Featured Stories

Coronavirus and our relationship with nature

As I sit down to write this, it is Passover and Easter weekend. The world has suddenly and collectively been united by the spread of sickness and death from the coronavirus. I am not a religious person, but I find myself contemplating the forces of good and evil and wondering if we have perhaps entered a time of hell on earth. Or is it a time for redemption?.​
Toxic Exposure
When her kids were young, Tracey Woodruff knew more than most people about environmental toxics. After all, she was a senior scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But even she never dreamed, as she rocked her children to sleep at night, that the plastic baby bottles she used to feed them contained toxic chemicals that could leach into the warm milk. 
FLICKR USER THOMAS ANGERMANN

Greening of Chinatown

The Washington Bakery & Restaurant in San Francisco is a place where you can get a steaming hot wonton soup or a nice piece of cake and a cup of tea. With a few older Chinese neighbors chatting in Cantonese and reading the paper at small Formica tables, you won’t find your typical San Francisco cold filtered locally roasted fair trade coffee here. And you won’t ever, if Cindy Wu has her way. (She simply orders the hot water with lemon.)​
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Photo:  Michael Woolsey

Coming Home

Years ago, before he was born, Jim McIsaac’s family had a couple of deer hound pups named Cloudy and Thunder. One day the pups took off up to Black Mountain. Jim’s dad rode up there on a horse, found them and brought them back on his saddle.

Like Black Mountain, Jim’s father, Neil McIsaac, looms large over this 527-acre ranch on Point Reyes-Petaluma Road in West Marin. Jim was only five years old when his family was forced to leave here for the construction of Nicasio Reservoir, but he does remember it. In fact, it’s sort of burned in his memory just like the vivid family memory of his dad riding down off Black Mountain with the lost pups on his saddle.

Power to the Apes

By Molly Miller

Like many Americans, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, Stephen Moore, recently made his way to the summer blockbuster film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. As he reflected on the film in the National Review Online, he was struck by the role energy played in the plot.

"I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource," he asks. "Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short." (In case you skipped the film, the storyline partly follows the human struggle to regain electric power in a post-apocalyptic world.)

Big Ass Solutions and other building tech adventures 

By Molly Miller

​Comfort and energy in buildings have this cozy relationship. When building designs and systems keep people comfortable, they often also save energy and vice versa.
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In 2016, we saw smart technologies for homes and offices layer in more ways to enhance this relationship, integrating temperature, humidity, health and comfort data with thermostats, fans, appliances, solar panels and the electric grid. Companies are forming strategic partnerships to merge the functionality of multiple products now that they are actually really learning to make the very best use of all the data we are able to collect. But as the folks at Comfy say, “Data is easy but insights
​are hard.”

New zero-energy districts: A mile high and growing

By Molly Miler

Colorado is a leader in the movement toward net zero energy districts — where a group of buildings together generate as much energy as they consume over the course of a year — for a few reasons.  

​The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) is in Golden, Colorado, and local corporations and local governments have tapped into the research lab’s technical resources on renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Colorado also has taken advantage of brand new federal support for zero energy districts and technical resources at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.