Publication archives

Few things are as fundamental to good health as healthy food, grown well. And yet the reality of our times is that the easiest, most available, most "affordable" food is typically the least healthful. I'm talking about packaged and heavily processed foods high in calories, additives and saturated fats and low in nutritional value.

Stepping into the Riverview Theater earlier this month, I didn't know what to make of the scene. The theater was packed: 700 people had come to a sold-out documentary about food. The film is called Fresh. There had been no paid media advertisements. No prominent reviews in the entertainment press.

Conventional cattle ranchers and pig and chicken farmers routinely feed their animals a steady diet of antibiotics to prevent illness and help them grow fatter faster. But as consumers become more obsessed with what they eat, including an insatiable hunger for meat and chicken raised naturally, without drugs, more producers are promoting their products as antibiotic free.

Calculating the carbon footprint of corn-based ethanol (including indirect effects around the world) continues to be a political hot potato that threatens congressional negotiations to address global climate change.

Agriculture is rapidly finding itself at the center of the climate change debate at national and international levels.

The FSC Family Forests Alliance, a national partnership of individuals and organizations committed to promoting responsible forest stewardship, has released a report on the results of the recent field testing of proposed revisions to group certification and the family forest standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

President Obama's nominee to lead the Forest Service and farmland conservation programs says he withdrew his name from consideration for family and financial reasons.

With the protection of darkness, chameleons give up on camouflage. Sleeping on the low-lying branches of bushes in Mount Mabu, northern Mozambique, they're easy to spot by torchlight. White lizards with their eyes defiantly shut.