Update: The photo exhibit Irreplaceable is on display at the San Francisco Public Library gallery through the holidays. It heads to Los Angeles, to the G2 Gallery in Venice, for the month of January. It will move to Washington D.C. in the spring; the dates will be announced.

By Barbara Kessler

Polar bears, penguins and caribou are all facing an uncertain future as global warming melts their arctic climates.

Photo: Wendy Shattil/Bob Rozinski

If only they were the only species at risk. Tragically, these arctic animals have many cousins in similar straits in lower latitudes: From the American Crocodile to the Monarch Butterfly; the Green Sea Turtle to the Mountain Goat; the Grizzly Bear, Lynx, Mountain Yellow-legged Frog, Sugar Maple and Northern Flying Squirrel. An array of amazing mammals and marine life, as well as plants, is imperiled by climate change.

The effects are being observed already, as populations dwindle, critical habitat becomes inhospitable and breeding or wintering grounds warm.

More from GRN

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By John DeFore

The Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, a sixty-plus-year-old lab complex near Chicago, needs an enormous amount of juice to run all its number-crunching computers. But its ratio of computing power to electrical usage just made a leap, thanks to the Blue Gene/P, a supercomputer designed for the Department by IBM.

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By John DeFore

Published to coincide with the historic moment at which, for the first time, more humans live in cities than in the country — and, as the author notes, “one-third of these urban dwellers — more than one billion people — live in slums,” the exceptional photography book The Places We Live puts a human face on appalling environmental issues without resorting to sentimental clichés.

Photographer Jonas Bendiksen does this by not looking for the button-pushing universal image (the malnourished girl with watery eyes, say) but by meeting individual people, listening to their stories, and visiting their homes: The bulk of the book consists of four-panel spreads in which Bendiksen places his camera in the center of a single-room dwelling and photographs its four walls and the inhabitants who share them; accompanying the layouts are first-person narratives that can dispel myths about poverty (as with Shuresh Chandra, who shares an apparently bed-free room with three other grown men despite having a bachelor’s degree) and caution readers against pitying the subjects (”I don’t know how you see my house,” one man says, “but to me it’s beautiful”).

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By John DeFore

Despite efforts to increase recycling, landfills aren’t going away any time soon. But a process called “phytocapping” might drastically reduce their impact on the environment, according to a paper published in the first 2009 issue of the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management. (The full paper can only be seen if purchased, but it is summarized here.)

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Green Right Now

California this week honored 21 companies and organizations with the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards, the state’s highest prize for contributions to environmental issues.

The Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Awards program was established in 1993. Recipients are selected by a large panel of evaluators and the Secretaries of Cal/EPA, the Resources Agency, Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, the Department of Food and Agriculture, the State and Consumer Services Agency, and the Governor’s Office. It honors projects in nine categories.

Here are the 2008 award winners in each category with comments from the California EPA:

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By John DeFore

While you’re sitting around the table on Thursday, be sure that in addition to giving thanks for whatever combination of fowl and starches sits on the plate you also pay due respect to the water in your glass. As a new documentary insists, it’s not something to take for granted.

FLOW (the title’s an acronym for “for love of water”) is a frightening film full of outrages and dispiriting facts about the state of water here and abroad. Stocked with scary tidbits for Americans who take water safety for granted — Can it be that 40% of the brief but nasty illnesses we attribute to “something we ate” are actually caused by water? Can you believe that drugs like Prozac linger in the water supply so long they’re found in the flesh of fish? — it also travels to areas where the scene is more dire: Bolivia, where the World Bank’s insistence on water privatization led to horrible things; India, where dying of water-borne pathogens is commonplace.

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By John DeFore

The world is scrutinizing every shred of news from the Obama camp these days, trying to guess who’ll have an office in the West Wing. But a group of gardeners based in Maine are more focused on what’s going to happen just outside the White House — on the lawn, in fact.

Eat the View is the name of a petition encouraging the Obamas to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn, using the produce both for the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and to feed the hungry at area food pantries.

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By John DeFore

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

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By John DeFore

James Bond has often fought men who sought to bend the Earth to their whims. But this time around, the evil scheme is a tad more realistic than a planet-sized death ray.

In the new Quantum of Solace, which opens tomorrow, the super spy’s personal vendetta (he’s hunting the folks who killed his girlfriend in the last movie) leads him into the world of a big-time operator named Dominic Greene, whose name lends itself to a glitzy organization, Greene Planet, that is ostensibly trying to help the environment and the world’s poor.

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By John DeFore

As more and more individuals and groups set out to re-introduce gardens to urban areas — often citing WWII’s “Victory Gardens” as proof that a large percentage of our food can come from our back yards and vacant lots — the Detroit-headquartered Urban Farming wants to push edible plants into new spaces — like walls.

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By Barbara Kessler

The cork is off the champagne on the presidential election - and many environmentalists who’ve felt stifled by the Bush Administration’s indifference, hostility or lukewarm interest in ecological issues, including global warming, are giddy with new possibilities.

Frances Beinecke, head of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, sounded buoyant in an address on the NRDC website: “Barack Obama’s election is a huge win for everyone exhausted from playing defense. Count us among them. It rekindles our hope that environmental protection may be restored to its rightful place as a treasured American value.”

Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, was no less ebullient. “America embraced change today. And the planet will be better for it,” he announced.

Karpinski noted that, along with Obama, the nation also elected some environmental-minded senators, such as cousins Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), from a family with a long conservation history.

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By John DeFore

Pretenders bandleader Chrissie Hynde has been visible for years as a vegetarian and PETA supporter, but her latest album nods to the well-being of the plant world as well.

The first copies of the band’s new album Break up the Concrete come wrapped in a half-sleeve made of handmade paper with tiny seeds molded into it. Listeners can soak the paper in water and plant it in hopes of growing some flowers.

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