If anyone is doing “it” right it is John Wells, who is living entirely off the grid and on his own terms in Terlingua, Texas. A former photographer in New York City, in 2007 Wells bought 40 acres of scrub land in west Texas for $8,000 and began building his own little off grid home [...]
The Zoetrope is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT) made from materials commonly found at your local hardware store and a few easily purchased online, and Applied Sciences has made the decision to “open source” the turbine for everyone who wants to try their hand at making one. With videos and a downloadable PDF construction guide, [...]
Dear EarthTalk: I heard someone say that the environmental benefits of natural gas for electricity generation were overstated and that it is not as green-friendly as the industry would have us believe. What is your take on this? In our increasingly carbon-constrained world, natural gas (also known as methane) does keep coming up as a [...]
One of the challenges of being green is that while there are the many obvious tasks to consider, there are also many things that can slip your mind or make for an easy mistake. One of these is how you dispose of an old car. If our solar panels could talk, they might be saying: [...]
Whenever I become most appalled with people who toss their trash out the window without a thought, who live off of pre-packaged vacuum-sealed packets like they’re a food staple and with everyone else who insists upon using the earth and its resources like there’s 10 more of them we can use when we exhaust this [...]
Looking for a green job? I know – it’s hard to find any job in this economy. But don’t lose heart. Believe it or not, what I see happening out there is that job seekers who are looking for a specific type of job in a specific niche are more likely to find something – [...]
Dear EarthTalk: Isn’t it a waste that we buy water in plastic bottles when it is basically free out of our taps? Even health food stores, which should know better, sell it like crazy. When did Earth’s most abundant and free natural resource become a commercial beverage? Bottled water has been a big-selling commercial beverage [...]
