In the age of sustainable seafood, sushi can be a decidedly guilty pleasure—if a permissible pleasure at all. Those glistening slices of hamachi? Most likely not what you’d call earth-friendly fare. The latest issue of Edible San Francisco, however, profiles two restaurateurs out to prove that sushi can be served without a side of environmental destruction.

At Tataki, Raymond Ho and Kin Lui exclusively serve sustainable seafood. It’s a substantial commitment, considering that the five most popular sushi items—salmon, hamachi, shrimp, uangi, and tuna—are rarely ocean friendly. But with some help from FishWise business director Casson Trenor, the chefs have found some creative ways to proceed. They skip salmon in favor of farmed arctic char. Instead of eel (nagi), they offer delicately blow-torched strips of Canadian black cod.

“Faux-nagi asks for a certain willing suspension of disbelief, heavy emphasis on the willing,” Edible San Francisco reports. But the alternative—“rolling the [most popular] five until fisheries crash and sushi as we know it drifts off into extinction, like a polar bear on an ice floe”—doesn’t exactly whet the appetite.

For those of us who don’t live in the Bay Area, the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a special sushi edition of its trusty seafood guide. And for fun additional reading about sustainable seafood, visit Utne Reader’s Sustainable Seafood Project, which includes excerpts from the exquisite book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.

Source: Edible San Francisco

The Toyota Prius is the best-selling hybrid car in the world, a status fueled by celebrity supporters, rabid consumer fans, and the Japanese auto giant’s own savvy marketing. But there's a problem: a growing number of Prius owners claim that they’ve experienced “unintended acceleration” while driving—their cars take off suddenly and won’t stop, even if they slam on the brakes.

Reporter Paul Knight at Westword has tracked this dark side of Prius ownership “as owners share horror stories on blogs and message boards of crashing their cars through forests, garage doors and gas stations from Washington to Michigan to New York.”

Toyota’s response to these claims has included a feeble recall of “faulty floor mats” (which they say cause the gas pedal to stick), and a blame-the-consumer attitude:

“You get these customers that say, ‘I stood on the brake with all my might and the car just kept on accelerating,’” Toyota spokesman Bill Kwong explains. “They’re not stepping on the brake. People are so under stress right now, people have so much on their minds...you’re driving along, and the next thing you know, you’re two miles down the road and you don’t remember driving.”

Barbara Sherman, a retiree from North Carolina whose Prius sped her through a stoplight, responds to such allegations with, “Garbage—I was driving it, and I know what happened. There is definitely a problem.”

Image by xrrr, licensed under Creative Commons

 Source: Westword

Have you heard? In 2007 a record-breaking number of U.S. babies—nearly 40 percent—were born to single mothers. But the stat that’s not making headlines, writes Julia Whitty for Mother Jones, is the one we ought to heed: 2007 also holds the title for most babies born annually in the United States ever, period. That’s 4,317,119 bundles of joy.

According to a study published in Global Environmental Change, which Whitty cites, every American baby “costs” six times a parent’s own carbon emissions. “The bottom line is that absolutely nothing else you can do—driving a more fuel efficient car, driving less, installing energy-efficient windows, replacing lightbulbs, replacing refrigerators, recycling—comes even close to simply not having that child,” she writes.

Assuming perpetuation of the standard U.S. lifestyle, true indeed. But Whitty mitigates her argument with a final stat: “In comparison, under current Bangladeshi conditions, each child adds 56 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female.”

And in a snap, we’re back where we began. Our spiraling global population is part of the climate equation, no doubt. But sitting heavy on the scales is a disparity in consumption so vast that a single U.S. newborn can be charged with 169 times the environmental havoc as a Bangladeshi infant. So much for the innocence of youth.

Plainly speaking, there’s got to be a way to combine consideration for how many people with how much each individual consumes—before nudging the door open to preposterous scenarios where the childfree American can consume with impunity, or carbon-light countries encourage their populations to boom without concern.

As Utne Reader’s publisher Bryan Welch writes in our Jan.-Feb. 2009 issue: “Conservation alone cannot save us from ourselves. With the right combination of imagination and common sense, though, we can begin to address a hard reality: that although the world can always get better, it’s not going to get any bigger.”

Sources: Mother Jones, Global Environmental Change

Image by normanack, licensed under Creative Commons.

Whether you consider it a genuine holiday for expressing sincere affection or a Hallmark-created sham, Valentine’s Day tends to generate a mixed bag of emotions.  If you fall into the former camp, a plethora of eco-friendly gifts exists to ease the burden of your love on both the environment and your conscience.  Here are few ideas:  

1) Treehugger offers a list of alternatives to traditional Valentines gifts, such as fair trade chocolate and organic flowers.  My favorite suggestion is to cook a meal at home with local ingredients rather than dine at a fancy restaurant.      

2) In lieu of the ubiquitous heart-shaped trinkets, Sweet Organics and Naturals sells a variety of accessories created from recycled materials.  Check out their cool selection of earrings made out of antique dishware, Noxema jars, WWII era Mason Jars, and even Schlitz beer bottles.

3) For those willing to plunk down serious cash, Voltaic Systems designs a line of backpacks and messenger bags which are, according to their site, “mobile solar power generators designed to charge virtually all handheld electronics.”  Each bag comes equipped with solar panels, so a few hours in the sun will keep your iPod humming.  With the cheapest model going for $199, this gift might feel more like a major investment.

4) Reader’s Digest Canada encourages you to reconnect with your inner Shakespeare and compose a poem on biodegradable seed paper which, after sharing with your beloved, you can then plant.  Something very Buddhist about how that embraces the idea of impermanence.

5) And after researching numerous suggestions for eco-friendly Valentine’s Day gifts, I came up with an idea of my own: rather than spend money on a gift, why not simply spend time with your loved one? 

Sources: Treehugger, Sweet Organics and Naturals, Voltaic Systems, Reader’s Digest Canada

Image by evoo73, licensed under Creative Commons

Phil Werst knows a lot about sustainable cuisine. As the general manager of Minneapolis’ Common Roots Café, Werst is charged with designing made-from-scratch menus that make flavorful use of local bounty and organic ingredients. Several times a week, you can find the eco-minded chef cycling back from the farmers market, his bike trailer loaded down with the season’s goodies.

We told Werst about our Sustainable Seafood special project—an online repository of recipes, news, and resources inspired by our recent excerpt of Bottomfeeder: How to eat ethically in a world of vanishing seafood—and the chef agreed to dream up something delicious for Utne.com’s readers. This past Saturday, he showed Utne librarian Danielle Maestretti and me how to prepare Baked Trout with Roasted Root Vegetable Farro Risotto and Butternut Squash Puree.

A word of warning: I nearly died of happiness when I shoveled the first bite of Werst’s dish into my mouth. The roasted root vegetables heartily stood up against the dense, nutty warmth of the farro risotto, and the butternut squash puree, a food too often prepared overly sweet, was refreshingly spiked with apple cider vinegar and a hint of cayenne. And the fish, well. Fresh from Star Prairie Trout Farm, the trout wasn’t just amazingly tasty—it was surprisingly easy to prepare. (If you’ve never removed pinbones before, Werst demonstrates the technique in a video below.)

Baked Trout with Roasted Root Vegetable Farro Risotto and Butternut Squash Puree

Serves six.

Trout and Farro Risotto: 4 medium carrots; 2 bulbs celery root; 4 medium parsnips; 3 tablespoons olive oil (plus some for drizzling); 1 medium yellow onion, diced; 2 cloves of garlic, chopped; ½ teaspoon chili flakes; ½ teaspoon fennel seed; 2 cups organic farro, dry; 1 cup mild white wine; 1 quart vegetable stock; 3 cups arugula; 1 tablespoon unsalted butter; 3 whole trout; Salt and pepper

Butternut Squash Puree: 1 medium butternut squash; 1 cup vegetable stock (plus some for thinning); ¼ cup apple cider vinegar; Pinch cayenne; 2 tablespoons maple syrup; Salt and pepper.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

The butternut squash will take the most time in the oven, so begin by chopping the squash in half and laying it face down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Put the squash in the oven. You’ll roast it until a knife inserted offers little resistance, 45 minutes to an hour.

Peel the carrots, parsnips, and celery root bulbs. Slice the parsnips in half lengthwise, and then again; remove the woody core. Chop all the vegetables into quarter-inch cubes. Toss them with 2 tablespoons olive oil, salt, and some fresh-cracked pepper. Transfer them to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and put them in the oven. They’ll roast for 15-20 minutes, but keep an eye on them. The cubes should be tender but not crispy.

While your vegetables are roasting, bring the vegetable stock to a simmer in a medium saucepan. As the stock warms, place a large pot over medium heat—this is where you will cook the risotto. When the large pot is hot, add 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add the onions and garlic, stirring until translucent. Add the chili flakes, fennel seed, one tablespoon salt, and farro. Stir for two minutes and then add the white wine. Stir until the wine is almost completely dissolved. Ladle in warm vegetable stock 1 cup at a time, stirring frequently. Remove from heat when the grain is cooked but still slightly chewy. Stir in the unsalted butter and set to the side.

Provided they’re done cooking, pull the squash and the roasted root vegetables out of the oven and set aside to cool—it’s time to prepare your trout. You can purchase trout fillets with the pinbones already removed, but it’s really quite easy to prepare your own. Werst demonstrates the technique:

Place the trout fillets skin-side-down on a parchment lined baking tray. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil, and season lightly with salt and fresh-cracked pepper. Depending on the idiosyncrasies of your oven, the fillets will take 8 to 12 minutes to bake. When they are done, the flesh will be opaque pink and firm to the touch. Bake until cooked through and remove from the oven.

While the trout is in the oven, remove the seeds from the cooled squash. Scoop out the squash meat and put it in a food processor. Add 1 cup of vegetable stock and apple cider vinegar. Puree for 30 seconds. Add cayenne and maple syrup. Puree again. The squash should be silky smooth and slide easily off of a spoon; add additional stock as needed. Salt to taste.

Stir the roasted vegetables, arugula, and ½ cup butternut squash puree into the farro risotto. Salt and pepper to taste.

In large pasta bowls, place one cup farro risotto in the center, and gently transfer a trout filet on top of the grain. Drizzle generously with butternut squash puree. Note: Excess puree, thinned with additional stock, will make a delicious soup.

Forget Oktoberfest, here comes Octoberfish: a month-long celebration of sustainable seafood from the consumer group Food & Water Watch. The international nonprofit has put together a calendar of events, including simple direct actions (such as sending an e-mail against fish farming in the Gulf of Mexico) and sustainable seafood menus.

To read about why eating seafood ethically is environmentally essential, visit our Sustainable Seafood Special Online Project, which includes an illuminating excerpt from Taras Grescoe’s book Bottomfeeder. Stay tuned, too. Next week, we’ll post an exclusive sustainable seafood recipe from chef Phil Werst, general manager at Minneapolis’ locavore haunt, Common Roots Café.

Image by tarotastic, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s difficult to tell the difference between ethical, sustainable seafood and the environmentally destructive fish you find on many menus. The seafood industry wreaks havoc on the environment, using massive ocean trawlers that destroy ancient habitats and kill massive amounts of fish unnecessarily. In the September-October issue of Utne Reader, Taras Grescoe, author of the book Bottomfeeder, helps readers navigate the confusing world of seafood and find delicious fish that can be eaten with a clear conscience.

For the latest episode of the UtneCast, I talked with Grescoe about the ways that everyone can enjoy healthy, sustainable seafood without destroying the environment.

You can listen to the interview below, or to subscribe to the UtneCast for free through iTunes, click here.

Listen Now:

 Interveiw with Taras Grescoe on Sustainable Seafood: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

For more information on ethical seafood, visit www.utne.com/seafood.

No, I don’t mean on an energy-efficient treadmill. Get a wild workout the good old-fashioned way—doing chores. According to Nicolette Loizou of the Ecologist (article not available online), Green Gyms, which are gaining popularity in the UK, revolve around the idea of conservation and gardening volunteerism as a workout. The UK now has 95 Green Gyms, where you can expend your calories while nurturing the great outdoors.

BTCV, a charitable environmental organization in Doncaster, UK, began its Green Gym 10 years ago. More than 10,000 people have since volunteered to improve local green spaces, as well as their own fitness. Typical tasks can be anything from digging soil and planting trees to sawing logs for building a sheep enclosure. And just like a workout routine with a personal trainer, BTCV leads groups in pre-workout warm-up exercises.

Aside from the obvious benefits of improving physical health and our natural surroundings, participants felt that the skills they learned helped to improve their mental health, self-esteem and confidence, reports Loizou.

A single Green Gym session usually lasts around three hours—for free. So instead of hiking it across spinning rubber, grab a shovel and dig—a tree is waiting to be planted. Exercise never felt so worthwhile.

(Thanks, Ecologist.)

Image by  alexindigo , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

Farm animals are beginning to breathe (and move) a little easier. After much pushing by U.S. voters and European Union policy reforms, farming companies the world over are finally changing their animal confinement policies, Ben Block reports on Worldwatch.org. Besides the impact on animal welfare, close confinement also spreads disease and  increases pollution and bacteria resistance, things that can and do affect human health. Farmers, as well as food industry giants like Burger King and Safeway, are responding to customer concern and have begun to phase out inhumane confinement practices such as breeding pig crates and chicken battery cages.

Image by  Rephotography , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

David Suzuki truly has a passion. His lifelong dedication to the environment spans across his many endeavors; most notably, he is a broadcaster, a scientist, an activist, and an author of 43 books. A Passion for This Earth (David Suzuki Foundation and Greystone Books, 2008), however, is not Suzuki’s book at all, but the product of his remarkable ability to inspire people to think critically, personally, and practically about our environment. A collection of essays from writers, scientists, and activists, the book presents an extensive selection of voices about a common passion: the earth and our role in its capacity to flourish.

Edited by Michelle Benjamin, A Passion for This Earth boasts a foreword by Bill McKibben, environmentalist and acclaimed author of several books including The End of Nature and Deep Economy. The essays range from the urgent call for action of Doug Moss’ “Save the Environment—Take Back the Media” to the anecdotal nature of David Helvarg’s “Saved by the Sea”:

As a young kid, I’d looked up at the stars and gotten pissed off, thinking I’d been born a generation too soon to explore other worlds. But that week in Key West I got hold of a mask and snorkel and got into the water and saw live rocks, and vibrant colors, sea cucumbers and a queen conch, a sea turtle and a small hammerhead gliding through a coral canyon amid shoaling fish and realized there was this whole other alien world right beyond the seawall. Sadly, in the blink of an eye that’s been my life, the Keys reef has gone from 90 percent live coral cover to less than 10 percent, devastated by pollution, physical impacts from boats, anchors and people and global warming.

A Passion for This Earth is a satisfying fusion of appreciation for nature and political activism that stems from the natural diversity of our earth, of the problems that face it and the people who choose to tackle the issues.

Advertisements are the invasive species of the urban world, seeking out every available space to spawn a message. The latest marketing slot is wrapped around free water bottles at just about any business you can imagine. Whether you are browsing around at a car dealership, shopping at a department store, or getting your teeth cleaned, there’s a good chance that a free bottle of water sporting the company slogan is waiting for you to grab it up.

And it’s not an unsuccessful ad campaign, because it banks on a widespread weakness for free product and stats that show Americans guzzle twice as much bottled water as they did just 10 years ago. Amy Roe, a senior editor for the Bear Deluxe, a quarterly magazine of environmental issues and creative arts, writes in “Message in a Bottle” (article not available online), “Taking free things is easy to rationalize, hard to resist. (Free food, as we all know, doesn’t really have calories.)”

Likewise, the environmental impacts of free items are often easier to disregard than items you pay for. It’s not hard to see, however, that free plastic water bottles are not an eco-friendly way to publicize a brand. Recyclable, yes—but 90 percent of plastic water bottles still end up in the trash or littered on the ground, according to the Sierra Club.

The good news is that some people are starting to avoid plastic bottles, opting for municipal water instead. Bear Deluxe reports that the West Coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, and Vancouver have all made similar efforts to phase out the use of plastic water bottles at city functions, an earth-conscious change that has additionally benefited San Francisco with a savings of $500,000 a year.

We’re accustomed to being bombarded with unnecessary free products in our culture, and Amy Roe is great at bringing the uselessness of those trends to surface. The Utne Reader recently reprinted another Roe article from the Bear Deluxe, “Tee-d Off,” that fleshes out the ills of race-day T-shirts, which are often used just once and subsequently shipped off to countries where they were most likely originally made.

(Thanks, Bear Deluxe.)

Image by  shrff14 , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

With the Senate’s passage last week of a ban on lead in children’s toys, it’s tempting to think that we’ve taken care of that nasty old lead problem. But we’ve taken care of just a small part of it. The fact remains that many children are still exposed to lead in the environment, even if they don’t regularly suck on toxic Thomas the Tank Engines.

Children are indeed at higher risk from lead exposure than adults, the Alliance for Healthy Homes reminds us, though the greatest source of exposure isn’t toys but the paint in old homes (PDF), specifically the dust created when paint is damaged during home renovations.

Unfortunately, cleaning up this source has less public oomph—and thus political power—behind it than the toy scare. That’s why the Environmental Protection Agency, ordered by Congress in 1992 to address the danger of lead in home renovations, took until March this year to actually do something. And even then it was a baby step, requiring contractors who fix up older homes and other buildings occupied by children to take simple precautions against creating and spreading lead dust. The cleaning must then be verified—by the same workers who do the lead removal. The rule doesn’t take effect until 2010.

“In the 16 years since we’ve been waiting for this rule, at least 17 million children have been exposed to harmful levels of lead unnecessarily, permanently losing IQ points as a result,” the Alliance for Healthy Homes said in a statement (PDF). “The new regulation is an important first step toward preventing another generation from being poisoned by debris left behind after a remodeling job.”

The Alliance went on to criticize the lack of teeth in the new rule and encouraged the EPA to take additional steps, including banning “dry scraping,” which generates lots of hard-to-clean lead dust and increases exposure; requiring formal lead-safe training of all workers, not just their supervisors; and strengthening its enforcement. I suggest going even further and enhancing the educational effort aimed at do-it-yourself remodelers, who every weekend haul out their scrapers, sanders, and demolition bars and release tons of lead dust into the air, often unknowingly.

Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can retard children's mental and physical development, reduce attention span and delay fetal development, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Alarming new studies have even linked childhood lead exposure to adult crime and brain damage. Let’s use the awareness generated by the toy scare to tackle this lurking environmental threat.

Image by skidrd, licensed under Creative Commons.

Soon, Galactic Pizza-delivering superheroes might have to share Minnesota streets with another group jockeying to put more fuel-efficient vehicles on the road.

With a $10,000 grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a group of Minnesota high school students on the Experimental Vehicle Team created an electric motorcycle that could hit a top speed of 60 mph and goes 40 miles before recharging. It looks like the result of “mating a mutant soybean with a Vespa scooter,” writes Minnesota Public Radio. The bike’s unorthodox design stems from concerns over rider safety. Along with a seat belt, the bike has a body that encloses the rider, “designed for crumple zones so that it will take the energy from an accident and dissipate it,” team member Tom Lenertz told KSAX-TV. 

You won’t see a fleet of these bikes on the road anytime soon, however. Talks to register and license the original bike with the Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles have been ongoing since March, says team advisor Mark Westlake. “They keep asking for the model and who made it,” says Westlake. “And we’re like, well, we made it ourselves. We don't really have a model name for it.” Sounds like the Experimental Vehicle Team could use some marketing help. Any suggestions? 

(Thanks, City Pages.)

It's tempting to succumb to liberal guilt when “everything from melting ice caps to parched croplands threaten an all but certain apocalypse—on our watch,” as we wrote in the March-April issue of Utne Reader, but it turns out there's less to be guilty about than we thought. Tuesday’s New York Times assures us that 10 things we worry about are no cause for concern. From defending the harmlessness of hot dogs and plastic bags to claiming BPA in plastic bottles is not harmful to humans, the list will irk many, even as it frees a few to scarf down a foot-long, take a swig from their Nalgene, and crank up their car’s AC.

For mothers (and fathers) who want more out of a parenting magazine than five ways to feed your child vegetables, the Mother explores natural parenting from pre-birth into adult life. Seeking to create a holistic lifestyle for your children, yourself as a parent, and your larger community, the UK-based magazine is anything but conventional.

The July-August 2008 issue includes “The Activist Parent,” by Dr. Richard House, which emphasizes the importance of finding “ ‘personal power’ to stand up for one’s truth” and details the defining features a parent who embraces that ideal. An “activist parent” is informed and honest and often participates in some form of “principled non-compliance,” such as refusing to subject his or her children to standardized testing, among other avant-garde attributes.

In the same issue, an article by Anton Saxon shows how to turn your city into a Transition Town. A movement founded by environmentalist Rob Hopkins, the Transition Town concept examines how a community can self-organize to decrease the effects of global warming and meet the challenges of peak oil.

If, however, you would like to know how to get your child to eat his or her greens, the Mother is not without its share of practical parenting information. In it, you can find delicious vegan recipes and suggestions for protecting your children from sun damage the nontoxic way.

Shopping malls, once proud bastions of air-conditioned capitalism, are transforming into less self-contained structures, reports OnEarth, a result of competition from strip malls and big-box retailers.

“In 2006 there was only one new enclosed mall built in this country,” says Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s archi­tecture program. In the 1990s, Durham-Jones says, it was common to see 140 new malls each year. Now, dozens of malls are dead or dying (witness the long list of the deceased at DeadMalls.com). To revitalize struggling malls, developers are converting them into “compact, well-planned, walkable communities with a dense mix of homes and small businesses” in communities from New Jersey to Colorado.

Mall makeovers tips in New Urban News include adding upper-floor housing, outdoor-facing stores, parking ramps in place of parking lots, and pedestrian connections to nearby neighborhoods.

“A lot of bad design practices are being resolved, knitting these malls back into the neighborhoods,” says designer Richard Huffman to New Urban News.

Outdated zoning laws obstruct mall conversions, urban policy specialist Christopher Leinberger tells OnEarth, but he believes increasing demand for "walkable urban living" will provide the necessary momentum to keep malls evolving.

Image by Nate Grigg, licensed under Creative Commons.