The great American Southwest is mecca for many to get out of their skins and absorb big sky and red rock. But inspiring enough to start a shoe line?

Yes, my southwestern sister.

After Manimal founder/designer, Kristen Lombardi, took her first trip to the desert (she a native New Englander), she was completely inspired to create shoes capturing the essence of the space.

She says her interest in traditional costumes and animal forms also influences the design of each moccasin and accessory (she has great jewelry and bags too), with her design …

As Fashion Editor of EcoSalon and owner of an eco-boutique I talk to a lot of designers. This was my first time going to Market Week in NYC as both and it was as thrilling as it was tiring.

Market Week, if you haven’t been, is where clothing designers worldwide show their seasonal collections in New York City. Buyers from stores large and small come here to buy what best represents their brand. It is a tough, tedious job and forges a deeper appreciation for the fashion industry beyond hitting …

Boeing must think radioactive waste is mighty tasty. After all, they’ve allowed plenty of it to sit at one of their research facilities and seep into the surrounding community. So naturally, some students who want the company to clean up its toxic mess at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory thought that offering a bribe of “˜meltdown morsels’ and other radioactive sweets might do the trick.

But the “Teens Against Toxins”, a group of tenth-graders at Oak Park High School in Southern California, must have realized that what Boeing wants above all is money, …

Soot, screeching sirens and forbidding skyscrapers; is this your definition of the big city? Think again. The urban landscape might seem like the epicenter of everything that’s wrong with the world, but in fact cities are where some of the most interesting components of the green movement are currently taking place.

With everything from urban farms and electric cars, large cities are surprisingly livable, and now there’s another trend on the rise: urban hiking. Living the city life has long been equated with staying indoors and neglecting to feed …

Facebook is the second largest website in the US and the default social network of many environmental activists, where they (ok, we) go to develop supportive networks, raise awareness and funds for good causes. It’s also a platform for some excellent, environmental-fundraising games like Lil’ Green Patch (acquired by social games company Playdom in 2009) and Sea Garden (a MobScience game).

Obviously the environmental community, on and off Facebook, felt betrayed when the social media leader, in late January, announced its plans to build a data center …

Is space worth it?

Another year, another whirl of astronautical triumphs and failures, all at the taxpayer’s expense. With environmental problems already testing us to our limits, do we really need to go in search of the mysteries of the universe?

Not Worth It

Space eats money. The technical challenges of space exploration, particularly the manned variety, are such that any extraterrestrial venture is fabulously expensive. NASA’s 2007 budget? $16 billion. Accompanying this massive outlay is the failure rate. Space is the most hostile environment we know of – yet we’re launching super-expensive machinery …

No matter how confused the media appear about what eco fashion is, one mantra rings true: to create a sustainable wardrobe is to buy clothes designed to survive the short-lived trend cycle.

Happily, this theme appears to have dovetailed, so that timeless chic will be what we soon find in our favorite stores. Understatement and restraint seems to have tied together the designs shown during New York Fashion Week and the Green Shows.

Donna Karan, celebrating her label’s 25th year, declared she was going back to basics (together with …

Mayor, mayor, on the wall: Who is the greenest of them all?

My neighboring hometown across the Bay, San Francisco, makes all the greenest cities lists, with its mayor, Gavin Newsom, regularly billed as “America’s Greenest Mayor.” But behind the glossy Priuses, how green is SF?

Google “country’s greenest mayor” and you get some interesting results. Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake City, comes up first. Greg Nickels, former mayor of Seattle, also gets some hits. Then there’s Chicago’s Richard Daly, New York’s …