Not very long ago, using the words “sustainable” and “Wal-Mart” in the same sentence might have been the punch line of a joke. The world’s largest retailer was not well known for its green-minded practices, and it probably would have ranked just behind Monsanto, Exxon Mobil, BP, and other eco-villains on the blacklists of environmentalists.

While Wal-Mart still takes heat in other arenas — notably gender parity in pay and labor relations — it has been starting to show signs of life on the environmental front, which, given the sheer size of the company, is good news. Read the rest of this entry »

Nike recently released its annual sustainability report outlining its newly revised environmental strategy. Of particular interest, the section on manufacturing lays out its plans for improving the environmental performance of its worldwide network of contract manufacturers. Read the rest of this entry »

One day Evgenia Chirikova, variously described in news reports as a small businesswoman, homemaker and engineer who lived in the greater Moscow area, decided to take a walk through Khimki Forest with her two young daughters, near their home in the town of Khimki.

Contemporary Russian history would never be the same.

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Like a lot of start-ups, electric vehicles hold much promise but have had lots of fits and stops-and-starts (much like some of the old gas-guzzling jalopies we all used to drive, come to think of it.) Read the rest of this entry »

New York City’s iconic Empire State Building, which has just undergone a green retrofit that earned itself LEED Gold certification, continues to receive additional energy-saving updates. The latest project for the 102-story skyscraper will change the way it lights up the nighttime skyline. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Western Sydney (UWS) has just begun a multimillion-dollar project described by Voice of America as one of the most expensive, complex climate change experiments in the world.   Read the rest of this entry »

Did you hear the one about director James Cameron and the near-Earth asteroid? A resource-hungry Earth looks for precious mineral ore contained in space rocks. Young billionaire philanthropists sink their personal fortunes into launching a space mission, with fearless, ruggedly handsome astronauts and a high-tech spaceship, to capture and tow the asteroid back to Earth’s orbit and mine the rock for valuable minerals.

It’s not a movie. Read the rest of this entry »

By 2030, the world economy will have 3 billion more middle-class consumers, says a report from management consulting firm McKinsey & Co., (Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food, and water needs, November 2011). Those 3 billion people will expect to have energy available to them; they’ll need to heat and cool their homes, run their appliances and home electronics, drive their vehicles and consume food and products that require energy to produce. Read the rest of this entry »

Scientists are looking at fossils spanning back millions of years to uncover ancient global warming clues. Recent reports show that by studying entombed leaves and other specimens, paleontologists are able to better understand past climate changes and how global warming could affect life on Earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Last June, I wrote about the disturbing phenomenon of the disappearance of millions of honeybees.

"Aargh, the neonics got me..."

My impetus then was a post on my sister’s Facebook page wondering if cell phones were responsible for mass bee disappearances. A few days ago I saw on a friend’s Facebook page a post claiming the mystery had been “solved.” Read the rest of this entry »