education
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Thinking beyond the bottom link
My four-year-old daughter spent the afternoon at a local science museum the other day, exploring an exhibit on biodiversity. She returned home full of determination, found a pencil and paper, and composed a letter. Now she distributes copies to friends and strangers alike. The letter begins: From Jenna to the world:Please stop making all […]
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Michelle Nijhuis reviews The Tapir's Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte
It's easy to glorify field biologists. They travel to exotic locales, hang out with rare wildlife, and further humanity's understanding of the natural world. What could be more valuable -- or more fun?
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A personal appreciation of Grist contributor Donella Meadows
I was once speaking with Donella Meadows in her Dartmouth College office a few years ago, back when I taught with her in the environmental studies program. She was responsible for my appointment in environmental literature and writing and had become a mentor I could call on for advice at any time, no matter how […]
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Can laws be written that inspire reverence for the land?
As usual, Charles Wilkinson is pacing. Hands stuffed in the front pockets of his Levi’s, head down, he paces the lecture hall, up one stairway and down the other, his students’ heads swiveling to follow him. Charles Wilkinson, law man. Photo: Larry Harwood, University of Colorado at Boulder. But on this December morning, during the […]
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Preaching the gospel of ecotourism
Costas Christ has a knack for handling sticky situations. I got a glimpse of this as I was making my way home from an ecotourism conference in Senegal in the early 1990s. Along with a number of other conference participants, I was stuck in the airport in the capital city of Dakar. For some unknown […]
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An Iowan causes growing pains for agro-industry
Kamyar Enshayan is a folk music aficionado and a lifelong soccer fan. He lives in a comfortable house on a shady street in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his four-year-old daughter, Nettie, and his wife, Laura Jackson, a biology professor at the University of Northern Iowa. They have a large vegetable garden. Laura is expecting their […]
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A review of 'Women Pioneers for the Environment' by Mary Jo Breton
In 1993, Emma Must, irate over the British Department of Transport's plans to plow through yet another grassy hillside for yet another highway extension, chained herself by the neck to the axle of a bulldozer for five hours. Her bold antics and those of a band of like-minded peaceful protestors stalled construction of the highway for six months, but ultimately their campaign failed. Out of the ashes of Must's effort, however, rose a tide of public anger that swelled Britain's anti-road movement and forced the DOT to dramatically scale back its building plans and reassess transportation policy throughout the country. For Must's leadership in the anti-road movement, she earned a Goldman Environmental Prize in 1995, the environmental community's equivalent of the Nobel.
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Riders on the Storm
No one in her or his right mind thinks the 106th Congress is going to pass a whole lot of actual free-standing legislation. It will likely take every ounce of strength this feeble Congress can muster to pass the essential spending bills that fund the government. So riders, those pesky little items that hope to […]
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A review of 'Earth Odyssey' by Mark Hertsgaard
Will humans survive the environmental degradation we've loosed on the world, or will we drive ourselves to extinction alongside countless other species? Mark Hertsgaard sets forth to explore this question in his wide-ranging book Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, and while he does not arrive at a vision of humanity on the brink of extinction, he presents a sobering portrait of problems present and impending.
