From its bizarre combination of resort-wear and guerrilla gardening (hoeing in Donna Karan wedges seems like a great way to twist an ankle) to its gushy coverage of "wwoofing" (working without pay on an organic farm), November Vogue does a great job of portraying environmentalism as a fun hobby for rich people with time on their hands. Perhaps most egregious is Sally Singer's piece on hiring consultants to help make her apartment in the Chelsea Hotel more environmentally friendly. She laments that it's hard for her to save energy because "I receive no water, gas, or electricity bills." And her cleaning lady "cannot understand why her beloved long-handled dust mop must make way for a cut-up organic T-shirt on a bamboo stick." But somehow, Singer pushes through. After all, she says, "at yoga class, they tell you that if you breathe correctly, your virtue will be contagious and the world will begin to change" — and surely, if you write about your virtue in Vogue, other rich people will make their cleaning ladies scrub the floors with T-shirts too. Be the change you want to see!

We get that Vogue is trying — several items in Diaz's gruel-toned shoot are under $100. And the bikini Gisele Bundchen sports in Style Ethics is a relatively sane $120 — but it's 100% cotton, so its designer admits it may not stand up all that well to actual swimming. Ultimately, Vogue's affordable and sustainable offerings end up looking like window-dressing for the real stuff — an $11,495 bachelorette-party dress, and a $5,000 treatment to tighten the skin in "flab-prone areas" by "bulk-heating." Because nothing looks better under that cotton bikini than a char-broiled ass.

The new anaerobic digestion system will capture methane from waste provided by nearby cattle farms and turn it into electriticy. 85% of the cosmetics factory's power will be supplied by the system. According to L'Oréal, it's part of an effort to reduce the company's carbon footprint, and will cut emissions to 50% of the level recorded in 2005 by 2015. That's something everything can get, ahem, behind.

L'Oreal's Cosmetics Factory Set To Run On Poop [Inhabitat, via Allure]

[Image via Flickr.]

Barron YoungSmith gives the example of a hypocritical environmental consultant who has the gall to pursue a cross-continental relationship even as she preaches conservation.

Consider what happens when these two fly to see each other once a month. Since greenhouse gases emitted from high-altitude airplanes are thought to have several times the impact of ground transport, a carbon offset company would pin their romantic travels with the equivalent of 35 metric tons of CO2 each year. If that responsibility were divided evenly between the two, our sustainability consultant's lifestyle would be about six times worse for the environment than that of the average gas-guzzling American—and up to 10 times worse than that of the average San Franciscan. (Indeed, for her, breaking up would be about 10 times better for the environment than going vegetarian.)

Oh, and if you're driving? Even worse, you heedless solipsist! Indeed, by roughly calculating the number of long-distance couples in the country and tallying up the damage their travel has done, YoungSmith figures such hapless folks are pretty much single-handedly destroying the earth for the future generations they're so selfishly intent on begetting. The answer, of course, is a "Date Local" movement akin to our new conscientiousness about food and growing awareness of manufacturing practices.

Let's start thinking about "sex miles": Just how far was this person shipped to hook up with you? And how many times more efficient would it be to date someone within a 100-mile radius? If the movement spread globally, mirroring either the decentralized development of Local Food co-ops or the manifesto-and-chapter model that built up to the Slow Food movement's mega-confab this summer, its environmental benefits could multiply many times.

And, he adds, it wouldn't just help the planet: dating local would increase people's socialization - the implication is that such sad-sacks are slaves to their computer monitors — and the amount of sex they had, which would in turn result in important health benefits. Naturally, the author's tongue is, if not firmly, at least slightly in cheek: even he acknowledges the obvious drawbacks of enforcing such a policy:

Of course, like many eco-conscious attempts to instill social virtue, this proposal runs the risk of killing romance. Many a true human thrill—the high-octane cheeseburger! the long shower! the Chevy Suburban!—has been deflated by green evangelists out to render the personal political. And, in a way, long-distance dating is romantic precisely because it expends so much in the way of resources and effort...No, our Date Local movement won't be overbearing. It shouldn't try to break up every cross-country love odyssey. Instead, it will discourage this special type of conspicuous consumption at the margins, nudging people toward the realization that breaking up is in their own, and enlightened, economic self-interest.

In fact, the piece had the opposite effect on me: it made me realize that LD daters are one of the most marginalized and maltreated of subspecies! No one needs to be told the benefits of living in the same place! Does YoungSmith think people choose the agony of separation and loneliness deliberately? For the thrill of stressful travel, the inadequacy of scheduled phone calls, the awkwardness of getting to know each other anew each time and then the pain of parting after a visit? While there may be a few blithe souls who like the detachment of such a relationship, no one I know has regarded it as anything but a necessary evil. And leaving as huge an environmental footprint as he suggests? Most of us should be so lucky: we're at the mercy of high airfares and punishing work schedules. The LDR is one of the few things which has been unambiguously aided by modern technology — couples separated by necessity, or lonely folks who've had to look far afield to find love — and if anything, this beleaguered population should be getting a dispensation rather than a lecture!

This said, I'm all for Mother Earth and so I suggest that the rest of us form a counter-campaign: conserving a bit more to make up for our friends who can't. "Going Green for LDR" we'll call it, and live twice as locally if need be! Heck, I won't even take a car back from Ikea tonight if it means one couple can drive another two miles to see each other! We could even donate airmiles! "Dating locally", after all, doesn't make most of us feel smug — just lucky.

Date Local [Slate]

The Times piece, unsurprisingly, is a cute collection of yuppie-kids-say-the-darndest things anecdotes; children berating their parents for taking wasteful baths or allowing delivery services to use plastic bags. Inundated with green messages at school, on TV, and surely from their families, these kids have taken to greening with an evangelical zeal that allows for no compromise. Often, the bemused parents say, the one track mindset, however virtuous, leads to embarrassment when kids lecture neighbors, or discomfort when they want expensive innovations like Hybrids and solar panels.

Of course, what the piece does not acknowledge is that these kids — whose parents answer to descriptions like writers, stay at home moms, "a professor of furniture design," and "an executive with a solar energy company" — are hardly the norm. They live in brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods and prosperous commuter suburbs. I very much doubt that children from lower-income families, whatever they are learning at school, are as prone to pester their parents for such worthy luxuries as solar panels. After all, what the children in this piece are doing, quite obviously, is parroting the essential worldview of their parents —albeit with a kid's simplistic, inflexible and ultimately purer mindset. The parents' feigned bemusement doesn't do much to hide their evident pride in their children's civic-mindedness. Yes, it's very cute that one little girl dries her clothes on a clothesline in her room, or another won't let her parents buy an SUV. But it's a lot easier when you have the option of a dryer on cold mornings, and the money to buy an SUV if they wanted, to say nothing of small changes like energy-efficient light bulbs and "walking to school" instead of driving. These are luxuries. Necessary ones, ultimately, but the tone of the piece still rubs me the wrong way.

Look, it's amazing and encouraging that children care about the environment, and their awareness augurs for a responsible stewardship. But it's not really news that the children of wealthy, environmentally-conscious parents have developed a similar awareness, untempered by adult constraints. So much more interesting would be to see whether a similar awareness has developed in other communities, or families where green concerns were not necessarily a priority for older generations. In other words, whether there's actually been any change. The piece touches on some peoples' concerns that teaching "greening" in public school is a waste of taxpayer dollars, especially when math and reading are lagging; I'd be much more curious to know how much time such initiatives are even getting in the schools where those scores are lowest. Kids imitating their parents is not news. Kids being self-righteous tyrants, as I know all too well, is pretty old news, too.

Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud And Sometimes Crazy [NY Times]

New York Post:

There is far too much going on in "WALL-E" to take in during a single sitting; I would have happily watched two or three more times the other night.

Some day, there will be college courses devoted to this movie.

Kids will love "WALL-E," the robot's epic adventure and his heart-tugging love story. Some adults may be less comfortable, which is fine with me; most great works of art are inherently subversive.

NPR:

But through it all, Wall-E never loses its sense of wonder: wonder at life, wonder at the universe, even wonder at the power of computer animation to bring us to worlds we've never seen before.

Wall-E is daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental — and how often do we get to say that in these dispiriting times?

The New York Times:

ather than turn a tale of environmental cataclysm into a scolding, self-satisfied lecture, Mr. Stanton shows his awareness of the contradictions inherent in using the medium of popular cinema to advance a critique of corporate consumer culture. The residents of the space station, accustomed to being tended by industrious robots, have grown to resemble giant babies, with soft faces, rounded torsos and stubby, weak limbs. Consumer capitalism, anticipating every possible need and swaddling its subjects in convenience, is an infantilizing force. But as they cruise around on reclining chairs, eyes fixed on video screens, taking in calories from straws sticking out of giant cups, these overgrown space babies also look like moviegoers at a multiplex.

They’re us, in other words. And like us, they’re not all bad.

Salon:

"WALL-E" falls somewhere between those two poles. It's not as beautifully crafted a piece of work, either visually or narratively, as "Ratatouille" is. But it does have a soul, and for a portion of the movie, at least, Stanton (who co-wrote the script, with Jim Reardon; he and Pete Docter conceived the idea for the story) does take a surprisingly firm stance on the uselessness and unlikability of humankind. "WALL-E" shows us a future world in which humans — fed largely on junk food — have become so fat they look like old-fashioned rubber dollies bloated to obscene proportions. They're obese partly because they're lazy: Instead of walking, they've gotten used to coasting along on floating chaise lounges, and robots cater to their every whim. Instead of talking to each other face-to-face, they chat with their friends on computer screens that appear to be permanently affixed just a few inches from their faces — even when their friends are sailing along right next to them.

Slate:

Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, a longtime Pixar collaborator who also directed the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo in 2003, Wall-E isn't quite as transcendent as last year's Ratatouille, but it's more formally innovative. Some of the lesser characters, particularly the misfit bots who help Wall-E stow away on the Axiom, could have been better fleshed out (if one can say that of a robot). But the central couple—forlorn, googly-eyed, stubbornly loyal Wall-E and sleek, directive-obsessed, but ultimately tenderhearted Eve—are triumphs of the animator's art, as their characters are established almost entirely through movement and gesture (though Burtt, who also provided the "voice" for Star Wars' R2-D2, is an expert clicker and beeper). Despite the virtuosity of its technical execution, Wall-E never feels like a soulless, well-oiled entertainment machine. Rather, the movie resembles its resilient, square-shaped hero: a built-to-last contraption with a disproportionately big heart.

Entertainment Weekly:

WALL-E is a movie you want to discover, but without giving too much of it away, I'll just say that the early ''silent movie'' section, quietly enticing as it is, is merely the prelude to an eye-boggling future-shock adventure. WALL-E himself is the movie's mascot and unlikely hero; it's up to him to save a spacebound colony of humans who've ''evolved'' into hilariously infantile technology-junkie couch potatoes. Yet even as the movie turns pointedly, and resonantly, satirical, it never loses its heart. I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, kid or adult, who didn't get a bit of a lump in the throat by the end of WALL-E, a film that brings off what the best (and only the best) Pixar films have: It whisks you to another world, then makes it every inch our own.

Variety:

That, presumably, could be addressed in a sequel. In the meantime, "Wall-E" pushes an agenda that could, and no doubt will, be interpreted as "green," or ecologically minded. It's a theme that is certainly present, at least as pertains to what forced humanity off the planet in the first place. But in a bigger sense, the picture seems to be making a quiet pitch for taking clear-headed responsibility for the health of the planet as well as one's body and mind.

The adages about how you must lie in the bed you make, and you are what you eat, both would seem to apply here. But Stanton, his co-story hatcher Pete Docter, co-scenarist Jim Reardon and the entire Pixar team operate on the principle that entertainment values come first, and they have applied it throughout to sprightly effect.

Chicago Sun-Times:

What’s more, I don’t think I’ve quite captured the film’s enchanting storytelling. Directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” it involves ideas, not simply mindless scenarios involving characters karate-kicking each other into high-angle shots. It involves a little work on the part of the audience, and a little thought, and might be especially stimulating to younger viewers. This story told in a different style and with a realistic look could have been a great science-fiction film. For that matter, maybe it is.

Newsweek:

Following high-concept movies about a superhero family, talking cars and a gourmet rat, this is the Disney computer animation arm's boldest experiment yet. "WALL-E" is essentially a silent film in which the two main characters, a mismatched pair of robots, communicate through bleeps and blips and maybe three words between them.

And yet director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") is resourceful enough to find infinite ways for them to express themselves — amusingly, achingly, and with emotional precision. He's also created, with the help of a team of animators, a visual marvel. Not that this is in any way surprising from a Pixar flick, but still, it's worth noting.

Wall Street Journal:

The first half hour of "WALL-E" is essentially wordless, and left me speechless. This magnificent animated feature from Pixar starts on such a high plane of aspiration, and achievement, that you wonder whether the wonder can be sustained. But yes, it can. The director, Andrew Stanton, supported by a special-forces battalion of artists, voice artists and computer wizards, has conjured up a tender, comical love story between two robots whose feelings for each other seem as nuanced and deep as any you're likely to encounter these days in live-action drama. Better still, their story plays out in two disparate worlds that amount to a unified vision, stunning and hilarious in equal measure, of what we human creatures have been up to and where it could get us.

'Wall-E' opens today, nationwide

The UK-based adult toy shop LoveHoney actually started a great recycling program for sex toys, but that's not going to help us on this side of the pond. I dug around, and found one website that claims to be part of a sex toy recycling company, but with no address, phone number, or specific instructions, it's most likely just a joke.

In the end, I ended up not putting my big broken vibe in my garbage, choosing instead to place it in a plastic bag and tossing it in the dumpster in front of my building. One other Jezebel editor says she walked her broken vibe down the street so that her super wouldn't find it when sorting the trash. So here's the question: what should we do with broken vibrators?

Related: How Green Are Your Sex Toys? [Utne]

The DMA has its own opt-out service but it requires users to submit a credit card number to verify their identity and costs $1. That's right — they want you to pay not to get catalogs. Victoria's Secret and J. Crew declined to comment on the BusinessWeek article — while the Harry & David spokesperson said he was too busy making sure "all of Santa's orders come through" to discuss the issue. One thing is for sure: Without receiving catalogs, we would ever have found our new boyfriend or the beloved polyester Loser throw. Would you rather save the environment or live without a RoboPanda?

Cutting the Stack of Catalogs [BusinessWeek]

Earlier: Attention Shoppers: It's Not Too Late For L.L. Bean
'Tis The Season For Crappy Christmas Gifts
Barneys New York: Shiny Happy People & Crazy Expensive Clothes
'Tis The Season For Kooky Gadgets
Pears, Pumpkin Cakes & Homegrown Pecans

Haha, not even their wives? Anyway, the real issue here is the culture we're living in: Not all women think guys with gas-guzzling sports cars are hot, but in the United States, do we take the global-warming issue personally enough?

In a recent issue of BusinessWeek, senior correspondent David Kiley writes:

Ford and Chrysler do not make a single vehicle for the U.S. that tops 35 mpg. But two things to keep in perspective about this new fuel-economy standard: The European vehicle fleet today already achieves more than 40 mpg. Remember the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when France and Germany would not assist in the Iraq War? He called those countries "Old Europe." Which part of the world looks old now?

Women Who Find Ferrari Drivers Sexy Contribute to Global Warming? [Wired]
Related: Energy Bill Has Only Half a Tank [BusinessWeek]
Sports Cars More Dangerous Than SUVs [New Scientist]

• We said it eight hours ago and we'll say it again: God is dead. Because Paris Hilton has a Teen Choice Award nomination. [TMZ]
  
• Note to self: Not nice to attack people with stilettos. [BBC]
  
• Second note to self: Stop talking on phone about how awesome it is that Bush is going to go to jail for wire-tapping. 'Cause he's not. [CNN]
  
• On a totally unrelated note, a Chinese government official who was found guilt of corruption has been sentenced to death. [NYT]

• Green journalism: knitting as yellow journalism: yoga. [Slate]
• How not-so-bad-ass is Avril Lavigne? Not-so-bad-ass enough to steal songs. [USA Today]
• Here's one thing even we know that Martha Stewart would not do for a dinner party: Hiding a dead body in your freezer for your guests to find. [ABC News]
• If Harry Potter dies, we will seriously freak out. And J.K. Rowling is not helping the situation. [E!]
• 3 U.S. casualties today pending DoD confirmation. [Iraq Coalition Casualties]

• Saks will open a shoe department in its flagship NY store that's so big, it has been given its own zipcode. Somewhere, the ghost of Carrie Bradshaw squeals and says something painfully cutesy. [WWD, sub req'd]]
  
• Fashion designer Jill Stuart taps actress Lindsay Lohan to star in her fall ad campaign since she's so "sexy and smart." If by that you mean "kinda slutty and makes bad choices," we totally agree with you, Jill! [WWD, 3rd item]
  
• Payless to buy Stride Rite for $800 million in attempt to move upmarket. Because Star Jones as a spokewoman wasn't classy enough? [WSJ]
  
• Corporate boheme-th Urban Outfitters (Get it? Kill me) is taking the whole "green" trend literally: For its fourth chain of stores (it also owns the maddeningly-overpriced Anthropologie chain) the company will be selling plants alongside those cute little ballet flats you are totally not sick of yet. [WWD, sub req'd]

• Under the helm of new CEO Angela Ahrendts, Burberry has started to make inroads in its war on chavs, with sales up 14.4%. [WWD, sub req'd]
• In the most ingenious Italian pairing since olive oil and gelato, fashion designer Giorgio Armani and directior Martin Scorsese pair up for World Cinema Foundation. [Vogue UK]

• France's new President and First Lady, Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy, cause national uproar when they both wear Italian-designed Prada to inauguration. Only in France, kids, only in France. [WWD, sub req'd]
• Pucci label celebrates 60th anniversary with a party that we bet would be a lot of fun on acid, which may have been the catalyst for such profundities as Laudomia Pucci's: ""But you will see there is no red - Daddy worked with fuchsia." [IHT]
  
• New investment firm (the nauseatingly-named "CHIC") invests only in luxury brands, promises to profit off the growing popularity of five-hundred-dollar wallets and other such absurdities in Third World countries. You can share in said profits if you can scrounge up $10,000 on eBay. [Fashion Inc.]
  
• Chronically-troubled luxury retailer Saks — who has time to go all the way upstairs? — is suddenly hot again, according to its first quarter earnings report. We blame Chloe. [NYT]

• French label Vionnet sees designer Sophie Kokosalaki exit as Vionnet artistic advisor Marc Audibet assumes her title. We will totally give you $10,000 if you can pronounce that sentence correctly. [Vogue UK]

• Only in Japan: Anna Sui creates a licensed line to be offered exclusively in Japan and aimed at 18 to 25-year old women. [WWD, sub req'd]
• This year's Council of Fashion Designers of America [CFDA] Awards is partnering with the CarbonNeutral Company to offset the carbon emissions of the evening, which we find not at all trend-humping of them! [WWD, 3rd item; sub req'd]