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Google: Much more than an Internet company
It’s hard to imagine life without Google–not just the search engine, but Gmail, maps, calendar and cloud storage. I could give up Twitter, Facebook and (reluctantly) Amazon, but Google and Apple are...
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Nonprofit Chronicles: my new blog
Call me a contrarian. I read this just the other day about writing on the web: Blogging?—? I mean, honey, don’t even say the word. No one actually blogs anymore, except maybe undergrads on their first...
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Keeping a close eye on all the world’s forests
Deforestation in the Andes Corporate commitments to protect forests are numerous. Unilever says it is “determined to drive deforestation out of our supply chains.” The giant paper company Asia Pulp and...
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Sparking sustainable aquaculture
On a recent visit to Cambodia, I visited a poor fishing village not far from Siem Reap where thousands of tiny forage fish, pulled from a large freshwater lake called Tonle Sap, were left to dry in the...
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With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Back in January, I wrote a blog post headlined A modest proposal for big green NGOs that suggested, in what was intended to be a helpful way, that the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Wildlife...
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How “evil” Monsanto aims to protect the planet
Iowa cornfield shows signs of erosion and fertilizer runoff. Climate Corporation aims to help farmers use fertilizer more efficiently. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/AP Monsanto has been called one of the...
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One hundred low-cost tools for global women
A microfinance circle outside Hyderabad, India In a gorgeous new large-format book called 100 under $100: One Hundred Tools for Empowering Global Women , author and activist Betsy Teutsch spotlights,...
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Ceres and the “inside” game
It’s been 45 years since the first Earth Day, and, as I was reminded when reading this brief history, some 20 million Americans — one in 10 of us — participated on April 22, 1970. That took organizing....
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Gap’s Kindley Walsh Lawlor has a daunting job
Nearly 20 years after retailers like Gap, Nike and Levi Strauss agreed to take a modicum of responsibility for the health and well-being of the workers who make their apparel and shoes around the...
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Catching up, “creating” jobs and coffee pods
I’m just back from a wonderful vacation in Italy, and spending this week at the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego. To my surprise, I see that I haven’t posted here in more than a month....
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Ramez Naam, ecomodernist
Ramez Naam I was introduced to a set of ideas known as “ecomodernism” back in 2009, when I read Stewart Brand’s book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Stewart, the founder of the...
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Edelman’s climate problem
Last summer, the big PR company Edelman faced a problem that no amount of spin could resolve. Kert Davies, the former head of research for Greenpeace who now leads the Climate Investigations Center,...
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Hershey’s, and the limits of certified chocolate
Silly me. I thought the world’s cocoa farmers, most of whom are poor, would surely benefit when global chocolate companies, including Hershey’s, Mars and Nestle, made major commitments to buy certified...
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We’re losing the climate battle. So we may need to harvest CO2 from the sky.
Carbon Engineering’s new plant in Squamish, BC The Guardian this week published my latest story about direct air capture of CO2, a topic that has fascinated me since the late 2000s. My 2012 Amazon...
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The fossil fuel divestment movement is failing. Except it’s not.
Harvard divestment activists sit in Despite all of the sound and fury set off by the campaign to divest fossil fuels — and there has been plenty — Bill McKibben, 350.org and their allies have persuaded...
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I’m sorry to inform you that your pet is bad for the planet
Aside from, perhaps, GMOs, few topics in the sustainable business arena are as emotional as pets. When my friend Erik Assadourian wrote a well-researched story for the Guardian last year asking whether...
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Amazon, Best Buy and the free rider problem
Gap, Nike and Walmart can police their global supply chains to outlaw child labor but what about discount retailers and no-name brands? McDonald’s can become a leader around animal health and welfare...
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Goldman Sachs, and the evolution of sustainable investing
Will socially-responsible investing (SRI) ever grow up? With roots in religious communities and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, SRI funds have long shunned investments in tobacco, alcohol, guns and...
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Turning CO2 from waste into an asset
It’d be nice if the world could be powered with zero-carbon energy but wishing it so doesn’t make it so. We’re going to be burning fossil fuels, for better or worse–actually, for better and worse–for...
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OS Fund: A venture fund that embraces big risks
A company that makes drones for humanitarian purposes, another that makes plant-based egg substitutes and still another that wants to mine asteroids for precious minerals would not seem to have much...
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