Modern Serenity

John Muir called himself a “poetico-trampo-geologist-bot” and it’s likely to remain the best description of preservation’s most popular poster child. He was a Kerouac or McCandless, with a scholarly command kept in check by his whimsical humor and self-prescribed duty to share the wilderness with the world. And of equal marvel, his beard remains a silent [...]

Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General searched Solyndra’s headquarters in Fremont, California early last month. After receiving a 535 million dollar loan from the federal government in 2009 and filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy in August, the investigation will likely raise concerns about federal loan guarantee programs, and whether or not government officials and [...]

Exxon Mobil filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government last week to retain expired leases for one of the largest discovered oil fields in company history. The company reports the field contains one billion barrels of oil and gas equivalent, and could be the largest discovery since BP’s Thunder Horse field in 1999. Three of [...]

Royal Dutch Shell announced on Friday that a platform flow-line was leaking hundreds of barrels of oil into the North Sea. According to a press release issued Friday on the company webpage, the flow-line on the seabed is “now isolated and depressurized.” Although the company said leakage had been “considerably” reduced, there was no indication [...]

50,000 plant and animal species go extinct every year according to David Tillman, professor of ecology at University of Minnesota. This rate is at least 100 times higher than the natural rate of extinction and approaches the same apocalyptic rate experienced 65 million years ago, after many scientists believe a meteorite hit earth, shifting normal [...]

Ryland King, founder of Environmental Education for the Next Generation (EENG) won a $100,000 grant from Dockers, through an online contest on the clothing company’s Facebook page. The contest, officially coined Wear The Pants Project, allowed Facebook users to vote for one of 3,000 contestants to receive a monetary kick to jumpstart their dream-project. “We ended [...]

Food-documentary Farmageddon – The Unseen War on American Family Farms premiered in New York last week and is scheduled to play at select theaters across the country until September. The film doesn’t paint a tale of apocalyptic measures as the title suggests, but its significance at least triumphs our latest hyperbolic “ageddon” (for some Southern [...]

Screening dates and locations for Farmageddon – The Unseen War on American Family Farms (Times TBA) July 17th Bethlehem PA Starfish Brasserie July 22nd – 26th Portland OR Hollywood Theater (Sponsored by O’Donnell Clark & Crew) Aug 6th Palm Springs CA Camelot Theater Aug 11th Tampa FL Roosevelt 2.0 Aug 20th Sedona AZ Sedona Public Library [...]

Guner Tautrim, 37, sits casually in a wood adorned office in front of a microscope used to analyze compost for Orella Ranch, a sixth-generation farm along the Gaviota coast. Like the office, most the wood furniture at the ranch has a hint of Tautrim’s craftsmanship, from the tool shed near the market garden to the [...]

The California state parks system will close 70 parks by July 12th 2012, as ordered by Governor Jerry Brown in a state budget released last March. The closures represent about 23 million dollars in cuts and are based on the relative significance of each park, as identified by the State History Plan and the California [...]