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Yesterday I attended a luncheon put on by Seattle's excellent Plymouth Housing Group, an innovative non-profit working to end homelessness in the city. Malcolm Gladwell -- staff writer at The New Yorker, author of Tipping Point and Blink, blogger, and public intellectual extraordinaire -- was the keynote speaker. (He was invited in large part thanks to his influential piece in the New Yorker arguing that problems like homelessness are "easier to solve than to manage.")

Opinions about Gladwell are mixed and deep-rooted. For my part, I think he's great. He basically lives the life I dream about: someone who takes obscure academic research and buried historical anecdotes and popularizes them for a broad audience. (And it could have been me in his shoes, dammit, if only I lived in NYC and were, uh, smarter. And more imaginative. And a better writer. Damn you Gladwell!)

Anyway, his talk was on social change. Stripped of the anecdotes, the basic thesis of the talk was that social change has three somewhat unexpected features:

We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Dust

Saharan dust may decrease effect of Atlantic hurricanes Thick clouds of dust rising up from the Sahara Desert are linked to less frequent Atlantic hurricanes, says a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. Studying satellite data from 1981 to the present, American researchers noted that dust clouds were scarce in years with intense hurricane activity, […]

How to protect biodiversity in the developing world

Indonesia poses a major challenge for environmental conservation. It is an archipelago of over 10,000 islands, the citizenry are relatively poor, the central government is extremely weak and corrupt, and yet it is home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world, under constant pressure for exploitation. For these reasons, Indonesia has been a focal point for major international conservation groups -- the Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the World Wildlife Fund all have major operations in the country.

I recently returned from a nearly month-long trip to Indonesia, where I had the opportunity to meet with many of the people in the conservation community who have been instrumental in the formation of Indonesia's marine protected areas (MPAs). My appreciation for the complexity and difficulty of their work grew enormously. It is one thing as an academic to discuss environmental policy (even with lots of real-world examples), and another to get a sense of the struggles from people who confront them firsthand.

Grace to the Bottom

W.R. Grace must pay to clean up asbestos mess in Montana, Supreme Court decides W.R. Grace & Co. must pay $54.5 million to remove asbestos-contaminated soil from the mining town of Libby, Mont., the Supreme Court decided yesterday. The U.S. EPA sued the company five years ago to recover cleanup costs; a lower court ruled […]

Du Diligence

DuPont unveils new sustainability program and predicts big profits Chemical giant DuPont announced a major sustainability program yesterday that it expects will put an extra $6 billion in its coffers by 2015. “We see sustainable growth as the biggest market opportunity on the horizon for the next two or three decades,” said CEO Charles Holliday […]

Polluting my bathroom

You know that little rubber duckie in your bathroom? I always thought the little fella was sorta cute, nestled there between the shampoo and the loofa.

Well, it turns out the little ducky's not so rubber after all -- it's plastic, namely the dreaded PVC. And it further turns out the bathroom is full of the stuff.

Senators threaten to impose industrial-strength rules on small vegetable farms

Salad greens thrive in the fall; they love brisk, cool nights and mild, sunny afternoons. Meet your greens. Photo: iStockphoto Here in western North Carolina, members of my farm’s CSA (community-supported agriculture) program are enjoying salad mixes that include spicy arugula, mizuna, and purple Osaka leaves, along with bitter endive, earthy shinginku — and yes, […]

Big sustainability announcement

Remember the big sustainability announcement from DuPont I told you was coming?

Well, they made it. Joel Makower has the rundown.

Someday I'll have time to comment on things like this again. And by "someday" I mean November.

Humanity …

... is officially in debt.

Tune in

Be sure to tune into Bill Moyers' Is God Green? special tomorrow, on your local PBS station.

Here's the trailer:

Also, check out this piece in the L.A. Times today on the same subject.

Update [2006-10-11 0:32:52 by David Roberts]: Here's another piece on the subject, from NYT.