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Turning Waste into Wine: A Pilgrimage to the Composted Land
It is said that Jesus was able to turn water into wine. While such truly miraculous skill to this day remains confined to the realm of saints and sages, I bring good news about a wine-making technique...
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Zen Monks to CA Governor Brown: "Don't even THINK about Fracking!"
I have a sticker in my office that says "Zen Buddhism: Don't even think about it!" This kind of humorous take often leads to the (false) perception that Buddhism and its more western-palatable...
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We did it! Biggest Anti-Fracking Demonstration in U.S. History! (photos galore)
So a bunch of concerned citizens of all stripes came out to Oakland yesterday to talk some fracking sense.More specifically, according to 350.org's count, over 8,000 of us marched...and gathered to...
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Get this: science denier David Koch sits on boards of America's science...
No more dinosaurs for you, Mr. Koch! You just can't make this stuff up! Science Museums Urged to Cut Ties With KochsSo David Koch, he of the oil and manufacturing conglomerate Koch Industries and the...
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A drop in the bucket?
In light of California's historic drought and Governor Brown's executive order to impose a 25 percent reduction on municipal water use, my partner and I thought about ways we can conserve more water...
View ArticleBombshell video shows Chevron covering up its lethal tracks in the Ecuadorian...
#ChevronExposedA week after Chevron CEO John "Hell Freezer" Watson received a "Distinguished Citizen" award from the Commonwealth Club, the gods of irony must have felt compelled to present the public...
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Ways in which your garden is like a city
An urban ecosystemIf you’ve ever tried to grow anything in your garden you’ve probably had your share of unrealized visions. In your rookie year perhaps the tomatoes never turned red or the...
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My ten years of American citizenship and what it means to me
Sunday (05/10/15) was my 10 year anniversary as an American citizen.What has it meant? What have I learned?Well, since I’ve never felt particularly patriotic in the conventional sense about my birth...
View ArticleNew EPA report estimates benefits of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions
The EPA just released its new report, Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action, a hugely significant piece of research that estimates the physical and monetary benefits to the...
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Bay Area reduces water consumption by up to 40%, civilization does not collapse
Good news! People are capable of conserving and scaling back when they have to and want to.From SFGate:The region’s widespread reductions in water use in June, which were as high as 40 percent in the...
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The one great thing coming out of Donald Trump...
The Donald is inspiring some pretty cool art. This little pre-debate snack is courtesy of my friend Anselm Yew...
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Offering tobacco and bottled water for a sea of oil, Chevron gets booted from...
No, this is not the 17th century: Chevron engineers, looking to frack billions of cubic feet of gas from indigenous Unist’ot’en territory in British Columbia, did indeed try to get past the tribe's...
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Carsick Planet, Part 1: Why the world needs FEWER not better cars
“Carden of Eden” at Flora Grubb Gardens, San Francisco. All photos by Sven EberleinWith the upcoming 21st UN Climate Summit in Paris (COP21) this December promising to be a multi-lane highway towards a...
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Carsick Planet, Part 2: Reducing the fleet through personal, infrastructure &...
If indeed the continued proliferation of the personal automobile is not compatible with the future we want as I have suggested in Part 1 of this series, the question naturally becomes: How exactly are...
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Carsick Planet, Part 3: Get around. Not too fast. Mostly walk.
Getting around not too fast on the New York High Line.The previous segment of this series left off discussing how lifestyle choices, infrastructure, and a new economic thinking must work in tandem to...
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Postcard from Abu Dhabi: On the Road to Masdar City, a Desert Ecocity in the...
Masdar City, the world's first zero-carbon city under construction.Last month saw the 11th edition of the International Ecocity Conference Series that was first held 25 years ago in Berkeley,...
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Why I don't have a candidate
Seeing that most of the American media including Daily Kos has been in full throttle about a presidential election that at this moment is almost a year away, I’ve been feeling the peer pressure to get...
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With the People's Voice cancelled in Paris, people voicing call to climate...
With the main march as well as a number of other civic events that were planned to accompany official negotiations at the COP21 climate conference in Paris cancelled, organizers have called on people...
View ArticleMeanwhile, the Supreme Court deals a severe blow to humanity's future. Google...
Those are the exact words of a text message I got from one of my friends at the EPA last night, in response to this:In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on...
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The chance the Birdie missed (but is still within grasp of a reusable mug)
By now, everyone has seen the iconic photo of the bird landing on Bernie Sanders’ podium at a recent rally in Portland. While the reactions to what’s come to be known as the “Birdie Sanders” incident...
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How to transform a burst of Bernie Power into a renewable source of Bernergie
An article posted a few weeks ago at The Atlantic entitled What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries by Finnish native Anu Partanen offers some great insights into Northern European democracies...
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Springtime at Joshua Tree (a National Park Week Photo Story)
As National Park Week is coming to an end, I thought I’d share some of the photos I took last week during a visit to Joshua Tree National Park.In light of Congress’Anti-Parks Caucus dedicated to the...
View ArticleThe Day Liberals Reclaimed Patriotism
I think my favorite part about last night’s Democratic convention — right after President Obama’s oratory master class and VP Joe Biden’s no-nonsense takedown of the clueless orange wanna-be dictator —...
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Separated in San Francisco
There are very few situations in life in which the idea of being separated would seem attractive. However, on Polk Street in San Francisco, right in the heart of one of the most bustling corridors...
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“Have You Noticed Your Energy is Cleaner?”
“Have You Noticed Your Energy is Cleaner?” is the subject line of an email I recently received from San Francisco Water Power Sewer, the public utility service that administers the city's recently...
View ArticleSmall victories: San Francisco poised to recycle almost everything the...
A few weeks ago I went on a tour of the new state-of-the-art upgrade at Recycle Central, San Francisco's 200,000-square-foot recycling plant on Pier 96 run by San Francisco's garbage resource recovery...
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When they go neutering EPA with fossil fools, we go building clean and...
Okay, so I admit that the orange plunderer-in-thief’s nomination of science-denying, oil-soaked, climate change-causing polluter Scott Pruitt to head the EPA gave me a little extra acid reflux in...
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Politics, Live and Unplugged (A photo essay to #DefendDemocracy)
Here’s the thing about being a citizen and making your voice heard. Getting exactly what you’re asking for is just a small part of why you do it. Monday’s #Dec19 #DefendDemocracy #StopTrump event...
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Saving the EPA from the Grave (A Protest Funeral Photo Essay)
Yesterday's Protest Funeral for EPA, the climate, and environmental justiceat the EPA’s regional office in downtown San Francisco was just another little piece in the multi-dimensional grassroots...
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What do we do now? TOMORROW documentary shows what's possible today
Those of us concerned about the planetary challenges of our time know the varying degrees of trepidation that can accompany a showing of yet another documentary attempting to address the world's...
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SciCli Blogathon: "I can't believe we're marching for facts" Edition...
Yup, this is, in fact (or is it a fact? who knows anymore), the year 2017 we find ourselves in, and thanks to the extraordinary verbal manure spreading machine posing as president that is America’s...
View ArticleThe Incredible Lightness of Being... Eclipsed
In this age of instant news and its inevitable twin, “instant olds,” I was debating with myself whether it’s even worth posting about Monday morning’s eclipse two days late when every conceivable...
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The haters came, saw and went to someone's apartment. Meanwhile, San...
So that was fun. Yesterday I joined some good friends at the #NoHateSF rally that converged marches from the Castro, the Mission and what seemed like everywhere in San Francisco to counter this...
View ArticleJimmy Kimmel gets Trumpublicans to admit they dig Obamacare as long as you...
Jimmy Kimmel's brilliant little Jujitsu act on his show Tuesday night to troll people into signing up for the Affordable Care Act is as much a lesson in human psychology (at least the Homo Trumpus...
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Do people still care about climate change? #RiseForClimate says (HELL) YES!...
I was wondering if there was enough room left in the “finite pool of worry” for a good turnout for the #RiseForClimate action taking place yesterday, considering all the first responses and triage...
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CA Recycling Company Says They’re Drowning in Plastic, Calls for Referendum...
It’s no secret that the world has a plastic problem. By now, most people have been made aware of the magnitude of this crisis, thanks to recent high profile features by National Geographic, UN...
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State of the Union to be dwarfed by Green New Deal, says God
With all the talk about God's preferences for political candidates it should come as no surprise that the Almighty would feel compelled to make a statement of the highest divine order. By relegating...
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"Democracy isn't dying in darkness, it's being murdered in broad daylight" |...
I went to the #FakeNationalEmergency protest today at the SF Federal Building and was heartened to see so many folks taking the time out of their day to express just how grave of a situation we find...
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16 yr old GND activist: "I shouldn’t have to think about survival, I should...
After attending the rally on Friday that preceded the now-viral exchange about the Green New Deal resolution between the local youth group Youth Vs. Apocalypse and CA Senator Diane Feinstein, I once...
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24 Signs of Democracy: A Resistance Photo Journey
I’ve always liked going to rallies and protests, because the energy created by direct citizen participation is so raw and genuine. In the age of constant media filtering and digital middlemen for so...
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Signs of a Climate Emergency
The Great Highway, one of San Francisco's iconic roads that runs along the city's Pacific coastline, has been closed intermittently for the last several months due to sand intrusion and flooding from...
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Shifting culture towards nourishing a just and sustainable society, or The...
Sometimes it’s truly uncanny how synergistic human consciousness can be. I’ve always thought that the world as it exists is the result of what we collectively dream into being, and if a lot of people...
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Turn the orange blues into action: California about to pass important climate...
It’s so easy these days to get either distracted or depressed by the daily barrage of orange madness raining down on us, ranging in significance from hopelessly vapid to humanly atrocious. Coupled with...
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#GlobalClimateStrike: A March for a Livable Planet is a March for Justice
As I was assembling the posters I had printed from the 350.org Arts Kit to make signs for tomorrow’sGlobal Climate Strike, I was reflecting back on a week in which the themes of justice so powerfully...
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The Planet or The Humans: Michael Moore’s false choice a lesson in how not to...
I meant to write about the Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans right after watching it last weekend. But over the course of the week all of the wild distortions and...
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Feels like we’ve been in the wrong movie. Let’s make a better one together!
What the hell was that? I don’t know about you, but the last five and a half years have felt like I’ve been in the wrong movie, a German idiom (“Ich glaub ich bin im falschen Film”) to describe the...
View ArticleYes, the IPCC report is dire. But it's not too late if we turn despair into...
The IPCC report released today concludes: “Unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond...
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ClimateBrief: Now that Germans are at risk of drowning, we are all balancing...
With historic floods hitting one of the last bastions of perceived immunity against the effects of climate change, people in financially wealthy countries are finally forced to reckon with the global...
View ArticleObservations from an immigrant on the American gun apocalypse
Each culture has its blind spots as it is part of our humanness to get used to ways of being within a lot of unspoken social norms and constructs. Just as sometimes it can be helpful to get feedback...
View ArticleI ❤️ DK Guild: A German Gingerbread Heart in Solidarity With the Workers of...
Help DKG Solidarity Group celebrate Valentine's Day! This story is part of a series of “I ❤️ DK Guild” posts written by Community members to show their support for the writing, activism, and site...
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