage of their “Elephant Trails” project- a bold initiative to…

Handmade is becoming big business — reeeally big. Etsy — the online marketplace for handmade items — announced earlier this week that it has raised $20 million in venture capital financing and has now tripled its valuation at $300 million (not including…

Credit: Photos via facebook.com/meeteater. I like “Meet Eater,” at least on Facebook. Not much happened after I hit the “Like” button to express my, um, admiration. Apparently, though, every time this plant makes a friend on Facebook, an electronic system…

A tiny baby seahorse was measured off the coast of Dorset, England. Image via the Seahorse Trust. It must have been like finding a needle in a haystack, but somehow, in murky water conditions, diver Neil Garrick-Maidment, the executive director of the…

Photo: Elephant being bathed in a temple in Thrissur (K.C. Sowmish via The Hindu) As long-standing icons of its unique cultural psyche, India’s threatened elephants are finally getting the protection — and well-deserved recognition — they need. In a…

Taylorville Illinois Energy Center, a proposed “clean coal” power plant. Image credit:Illinois Times Southern Illinois has vast, easily accessible coal reserves. That coal may be sulfurous and wet and salty; but ,Southern Illinois also has good geologic…

Photo via OneThirtyBPM.com Musician Paul McCartney isn’t shy about taking a stand for animal rights — the vegetarian superstar has talked about his journey to a meat-free diet and supported Meatless Mondays — and now he’s speaking up for another group:…

photo: Graham Racher via flickr Go chimps, go! An interesting new paper in the journal Primates documents how a group of chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea have been successfully deactivating snares set by human bushmeat hunters. Though not always successful,…

Photo credit: on_ovington + Baby formula could contain unsettling amounts of aluminum&emdash;more than 40 times the amount found in breast milk, according to one recent study. + Another scary side-effect of tainted baby formula: Breasts in female infants….

With half a million signatures backing it up, Greenpeace fired off a letter to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg today calling for the world’s largest social network to cut ties to coal-fired power at its new data center in Oregon. “Other cloud-based…

As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming. “More funds flow through…

Would you eat a genetically modified fish? What about pork from a pig with mouse genes? Beef from cattle with genes spliced to resist “mad cow” disease? These are questions Americans may soon have to answer for themselves if the U.S. health…

After playing dead on top of oil-black plastic sheets outside a Chevron office, protesters marched through downtown San Francisco on Monday to denounce “oil addiction” on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, as the U.S. Gulf Coast recovers…

–Andris (Andy) E. Cukurs is chief executive officer of North American operations of India-based Suzlon Energy Ltd., the world’s third-largest wind turbine manufacturer. Any views expressed here are his own.– The climate bill may have stalled…

photo: Michael Graham Richard As most readers have probably heard or read by now, yesterday was a dramatic day at the Silver Spring, Maryland headquarters of TreeHugger’s parent company, Discovery Communications. Early in the afternoon a lone man, later…

Image: Google Maps Thankfully, No Deaths This Time An offshore oil platform exploded and caught fire today in the Gulf of Mexico. It is located about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site of BP’s massive oil spill. All 13 people who were…

Photo via Animal Planet Each year in early September, Japan opens season on dolphins, and today marks the start of the season in Taiji, a now notorious place for slaughtering cetaceans thanks to the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove. And of course, activist…

New York Times Everyone in the red state is piling on the redesign of the oval office, complaining it is not patriotic enough, even though George Bush took Bill Clinton’s red, white and blue garish extravaganza and turned it into a muted southern living…

images from Bustler The HP Skyline 2020 competition “outlined fresh visual imaginations for the skyline discarding preconceived notions” and “allowed students and professionals to partner and elucidate their visions and designs that would change the skyline…

At TreeHugger we like cork, that warm material that can be harvested without chopping down trees, is fully renewable and biodegradable and can be shaped into many funky objects apart from stoppers to keep the wine in the bottles. The designers at studio…

photo via 350.org Big props to David Letterman for bringing on Bill McKibben earlier this week to talk to Letterman’s 4 million nightly viewers about global climate change and Bill’s 350.org project. 350.org has a savvy campaign to get the White House…

Photo via JWGA Inc Sometimes the waterway is both greener and faster than the highway. Though ferries are bigger than cars and usually use more fuel, they can carry hundreds of people and cars at one time. Plus, they are also often the shortest route…

Photo: Courtesy of Greenpeace Argentina. Some may argue that Greenpeace has its twisted ways, but sometimes they just nail it. In Argentina, last year there was a huge controversy over a used batteries recycling program by the Buenos Aires government:…

Ahead of its upcoming report Fossil Foolishness: Utah’s Pursuit of Tar Sands and Oil Shale Western Resource Advocates has produced the above short video detailing, as you might imagine from the title, why even though it may be …Read the full story on…

Nothing wards off vampire power better than a crucifix powerstrip. Alexander Pincus of Means of Production delivers with a 12 outlet cruciform surge protector that accommodates oversize adapters and provides comprehensive protection from evil, power surges,…

We love the idea of the Swedish TreeHotel, with its Almost Invisible Mirrored Tree House and its The Bird’s Nest Tree House that Hides Among The Branches. The bird house designer, Bertil Harström of Inredningsgruppen, has another in the works: a UFO….Read…

photo: ((brian)) via flickr Unless you’ve just started following environmental issues you’re probably aware that biodiversity is declining so much that the planet is seeing species go extinct at a rate a thousand times historical rates of extinction—and…

Images: Artecnica Spun out of synthetic, high-density polyethylene fibers that give it its characteristic durability and lovable crinkly texture, Tyvek is a surprisingly polyvalent material, though it’s typically thought of as house wrap. But there’s…

Taken June 2009. Courtesy Jeff Ford. Michigan lost its last wild wolverine in March. State wildlife officials later said the animal, a female about nine years old, would be mounted and put on display at a state park. But that was months ago. What happened…

Image credit: psyberartist/Flickr In the northern hemisphere, the winter of 2010 was notable for its unpredictability and extreme conditions. From East Coast blizzards to a devastating cold snap in Florida, cities struggled to to keep pace and entire…

Roads in Residential Areas Should be Safe for All In residential areas, lowering the speed limit for cars not only reduces the number of accidents, injuries and deaths, but it also revitalises the neighborhood by encouraging more people to walk and bike….

Photo: Flickr, CC Negawatts Strike Back The immensely popular LCDs screens that are found everywhere in the modern home (television, computer, laptop, cellphones, etc) use less energy than CRTs, the previous technology, but they are still far from being…

photo: sbamueller via flickr Contradicting previous industry- and government-backed studies about the source of pollution occurring downstream from Alberta tar sands projects, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that…

Image: EPA Making Guzzlers Stand Out Even More One way to nudge people into making better decisions is to make it easier to compare different products and services. There are still many people out there who have no idea if 16 MPG is a good or bad, but…