Costa Rica: The Carbon Neutrality Challenge

mattswriting — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:39:12 -0400

Costa Rica has declared that it will go carbon neutral by 2021. To meet that challenge, energy officials from the Central American nation have gone on a fact-finding tour of the United States, seeking out the best practices that can be incorporated in Costa Rica. UC Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies is hosting a talk by Minister Dobles on Costa Rica’s efforts to mitigate carbon emissions at 5 p.m. on Monday, May 19 in Room 554, Barrows Hall, UC Berkeley Campus in Berkeley, California. The event is free and should last one hour. read more »

Conscious Lifestyle recommends: the Omnivore's Dilemma

mattswriting — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:19:06 -0400

If Americans were to 'get Michael Pollan' about what they ate (or in other words—really think about what they consume), their eating habits would radically change. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is billed as "a natural history of four meals," but it is about much more than food. Pollan begins the book closely examining the omnipresence of corn in the modern American diet. And then he goes beyond the territory traversed by other books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and as an investigative food journalist, Pollan does not only offer critiques of the unsustainable megaliths of industrial corn farming and the PETA-angering Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), but offers alternatives to these destructive systems. read more »