Sarah Laskow

We don’t value dirt. It’s bad to be dirty. Taboo words are “dirty.” An object of little to no value is “cheaper than dirt.” But dirt deserves some respect. It’s incredibly valuable: Without dirt, we would not eat. And, like oil or coal, dirt is a nonrenewable resource. When topsoil disappears from erosion, it takes […]

One reason that New Yorkers use so much less energy than other people? A lot of us don’t go very far to get to work. In its annual study of New York City housing and neighborhood, New York University’s Furman Center looked for the first time at commuting patterns and found that “11.5% of employed […]

I wrote back in March that Republicans were unhappy with the administration’s “wild lands” policy, which lets the Department of the Interior use public lands for conservation. The policy doesn’t put public lands out of commission permanently but provides the option to keep the land wild, instead of developing it for uses like recreation or […]

The Christian Science Monitor does a good job of putting the wildfires raging across Texas into context: Drenching rains from hurricane Alex last July caused a huge plant bloom, which was largely killed off by this year’s uncommonly cold winter across the southern US and northern Mexico. Added to the driest March in state history, […]

The White House wants everyone to know that the deal President Obama cut with Speaker Boehner over the weekend counts as “the largest annual spending cut in our history.” That’s as measured in total dollars, of course. The cuts account for less than 1 percent of the government’s overall spending and can’t compete with massive […]

Most of the time, we hear about how climate change is going to engender destruction, create refugees, and generally wreak havoc. But it’s also going to create all sorts of little disparities in privilege, like, for instance, who gets to go to the beach. In the new issue of Orion magazine, writer and climate activist […]

The big story this morning in New York, where most people don’t have friends or family who’ll be directly affected by the government shut down, is the resignation of Cathie Black, Mayor Bloomberg‘s choice for education chancellor. It’s not entirely clear yet if Black’s resignation was driven by a recent poll that put her approval […]

The Cutline’s Joe Pompeo tells how on Tuesday, The New York Times’ Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was asked about the impact of the paper’s paywall on low-income readers. His answer: “Just translate that question to print,” he said. “How will low-income people get access to the New York Times in print? Imagine we were 20 years […]

Today might be the day that the Senate votes on stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate carbon. Yesterday, the Office of Management and Budget released a statement that criticized the House version of this legislation and promised, “If the President is presented with this legislation … his senior advisors would recommend […]

Most of New York City’s carbon comes from its buildings. No one has been doing much about this problem, because neither building owners nor tenants wanted to foot the bill for installing energy-efficient improvements, the former because they wouldn’t benefit from the lower energy bills and the latter because they wouldn’t necessarily be in the […]