Posts by: nicole

The guilty pleasure of reading

When I was a little girl, I read a stack of Berenstein Bears books every morning before I would do anything else -- and this was before I could officially “read.” This love of reading has persisted throughout my life. I almost always have a book with me nowadays, as my TerraPass colleagues can attest. Unfortunately, the business of publishing… read more →

Project spotlight: Pagel’s Ponderosa Dairy

I suspect most of us spent this past Sunday participating, albeit virtually, in that annual American ritual otherwise known as the Super Bowl. With the newly crowned Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers back at home in Wisconsin, it’s a good time to revisit the second-most important fact about Green Bay: it’s a mere 25 miles from Pagel’s Ponderosa Dairy,… read more →

Advanced recycling for environmental ninjas

I spent last week visiting some of the landfills TerraPass works with to create carbon offsets. As always, it was great to see these projects and the positive impact they're having firsthand. But spending so much time around so much trash really drove home how important recycling is for decreasing one's personal impact on the planet. Paper, plastic, and metal… read more →

Cadillac Desert

I just finished reading the environmental classic *Cadillac Desert,* by Marc Reisner. The book tells the story of water policy in the Western United States from the mid-1800s (the time of John Wesley Powell's exploration of the region) to the early 1990s. The strategy of damming and diverting the region's rivers over the past 150 years to encourage settlement has… read more →

China wrestles with carbon footprint

The U.S. and China collectively emit over 40% of greenhouse gas emissions, so relations between the two nations are rightly seen as central to a new global climate treaty. After a visit this week from Todd Stern, the United States' top climate negotiator, China declared it would not accept binding emissions reduction targets at this time, a position Stern accepts… read more →

Securing carbon in our soil

Everybody knows plants store carbon. But soils do too. That's the idea behind organic no-till farming, a cultivation technique that could dramatically increase soil carbon storage across the globe. Research has shown organic farming methods sequester more carbon per acre than fossil fuel-based conventional methods. While scientists are still fleshing out the reasons for this, one likely cause is the… read more →