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How to Grow a Chair: An Interview with Richard Reames
By Joshua Foer, Cabinet
As a child, Richard Reames visited the 'Tree Circus,' a roadside attraction near Santa Cruz, where intentionally mangled and misshapen trees inspired his life's art. Today, using ancient grafting techniques, Reames artfully bends and prunes the growth of his own trees into chairs, spirals, peace signs, and structures. In an interview with Cabinet, Reames tells Joshua Foer that he is trying to grow a 'living home' in which carefully planted trees fuse together, engulfing plumbing and wrapping around windows and doors along the way.  For further reading, check out Chris Dodge's review of Reames' book, Arborsculpture in Utne's March/April issue. --Elizabeth Oliver
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/foer.php

Boutique Biofuels
By April Streeter, Sustainable Industries Journal
The movement to embrace ethanol as the cure-all for our fossil-fuel woes has taken a few hits lately as environmental experts point out the pitfalls of its sustainability credentials. April Streeter has some good news for biofuel proponents, though. She reports that some entrepreneurs are looking beyond corn to a wide variety of source materials. Mark Cardoso of Ecogenics has experimented with turning old beer and rejected snack cakes into fuel, and now he's on to algae. Craig Venter, a major player in cracking the human genome (read an Utne account), wants to create 'new organisms that can make fast and efficient biofuel.'  -- Suzanne Lindgren
http://www.sijournal.com/transportation/3764782.html

What To Do With All That Debt?
By Mark Trumbull, The Christian Science Monitor
Americans have been spending gobs of borrowed money and declaring themselves bankrupt more frequently, creating what Mark Trumbull calls a widespread 'culture of debt.' The times seem ripe, then, for the Chicago Debt Exchange, which launches this month with an open auction for $500 million worth of bad debts. Trumbull reflects on the economic ramifications of our spiraling debt and the cultural acceptance of it: Some economists call the debt a sign of a strong economy, others say recovering from our borrowing frenzy will likely cause a perceptible recession. -- Suzanne Lindgren
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0911/p13s02-wmgn.html

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