Images by B. Alter It's been Fairtrade Fortnight, and in celebration Starbucks has released a special new Fairtrade coffee from Rwanda. It's part of their complete switch-over last year to selling only 100% Fairtrade espresso-based coffees in the UK and Ireland. This makes Starbucks the largest buyer of Fairtrade Certified Coffee in the world which is pretty impressive, no matter what you think of them. This TreeHugger was invited to a Starbucks tasting and informal discussion with coffee farmers and producers from Costa Rica and Tanzania. As a long-time anything-but-Starbucks coffee drinker, I att...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Trinity College, Dublin TreeHugger loves Product Service Systems, where you borrow and share instead of own. They are also called libraries, and Kris De Decker of No-Tech Magazine points us to a lovely post by Brian Kaller, a former newspaper reporter now living in rural Ireland. He loves his local library, but more importantly, writes about the principle beh...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo via Sheerman-Chase I can't wait to see the comments on this one. Really, I can't. But this is a concept that I think is important to think about, especially at a time when much of the media appears to be buying into the narrative that the science supporting climate change is being 'called into question'. As a result, we're seeing more calls for televised 'debate' than usual, especially from outlets already convinced that global warming is a big hoax. So what's a climate scientist to do when s/he's asked by a skeptic to appear on Fox News to defend the Read the full story on TreeHugger

Image credit: Andrew Zuckerman When Andrew Zuckerman, a renowned commercial photographer, turned his lens on animals, the result was a series of striking images that resonate with emotion. Collected in his book Read the full story on TreeHugger

Lloyd Alter Many small towns are experiencing a comeback these days; a combination of aging boomers and the green movement, combined with technology that lets people work just about anywhere make them a viable alternative to urban and suburban life. Sami has written extensively in TreeHugger about the Transition Town movement, where people are looking for resilient communities that can survive in a crisis. Smaller cities also have character, walkable main streets, apartments above shops that could be attractive to relocating urbanites. Then there are towns like Br...Read the full story on TreeHugger