As I write this, I have just left the LOHAS conference in Boulder, Colo. early after really struggling with the sessions. I’m not totally sure why, but one thing has become very clear to me, and that is that the idealistic discussions and opinions haven’t changed: big is bad, don’t sell out, why aren’t the

On Father’s Day, my family took me out to dinner at a restaurant that serves grass-fed and finished beef and local wild seafood, only two varieties of which were in season: ling cod and sculpin. This enabled us to discuss matters of sustainability related to food without feeling guilty about what we were eating for

The on-line magazine, GreenBiz.com, carried an article recently by editor Joel Makower alleging that green marketing by companies is, in effect, dead, and two rebuttals from the heads of firms that specialize in motivating consumers to make more beneficial choices.  I won’t bother going into their main arguments here  because the point I’d like to

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkRKeGzXMq8?rel=0] With more than 700 in attendance at last week’s Sustainable Brands Conference in Monterey, Calif., the sessions were as full as I can remember. The energy level seems to be especially high among big brands to be part of this movement. But what, exactly, is the movement? My feeling is that every company

The importance of building bridges in adversarial situations was brought home to me recently by none other than that veteran negotiator, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, with whom I spent some time hanging out during the recent Middle East Economic Future Conference in Doha, Qatar.  Listening to him counsel young Egyptian revolutionaries to sit down and

World Oceans Day, the international day of ocean conservation, is an occasion that I and the people I work with at Ocean Aid would like to see become as celebrated as Earth Day – a goal that seems perfectly reasonable in light of the fact that approximately 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered

The Discovery Channel should be ashamed of itself for turning the deliberate extermination of a majestic species into entertainment. I’m referring to the series, “Swords,” which glorifies the various captains and crews whose pursuit of swordfish  –“hunting for giants,” as the network’s Web site terms it – makes it ever more likely that these remarkable

If you think of the Earth as a gigantic spaceship and think of the oceans as its largest renewable source of oxygen – responsible for generating 70 percent of the amount in our atmosphere – you’ll have an idea of just how much our lives depend on the health of the marine environment. The fact

In the vast undersea ecosystem, little fish, from Antarctic krill and menhaden to sardines and anchovies, are the ones that matter most. You don’t have to be a marine biologist to understand  the fact that larger species depend on the existence of much smaller ones for their survival – and that if you have the

If there’s one thing that the upcoming global observance of  World Oceans Day on June 8 should make us think about, it’s the profound impact that our individual behavior can have on the marine environment. Take cigarette smoking, for example. The fact that it has long been known to be a health hazard, not only