Can renting cars by the hour and crashing in strangers’ spare bedrooms really change the economy?

My latest cover story in the Washington City Paper allowed me to call on a couple of years of personal experiences as a “collaborative consumer.” I also got to talk to other people using D.C.’s car and bike shares, Airbnb and eatFeastly hosts, as well as a bunch of pundits who say the burgeoning “sharing economy” is ushering in big changes in the way we live.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Sharing enthusiasts see a future with less pollution, inefficiency, and injustice—not to mention fewer cars. But sharing services aren’t always green (you can, after all, share a private jet). They seem more likely—not less—to accentuate class differences and perpetuate the same bad behavior on commercial, labor, and environmental fronts that everything that came before them did. And while sharing depends on high-tech social media and smartphone apps, in many ways the collaborative world harkens back to the past: to barter systems; the hyper-localism of preautomobile societies; and the almost small-town importance of reputation, which will increasingly follow us around as “data exhaust” that could replace the credit rating. Still, the changes afoot are propelled by decidedly 21st century realities: population growth, booming cities, rising costs, and shrinking personal space.

READ THE STORY

If I hadn’t become a journalist, I may have taken up sociology.  I’m fascinated about what makes society work; how people think and why; and how different cultures can come to very different views — or sometimes very similar ones — through different — or remarkably the same — experiences and approaches.

At the beginning of my career, I had the good fortune to spend six years in Mexico writing about everything from Mexican cinema to the country’s political elections and economic development for the Dallas Morning News and other newspapers.

This year, I’ve had a chance to reconnect with this interest in “the general assignment,” as in general assignment reporting. As the managing editor of the new Latino cultural site, Hola Cultura, I spend part of every day now focused on the arts and humanities.  Besides becoming more fluent in online video and other forms of multimedia communication, which are most certainly the future of journalism, the work has reconnected me to a past love: reporting on Hispanic culture.

While running holacultura.com is a blast, I haven’t lost interest in stories about environmental issues and their connections to most aspects of life — a web of relationships often reflected upon in art. Since it’s been awhile since I updated this site, here’s a roundup of environmental stories I’ve published in recent months:

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year I had an assignment investigating the links between climate change and weather. In the course of the reporting I talked to a Yale pollster who says last year’s extraordinary weather — dry and drought-like or rainy and flooded  in most places — has done more to convince people that the climate is indeed changing than any number of increasingly urgent reports like this one from the OECD.

For the story, I spoke with climate scientists too, and learned about efforts to better pinpoint when rising global temperatures play a role in a particular extreme of weather. It’s a still evolving area of science. Controversy rages.  Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has perhaps most riled his colleagues — not to mention climate change contrarians and non-believers — by suggesting that today global warming should be considered a factor in all weather.  Not all climate scientists agree — one even called it a “crap idea” in a major UK newspaper! But Trenberth hasn’t backed off. He elaborates on the idea in a new article due out this spring.

You can read all about this (and much more!) in my just published cover story in E Magazine. There’s also a sidebar on the impact to harvests and water supplies if the world remains on its current trajectory toward 10+ degrees Fahrenheit of warming.

If you still have time, check out my piece on Italy’s growing woes with the “ecomafia.”

Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, creative commons license

In this year’s Solar Decathlon  wrapped up earlier this month with 19 homes – more than half of which cost less than $300,000 to build. Affordability was one of the 10 categories on which the homes are judged this year in the biannual competition pitting universities from around the United States and a few foreign countries. The new cost/affordability bar, which replaced the lighting contest, inspired the student designers to drive down the cost considerably. According to the event’s sponsor, U.S. Department of Energy, this year’s houses were about 33 percent cheaper this year than those that competed two years ago.  “Solar for less” was just one of the industry trends reflected in this year’s entries.

Read my story in Architecture Week.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published my story on a new neighborhood of energy self-sufficient homes at prices affordable to middle class buyers. The North Pointe duplexes and townhouses going up in Frederick, Md. will use much less electricity than most homes and the 20 or so rooftop solar panels should be enough to cover what’s needed to provide heating, air conditioning and keep the lights.

In the article I also reference other green homes in the Washington area, including the region’s first Passive House super-energy efficient home I wrote about in Bethesda Magazine last year. That house also runs on impressively little energy — using the body heat of residents to provide much of the heat. As incredible as that sounds, it’s true. Last year, I went to Germany with a group of environmental journalists to visit several “passive houses” including an apartment cooperative and a school built using this super-insulated, passive-solar approach.  (The building method originating in Germany. In German, it’s called Passivhaus with “haus” refers to all kinds of structures.)

Tens of thousands of these homes have been built in Europe in the last few decades but they were virtually unknown in American green building circles until last than a decade ago.

The only draw back to the Bethesda Passive House is it’s price tag in the $1.4 million range. The great irony of the green building world is that “green” homes tend to be McMansions. They are often so big their size has undercut friendly environmental aims. Could the advent of Fredrick’s  “net zero” neighborhood mean deep green homes may soon be within reach for the rest of us?

I was on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning discussing my new E Magazine cover story on what happens after little, trusted and/or organic companies get bought out by big corporations. Can they be trusted?

You can download the segment here.  Or click here to listen.

“Sellouts” – that’s pretty much how the founders of trusted little and/or organic outfits tend to be seen after they sell to corporate America. While that conclusion is often true, it turns out to be a bit more complicated. I looked at the question from several perspectives in  my package of stories for E Magazine. It was fantastic to have the time to take a serious look at the various factors and pressures facing these companies. Check them out!

The Big Green Buyout
Countless Green Brands Have Been Snapped Up By Big Corporations. Can They Still Be Trusted?

Building a Responsible Brand
Advice from Four Green CEOs

The Little Company That Could
Organic Cereal Maker Nature’s Path Has Charted Its Own Course and Thrived