The bailout bill may not be as bad as it seems. Granted, I’m given to optimism when things look especially bleak, but when a friend recently expressed outrage at the millions of dollars in earmarks attached to the bailout bill, I exulted in pointing out that over $100 billion was slated for renewable energy projects. Can this be the Bush administration of yore?

Birds may not be as endangered by wind power quite as much as previously thought, reports a recent study in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

In New York, it's officially fall. There's a nip in the air, the skies are a crisp blue, and everyone's sleeping better and smiling more, now that those humid, asphalt-scented dog days of summer are over (we hope).

When I was in college and the air got like this, heralding changing leaves and cool afternoons of pickup football in the park, my friends and I would round up a gaggle of girls and head up to Poverty Lane Orchards in Lebanon, N.H., to pick what always ended up being way too many apples; they got made into way too many pies. We always ended those outings feeling uncomfortably stuffed--usually even before the pies, cakes, cookies and muffins came out of the oven. As a tribute to those fond memories, here are a few offerings of green ways to celebrate fall this weekend.

One of the best things about traveling in East Africa is the abundance of muchomo, barbecued kebabs of unidentified (but delicious) meat. We ate the muchomo without ever being sure what sort of meat it was. It’s not like anyone would tell you if it were anything less traditional than beef or goat, and I don't think it was—but then, I’m known for mistaking possum for highly seasoned chicken, and “bush meat” (monkeys, duikers, bush pigs, lizards) isn’t so uncommon in rural parts of Africa. 

Last September, Lehman Brothers announced in a report that “Society may want to pay an insurance premium to reduce the risk of an unforeseeable…catastrophe.” 

That report, oddly enough, had nothing to do with Lehman itself, or with the bank’s sudden collapse yesterday, which sent global stocks into a collective tailspin and prompted presidential candidate Barack Obama to call it “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

Black Tuesday (Courtesy FDIC)

Earlier this week, The Economist published its Technology Quarterly, an amusing mashup of defense innovations (the ultimate camouflage, plus special sensors for detecting chemical weapons), techno-geek observations (“humanoid robots may make people feel more at ease”; archaeologists can find buried stuff from space) and some interesting green things. Increasingly, technology seems to be tending toward energy efficiency. Then again, maybe it always has. Wasn’t that the point of the electric mixer?

Hearing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican VP nominee, say she’d start laying more pipeline and expanding oil and gas exploration in January (if elected) was a little surprising. But hearing an entire stadium of people with little red signs chant, “Drill, baby, drill!” afterwards was the real shocker.

It looks like a house in The Shire, straight out of a Tolkien book, but this one's the real thing. It's a green-- literally--home in Wales, the product of four months of "mucking around" by freelance multitasker Simon Dale, his father-in-law, and whoever else happened to have a free moment to help. The point? To have fun. Oh yeah--and to live sustainably.

I was reading Treehugger.com today and stumbled upon an article that appealed to my US Weekly/Gawker sensibilities: The seven celebrities who need a lesson in going green. Most of them were guilty of private jets, wanton air travel, and, in the fantastic case of Woody Harrelson, ordering a vegan belt and shoes to be flown from California to Cannes so he could keep up the eco-chic…

I used to work for an oil company.

In case you just did a double take: I used to work for an oil company. A small-ish one, based in the heart of Dallas, Texas (a town that unapologetically calls itself “Big D”).