
Brooke Baxter and Rolyn Hu are Brooklyn's cultural impresarios. The duo own and operate both Glasslands Gallery and the Manhattan Inn, two of the borough's meccas for music, art and food. They're also way into sustainability. Both spaces are built from salvaged materials and include loads of interesting nuances, such as repurposed doorknobs as tap handles, and school desks as......read more
There's not a ton to this video. Actually there's very little. But the song is some lovely, blissful pop, and there's an interesting backstory. The standout single from All Night, Houses' first full-length, "Endless Spring" was recorded in Hawaii where sole bandmember Dexter Tortoriello spent time with his partner living off the grid. In his words: "We moved out to a little cabin in Papaikou,......read more
Created by Brooklyn filmmaker Keith Ehrlich, the excellent web series Made By Hand profiles various pockets of artisinal activity around New York City. The latest episode departs from the black-and-white look of the first two episodes, with a beautifully shot, sun-soaked view of a rooftop beekeeping operation in Brooklyn. Local farmer Megan Paska has witnessed beekeeping as it......read more
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the state of the environment should be driving innovation around the world. And indeed it is. In our new series "The Big SHFT: 10 Innovators Changing Our World," we team up with Ford Motor Company to profile leading innovators who are shaping new sustainable businesses and influencing positive change around the world. Executive produced by SHFT......read more
Tom Szaky is the quintessential eco-entrepreneur. While a freshman at Princeton, Szaky founded a company that recycles garbage into plant fertilizer, then packages it in discarded soda bottles. Fast forward five years, and TerraCycle Plant Food is available in every Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and more than 3000 other locations. Today, TerraCycle is finding new uses for trash, creating products......read more
Today, Alice Waters is the queen bee of sustainable food movement. But it was flavor, not sustainability, that led the owner of Chez Panisse to local, organic food. Since founding the Berkeley eatery 40 years ago, Alice has helped inspire nothing short of a culinary revolution. These days, you won't find her in the restaurant's kitchen because she is too busy heading up the Chez Panisse......read more
In 2000, Bill Ford spearheaded a sustainability report for the company his great-grandfather founded nearly a century earlier. "Sustainability issues are neither incidental nor avoidable," he wrote in the report, "they are at the heart of our business." At the time, the green ideas were not well-received. Today, in the wake of rising fuel prices and global economic crisis, they are at the center......read more
Van Jones is a lawyer and activist who is America's leading advocate for green jobs. He is a co-founder of three successful non-profit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change and Green For All. Van's first book, The Green Collar Economy, is a clear-headed and optimistic discussion of the need for clean energy solutions to......read more
Driven by demand in Japan's seafood market, stocks of the bluefin tuna have depleted 85 percent over the last forty-odd years. Can aquaculture help meet the demand and save the threatened species? In "The Farmer and the Bluefin," The Perennial Plate hones its cameras in on a bluefin tuna farm in Wakayama, Japan. Whereas most bluefin farming operations capture young fish......read more
You may or may not remember Ellen MacArthur as the solo yachtswoman who in 2005 broke the world speed record for circumnavigation of the globe. Today, she stays busy as the figurehead behind the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, an independent UK-based charity promoting the vision of a "circular economy." Don't know what that is? Don't worry, neither did we until we watched this fun, well-made......read more