OnEarth contributing editor Elizabeth Royte also writes for the New York Times Book Review, which called her "no stranger to the pleasures and perils of chasing errant pieces of plastic and other castoffs to surprising (and often disgusting) places." She’s the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It and Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.
Urban Farming is Booming, But What Does it Really Yield?
City-based agriculture produces 15 to 20 percent of food globally. In the U.S., its benefits go far beyond nutrition.
April 29, 2015
The Play’s the Thing
Politically, America may still have a long way to go before everybody’s on the same page with regard to anthropogenic climate change and the imperative to take immediate action.
May 15, 2014
An Accident Waiting to Happen
In 2013, 69 percent of Bakken oil traveled by rail; that percentage is expected to reach 90 percent this year.
February 26, 2014
Scraps and the City
Food and other organic material (by which I mean yard waste and prunings) make up a whopping 25 percent of New York’s residential waste stream: that’s a huge amount to potentially divert from landfills and incinerators. Compost it instead and we’d be saving the city money (New York spends more than $330 million a year hauling waste to landfills) and avoiding the generation of the greenhouse gas methane, which is produced when organic material rots in the airless confines of a dump.
May 24, 2013