EcocentricPolitics
When Wangari Maathai, who died of cancer on Sept. 25 in a Nairobi hospital, won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, not everyone was happy. Maathai was the first African woman to win a Nobel, chiefly for her work creating the Green Belt Movement — a (literally) grassroots effort to empower rural women in Kenya to plant trees and reverse a …
EcocentricPolitics
President Obama will be making his much-anticipated speech on job creation this evening—though, fortunately, he won’t be interfering with the kickoff of the NFL season. But he still has to answer the question—where will those jobs come from?
In the early months of his Presidency, Obama had an answer: the jobs of the future …
EcocentricOil
On April 24, 2010, I wrote this about the aftermath of the explosion that took down the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico:
The good news is that this spill looks as though it will be largely contained. The Coast Guard reported Friday morning, April 23, that a remote-controlled camera found that oil was not leaking
…
EcocentricPolitics
I’m in Cameroon right now, working on a health story with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (update: it’s now just GVF) and the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. I’ve been out of email and cell contact the past few days—hence the lack of blogging—and even now Internet contact is dicey. But while the signal’s strong I wanted to note …
EcocentricEcocentric
On this Monday Pulitzer afternoon (no Breaking News award? What gives?), I wanted to turn your attention to an interesting piece in the Huffington Post from Lynn Jurich, the president and co-founder of SunRun, a major home solar-energy installer. Jurich notes that at the very time when a sluggish economy, high unemployment and …
EcocentricFood
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have my weekly Going Green column, this time on the rise of the food movement. It was inspired by the TEDx Manhattan conference on sustainable food that I attended over the weekend, and specifically by something said by Brian Halweil—a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and the publisher and …
EcocentricPolitics
The Heinz Family Foundation—set up in memory of the late Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania, who died in helicopter crash in 1991—today announced its 16th annual Heinz Awards, to honor heroes of the environment. (The awards are handled in part by Teresa Heinz, Sen. Heinz’s widow and now wife of Sen. John Kerry, who has emerged as a …
EcocentricEcocentric
Over in Foreign Policy, Christina Larson has an interview with the New York-based Chinese-American artist Zhang Hongtu. Zhang, who grew up in China under Mao Zedong but moved to the U.S. in 1982, is a dissident painter, but one with a comic touch—see his famous picture of Mao on the Quaker Oats can. While many of his artist peers back …
