When it comes to the environment, California car buyers are, if you’ll excuse the expression, walking the walk. In 2012, the top-selling car in the state was—wait for it—the Toyota Prius. According to the California New Car Dealers Association, 60,688 Prius models were registered last year. Runners-up were the Honda Civic with 57,124, the Toyota Camry with 50,250, and the Honda Accord with 49,420. (The figures represent sales to individual consumers, not fleets.) The website L.A. Observed notes that the Prius isn’t even on the top 10 list nationally. “We’re just that ... Read More
Prius Sales Suggest Californians Really Are More Eco-Friendly
January 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Chiapas Coffee: Price, Politics and Precipitation
October 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The volatility of coffee prices over the last two decades has been the biggest challenge for farmers and cooperatives in Mexico, and may be the single greatest factor threatening to make Chiapas' tasty shade-grown coffee a "threatened species." This threat matters, beyond denying coffee drinkers a favored brew or forcing farmers to seek more lucrative crops, because, as I explained last week, the traditional methods of growing coffee plants offer huge environmental benefits for the region. But volatile prices and politics help foster mistrust, while war and climate change batter the ... Read More
Marketing the Mystery of the Giant Squid
September 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The new canary in the coal mine could be a giant squid. Conservation efforts often rally around charismatic species like the African elephant or the bald eagle. Popular affection for these "flagship" animals can be leveraged into funding and political will. But who speaks for the 95 percent of Earth's inhabitants without a backbone? No worm has the rock-star appeal of a Bengal tiger. Enter the giant squid. Ángel Guerra, a research professor at CSIC (the National Research Council of Spain), makes the case for turning this unusual animal, the largest invertebrate in the world, into a ... Read More
The Last Mountain: A Scary Movie About … Coal
June 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Last Mountain is scarier than any Saw, Alien or Friday the 13th film ever made. It's a documentary about mountaintop coal removal in West Virginia, starring a group of locals whose environment is slowly turning into toxic sludge and an energy company whose methods are so predatory, they make Wall Street bankers look like acolytes of Mother Teresa. "If someone tried to blow up a mountain in Utah or Colorado, they'd be put in jail. Why is that allowed in West Virginia?" asks environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who figures prominently in the film. "It's because the public does ... Read More
T.C. Boyle Interview: Nature and the Novelist
March 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Mankind's relationship with the natural world has dominated the news of late, with terrifying images of tsunami damage and well-founded fears of nuclear contamination. But even during periods when we don’t seem quite so puny or powerless, the topic captivates T.C. Boyle. The much-honored and best-selling novelist often writes about people who take a hubristic attitude toward nature, assuming they can either tame it or bend it to meet their own needs. The natural world tends to elbow its way past their arrogance, or idealism, or combination of the two, vividly revealing the scope of their ... Read More
New T.C. Boyle Book Shares Interests With Us
March 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Miller-McCune is pretty much a nonfiction sort of place. But a new novel by T.C. Boyle caught our eye because it covers an aspect of several real-life stories we’ve written about. When The Killing’s Done, Boyle’s new book, looks at the efforts to restore the weedy and windy Channel Islands off California’s coast, once home to a barnyard of sheep and pigs gone wild. Amid the furious debate over whether to kill introduced species in order to protect native species and habitats, characters whose intentions are both laudable and incompatible collide. Of course, the peculiar genius of a ... Read More
The Human Causes of Unnatural Disaster
February 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Blowout in the Gulf, a new book on Deepwater Horizon, opens with the observation that the ruined oil platform was dubbed Macondo, after the setting for the novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Written by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, the novel is an apocryphal tale of a prosperous town cut off from civilization, too self-involved to notice the signs of its own corruption. Ultimately, it is wiped off the face of the Earth in a deluge. The parallels were too thematically powerful for the authors of Blowout to ignore in their account of the BP Gulf oil ... Read More
Rules That Improve the Business Environment?
January 21, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Harvard business professor Michael Porter floated an idea in a one-page essay in Scientific American 20 years ago that many of his colleagues at the time thought ridiculous. Good environmental regulation, he suggested, could actually spur innovation, making companies more competitive even as they adjust to stricter environmental standards. The idea was the exact opposite of conventional wisdom as it was discussed then among business leaders and taught in economics classrooms. Even 20 years later, it seems to contradict the premise that underlies every policy dispute in Washington over ... Read More
10 Memorable Threads from 2010
December 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The short days in the Northern Hemisphere produce a peculiar journalistic crop, the Top 10 list. At Miller-McCune.com, we’re not immune to the pull of that chestnut, but the wonk rays so prevalent here force a mutation. Instead of a Top 10 list, here’s 10 for 2010, stories that are popular and memorable but without the baggage of perfection as determined in a year-end frenzy of instantaneous deliberation. Of course, some of the best movies never get nominated for Oscars, and so it is here. We’ll make apologies to stalwarts like Jai Ranganathan (of Curiouser & Curiouser fame) or ... Read More
Slick Willy
October 20, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Ads for commercial cleansers portray bacteria as ominous globs lingering in the darkened corners of our homes. Yet some strains of bacteria actually aid in greening our environment. “Slick Willy,” or Pseudomonas putida, are gram-negative, rod-shaped bacterium that play a role in decomposition. Bioengineered by professor Ananda M. Chakrabarty in 1971, P. putida was the first patented organism in the world. Coveted for its diverse metabolism — including the ability to break down organic solvents like toluene, benzene and ethylbenzene — Pseudomonas is used in bioremediation, fuel ... Read More
