Pesticide residues often remain on produce even after you wash it. Therefore, it’s best for your health and your family’s to buy organic fruits and vegetables. If you can’t afford to by everything organic, the best strategy is to focus on the fruits and vegetables that are most likely to expose you to multiple pesticides. [...]
Panzanella Recipes
Panzanella (Tuscan bread salad) is a great no-cook dish for those summer days when temperatures get into the 80s and beyond. It’s simple, delicious and can be made with local, seasonal produce — tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and basil. Here is a traditional recipe, which uses no animal products, and some variations with cheese and other [...]
Permeable Pavement
Making pavement impervious to water only seems like a good idea. In fact, it creates a huge and serious problem. Whenever precipitation accumulates, the water travels across the pavement to street gutters, picking up contaminants along the way — from motor oil to dog poop. This noxious mix then flows into storm sewers, which empty [...]
Does Global Warming Cause Tornadoes and Floods?
Flooding in Smithfield, KY, 5.13.11. Photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Is the rash of deadly tornadoes in Joplin, Tuscaloosa and other parts of the country related to global warming, as author and environmentalist Bill McKibben recently suggested in a satiric piece for the The Washington Post? How about the disastrous floods we’ve been [...]
Fracking, Explained — in a music video
Here’s a great little music video that manages to make fracking — a subject practically no one gets — completely understandable in 2 1/2 minutes. And it’s entertaining to boot!
Raising Environmentally Aware Kids
My father, Jack Eisenberg, circa 1971, in a land reservation near our home How do you raise environmentally aware kids? In seeking the answer, I look back to my own upbringing in the 1960s shortly before the first Earth Day. Like our neighbors, my family had recently begun using paper napkins instead of cloth and [...]
A Well-placed Joke Brings Fracking Risks Home
“This water is most likely safe. If you have any concerns about contamination due to hydraulic fracturing, expose water to flame.” Ah, the power of a well-placed joke. You can read countless articles about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) to drinking water and health and never feel how much is at stake. But [...]
Why Compost
The virtues are obvious if you’re a gardener. What if you’re a person eager to live more sustainably with only so much time to give to the cause? You can’t do better. Composting not only reduces the waste you send to the landfill, but converts it into a useful product without requiring additional resources. Meanwhile, [...]
Fracking Fairy Tale
I’m worried there’s going to be a mad dash to natural gas now that people have been reminded how dangerous nuclear power is by the nuclear disaster in Japan. I’m not a fan of nuclear power, but don’t want to see us jump from the frying pan into the fire either — particularly the “fire” [...]
Nuclear Power vs. Gas — Danger on Both Sides
Were you scared by today’s report about radioactive contamination of Tokyo’s drinking water? Then how do you feel about radioactive gas drilling waste being discharged into rivers that feed drinking water supplies in the U.S.? It’s happening in Pennsylvania, in broad daylight, as reported in The New York Times. And no one has yet done [...]
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This Green Blog is the companion blog to NRDC's This Green Life, a green living column written by Sheryl Eisenberg for the Natural Resources Defense Council. (Subscribe to get it for FREE each month.) Sheryl has also written Greentips for the Union of Concerned Scientists and designs websites for environmental groups and others with her firm, Mixit Productions.
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