GOOD Magazine on the impact illegal drugs have on the environment. I’ll give you three guesses which one is best for the planet.

A Slate reader recently asked the Green Latern which illegal drug was the least harmful to the environment. If you not only care about your carbon footprint but also enjoy the occasional recreational high, you might find the Lantern’s response enlightening.

Let’s be frank: Most highs for you are kind of a downer for the planet. The conditions under which illegal drugs are produced make it impossible for the government to enforce any sort of clean manufacturing regulations, and the long-standing “War on Drugs” inflicts its own environmental damage. (Think of the RoundUp herbicide sprayed on 120,000 hectares of rural Colombia each year.) There are some ways to measure the eco-credentials of various narcotics, though. To understand how various drugs affect the environment, we need to take a close look at where each one comes from and compare the ways they’re harvested or synthesized.

Ecstasy, which is derived from the sassafras oil of endangered rainforest trees, and crystal meth, which comes from either Asian grasses or the pharmaceutical chemicals ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, are among the most environmentally damaging. Meth’s production is particularly toxic: “In California’s Central Valley, law enforcement estimates between 4 million and 7 million pounds of lab waste were poured into canals and on properties between 2000 and 2004.”

(GOOD: Which Drugs Are Best for the Environment?)

GOOD magazine reports on the decade in environmental advances. Having spent the latter half of the decade in the green trenches, I’m not quite sure what to make of this. I worry that this decade, while it was clearly the “Tipping Point” on the environment, was largely a decade of greenwash and back-slapping. The results of the Copenhagen conference are a case in point. Time to get it together, instead of running business as usual with a green Smilex smiley face painted on.

This decade will be remembered, first and foremost, as the time we finally came around to understanding climate change?

You gotta leave it to a Druid to really give a f*ck about nature. Archdruid John Michael Greer has a go at our culture’s standards on measuring productivity. Reported by GOOD magazine below:

The author, blogger, and druid (no joke, he’s a real druid) John Michael Greer has a piece in Energy Bulletin explaining why our normal way of thinking about economic “productivity” is flawed. Greer suggests that we look at “energy productivity” instead:

In an age that will increasingly be constrained by energy limits, for example, a more useful measure of productivity might be energy productivity?