To Hindus, cows are sacred. Jewish dietary laws ( kashrut) and Muslim dietary laws ( halal) prohibit pork consumption. Traditional Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. Religion and food have forever been intertwined. Food is deep, emotional stuff. So it’s perhaps not surprising that devotees of organic food often embrace with quasi-religious fervor the practice of growing food [...]

When I interviewed Steve Case last month at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in DC , he told me that we are entering a second Internet revolution . I’ve been thinking about that since then, and not only to do I think he is right — I think the rise of social networks and the mobile Internet may be the best [...]

The bench pictured below, fashioned from a single piece of black granite, was inspired by an African headrest and designed by Carl Bass. An accomplished and dedicated woodworker, Carl has lately been making things out of stone and metal, too. In his day job, Carl is the CEO of Autodesk, which makes 3D design software that [...]

Here are 10 companies that are putting real dollars behind their sustainability rhetoric: Kohl’s, Whole Foods Market, TD Bank, Swiss Re, Nordea Bank, Adobe Systems, Vestas Wind, News Corp., CLP Holdings and Deutsche Bank. They’re leaders in buying renewable energy, according to a new report from Vestas and Bloomberg New Energy Finance called the Corporate Renewable Energy [...]

Today’s quiz: How well do consumers understand “green” brands? (1) They are savvy. (2) They don’t have a clue. (3) They don’t care all that much. (4) All of the above. The answer, judging from the results of this year’s ImagePower Global Green Brands Study , is (4) all of the above . Hey, who ever said communicating about “green” is simple? The survey, which [...]

The bagged organic baby mixed greens on sale in my local Whole Foods Market in Bethesda, MD, are not very “green” at all. To grow the lettuce, vast amounts of water must be moved from the Colorado River to California, the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet . The lettuce is picked, packaged, washed and shipped in refrigerated trucks [...]

Writing in the Reader’s Digest in 1963, a scientist named Nick Holonyak Jr. , who then worked for General Electric and is now a professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics at the University, predicted that light-emitting diodes, better known as LEDs, would replace the incandescent light bulb of GE’s founder, Thomas Edison . Holonyak, who is known as the father [...]

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle? Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable. Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market. Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or ignorant. Or they don’t care. Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about [...]

Those pesky activists from the Rainforest Action Network are at it again. Today (May 19), four activists including a couple costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse were arrested outside the Burbank headquarters of The Walt Disney Co. They accused Disney of printing children’s books with paper that is driving the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests after after lab test [...]

If you’re in the office, would you rather be at home? Verizon sent me this infographic on tele-commuting, which the company calls telework (you can click the image for a full-sized version ): They also sent along this comment from a Verizon worker named Nena Faulkner who is part of their sustainability team.

I really appreciate the flexibility that TeleWork provides. [...]

You’ve heard about the cloud , right? This blog comes to you from the cloud. The cloud is where the bank keeps your money. YouTube, Gmail, Twitter and iTunes live in the cloud. So does a record of all my runs in 2011. The cloud, in essence, is the millions of data centers where information and software are stored [...]

It’s been another action-packed day at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. Lively conversation about the future of coal (it’s not going away), sustainable seafood (about which more another day), geoengineering and marketing to the green consumer. The “green consumer” panel featured SC Johnson’s CEO H. Fisk Johnson, Steve Wenc of UL Environment and marketing [...]

I hope my valentine is reading this blogpost because I’ve decided what I want for Valentine’s Day: a bar or two of Divine Chocolate . Divine Chocolate says it is the first farmer-owned Fair Trade chocolate brand. About 35 percent of the shares in the U.S. company that produces, markets and distributes Divine Chocolate are owned by the Kuapa Kokoo [...]

This is a plaza in Masdar City , the new “green” city in Abu Dhabi, where I’m enjoying a pleasant, cooling breeze. The breeze is generated by a wind tower, above, which is the centerpiece of the Masdar Institute , a graduate school devoted to sustainability that bills itself as “the Green University.” The tower isn’t a wind turbine — it doesn’t [...]

Plastic bags, SUVs and hamburgers: No right-thinking tree-hugger would endorse them, at least not in public. But here’s the thing: While we can replace plastic bags with reusable ones, and we can electrify our SUVs, the world’s consumers will almost surely demand more, not less, beef in the years ahead. Which is why the World Wildlife [...]

“The Power of One” is a series of stories about people who have helped their companies become more sustainable. (See earlier stories on UL Environment , eBay, and Union Pacific .) They can’t do it alone, of course. But by coming up with a good idea, enlisting the help of others and making persuasive arguments, one person can change a company and, [...]

Inside every Hewlett Packard laptop, and perhaps others as well, I’m told, is a tiny device — a sensor — known as an accelerometer. It’s just what it sounds like, a way to measure acceleration. Should you accidentally drop your laptop, the sensor’s job is to protect the hard drive from damage by sending a signal to [...]

Have you heard about the “Internet of things”? It’s a relatively new idea to me, although I note that the phrase gets about 2.2 million Google hits (at last count) and it has its own Wikipedia entry and a YouTube clip or two. As best as I can tell, it means that many things — cars, buildings, the [...]

Imagine that you’re the chief sustainability officer of a Fortune 500 company. During a meeting with your CEO, you say, “We need to talk to consumers about using less.” Improbable? Sure. Impossible? Perhaps not. An important conversation to start? Absolutely. So, at least, says Aron Cramer, the CEO of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a non-profit association of companies, whose mission [...]

Inside the Tapajos National Forest, where 228 people have joined in a cooperative known as  Coomflona, workers display sandals and wallets made of latex from rubber trees, necklaces and earrings made from the seeds of plants and tiny bottles of plant oils, pictured below at right. More important, they talk about how they are harvesting timber from [...]