The most environmentally ethical way to deal with the waste of Thanksgiving feasts is to go to somebody else's house or a restaurant, so you can "let others worry about it." But millions of us who hosted the holiday dinner are now left with the additional work/guilt of doing something with all the rotting containers of increasingly gross five-day-old leftovers in the fridge.

The EPA says that "food waste" is now the "largest component of municipal solid waste being sent to landfills," at more than 33 million tons per year. That's good, because it means that recyclables like cardboard and aluminum and plastic are no longer the bulk of stuff [...]

One of the worst things about summer, at least in New York City, is that by the time the Fourth of July rolls around, you’re pretty much ready for it to be over. It’s beyond hot, everyone has stains down the middle of their backs and under their armpits, you can’t afford a beach vacation, you’re crushed into subway cars touching other people’s sweaty arms and legs in ways that would fall under a definition of intimate relations in almost any other scenario. For these reasons and more, it’s a good idea to stop and pay tribute to the daylily.

Lately in my travels through the blogosphere, I've detected increasing unhappiness with the intrusive nature of what could be called our "brand economy." As someone who identifies with this discontent, I was led to wonder if branding has actually grown more intense in recent years, or if by getting older-in the way one generation always complains about the next-I'm more impatient with the status quo of our more-or-less-in-theory capitalist system. After all, it's hardly controversial to say that since the dawn of mass production, and perhaps even earlier, we've lived in a "brand-driven" society; it's natural for companies to make products and advertise with the expectation that customers will [...]

On a recent trip to Vero Beach, I was interested and a little dismayed-in a way that's probably unavoidable in Florida when you consider the ongoing clash between the lush vegetation and strip-mall civilization-to learn that my parents' condominium is situated on the former site of a large botanical garden. Originally called Jungle Garden, it was built in 1922 on land purchased by Arthur McKee and Waldo Sexton (an engineer and a citrus grower, respectively) who like many of today's rich-ass motherfuckers financial leaders were obsessed with orchids and water lilies, and brought rare specimens from around the world to showcase to the interested public.

In the decade-plus I've lived in Washington Heights, I had never been to Fort Tryon Park in February, but this year, motivated by a resolution to run more (a resolution that slipped by in January), I went twice. The first time was on the weekend of the snowstorm that walloped much of the East Coast but managed to miss New York City, stopping-or so I heard-at Staten Island. After heading north on Fort Washington Avenue, which ascends along the western ridge of upper Manhattan, I arrived at the park on 190th Street, where I was greeted by a crescent of elegant sycamore trees and a coterie of chirping sparrows. [...]

As I turned on to City Island Avenue, the first thing I noted was a series of magnificent trees, all eviscerated so as not to interfere with the almighty power lines. 'Can't Bloomberg do something about this?' I asked Stephen and we both laughed, knowing that the mayor has only been north of 96th Street ___ times during his 10,000 years in office, much less to any part of the Bronx beyond a 500-foot radius of Yankee Stadium.

On the taxi ride from the 'Ronald Reagan' National Airport, the majestic trees lining the Potomac cannot completely overcome a manicured sterility of the landscape that seems appropriately Orwellian, given the proximity of the Pentagon. Unlike so many great urban parks-e.g., Rock Creek Park, just a few miles away-which beckon with the allure of brief, anonymous sexual encounters, the most prominent 'cruising' in this stretch of Virginia seemed to be that of a police vehicle intruding in the shot, as if to warn against even imagining what might be going on in the back seats of those parked cars in the distance.

"Planting the vegetables when the moon was in different constellations, she discovered, resulted in their growing into different forms and sizes. Over years of research she concluded that root crops (including onions and leeks, which are not technically root crops) do best if sown when the moon is passing through constellations associated with the earth element; leafy crops do best when the moon is associated with water signs; flowering plants do best associated with air signs, and fruits did better with fire signs." —German gardener Maria Thun, who put the "biodynamics" theory of cosmic, occultist philosopher Rudolph Steiner to test in her garden and wrote a popular [...]