EcoHearth Environmental Website - Best ecology websites, environmental blogs, news, activism, green jobs, green products

As we enter a New Year, the news is replete with talk of recession, joblessness, falling home prices, diplomatic tensions and war. All of this is familiar territory to those who know their history. Surely the current administration has been making every effort to ensure that history does not repeat itself and we plunge into another Great Depression or war. The problem, however, is that recessions and hostilities pass, but climate change is forever. Read on…

What does any of this have to do with the environment? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

A few years ago, I had a long conversation with a friend of African-American descent who was arguing that the core of the environmental message was lost on the black community because, he felt, eco-friendliness was intertwined with economic welfare. His point was that poverty limited one’s choices and made making green decisions that much harder. Read on…

John Barth’s second lesson is that enthusiasm matters more than opinion.

There are actually two lessons tucked into this one and the second is a lot less obvious than the first. The first lesson is passion. And the best passion story I know actually has nothing to do with Barth, but with a wonderful sculptor named Cork Marcheschi. Read on…

I truly believe that without happiness, all environmental causes are lost. Eco-friendly living requires a great deal of tenacity, ingenuity, creativity and the willingness to let things go horribly wrong (I could tell you stories about my composting toilet that would… well, nevermind), and if you’re going to do these things and live this way—while being miserable—let’s just say that sooner or later your stamina is going to collapse and green living is either going to become a prison sentence or an idea abandoned.

Neither will save the planet in the long run. In fact, the only thing that will is everyone working together and being happy to do so. So while I normally write about the saving-the-planet portion of the equation, I thought I’d spend a little time on the happiness portion. Here’s why: Read on…

Recently, in the journal PLoS One, a group of scientists from the Maryland-based National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases published a study about how much food Americans waste—and the results were startling. According to their research, its an average of 1400 calories per person per day. This is, um, outrageous—and for a number of reasons. Read on…