In Brooklyn alone, there are 596 acres of vacant land just sitting there gathering garbage and gravel. Imagine if that was all green space, growing plants for food and providing parks for BK denizens. That's precisely the vision of 596 Acres, a public project which encourages people to connect with empty lots in the city. The group's actions range from guerrilla seed bombing to pushing for......read more
Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man sketch has been reproduced by an artist in the Arctic to draw attention to climate change. John Quigley, an artist specializing in aerial art, travelled on a Greenpeace icebreaker to create the copper artwork in the Fram Strait, about 500 miles from the North Pole. The piece, entitled "Melting Vitruvian Man", measures the equivalent of four......read more
Greenpeace has revealed that veteran rock bassist (The Clash, Gorillaz) Paul Simonon was among the activists arrested in June for occupying an Arctic oil rig. Simonon had joined the Greenpeace crew anonymously, working as an assistant cook. The oil rig, operated by Cairn Energy, one of Europe's largest oil and gas companies, was boarded on June 3 by the Greenpeacers, who demanded that the......read more
When big money is at stake, big powers take drastic measures to preserve their profits. Case in point: the Keystone XL pipeline, v. 2.0. Just weeks ago, President Obama said no to the first proposal for a pipeline that would transfer oil from the tar sands of Canada to refineries in Texas. Now a group pf U.S. senators are looking to resuscitate the project. Led by Sen. John Hoeven......read more
Poor plastic grocery bags. It must be hard to know that your time is coming to a close. And make no mistake, after L.A. councillors voted 13-1 to ban single use bags in the city, the end is nigh, indeed. L.A. is but the latest in a growing number of American cities and regions that are ditching single use plastic bags. But this time it's different. When Seattle, Portland, and San......read more
Every year, around the world, almost one trillion dollars of subsidies is handed out to help the fossil fuel industry. Who came up with the crazy idea that the fossil fuel industry deserves our hard-earned money, no less in economic times of such harsh human consequence? We fire teachers, police and firemen in drastic budget cuts and yet, the fossil fuel industry can laugh all the way to the bank......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
The monumental task of protecting the world's oceans from ecological destruction is made doubly difficult when you consider that 64 percent of ocean water lies beyond national jurisdiction. That means that the waters that cover 45 percent of the earth's surface, and that produce between 50 and 85 percent of the oxygen we breathe, are virtually unprotected. You do the math (we......read more
From photojournalist/activist Aaron Huey: "They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept but one - They promised to take our land...and they took it." 
- Chief Red Cloud Over the past seven years I have made many stories, but one project has come to own me. It is the story of the Oglala Lakota, who live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near South Dakota's......read more
Bill McKibben for The Huffington Post: The history we grow up with shapes our sense of reality -- it’s hard to shake. If you were young during the fight against Nazism, war seems a different, more virtuous animal than if you came of age during Vietnam. I was born in 1960, and so the first great political character of my life was Martin Luther King, Jr. I had a shadowy, child’s......read more