More Media Reviews
REVIEWING
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution
Marjorie Kelly, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.
—Genesis - Bereishit 1:1
Since the very beginning, who owns the world, its natural assets, and its people’s productivity has been an open...
REVIEWING
Vital Voices: The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World
Alyse Nelson, Jossey-Bass, 2012
Alyse Nelson is the president and CEO of the transnational organization Vital Voices. Since Hillary Clinton founded Vital Voices in 1995 at a United Nations conference for women in Beijing,...
As a former mayor of Santa Cruz, California, I have had a sustained interest in alternative investment strategies for local communities. Most of the proposals I’ve studied and worked on tend to be either unrealistic about the ability of local communities to function outside of the larger capitalist...
Wild boar, Burmese pythons, common carp, lionfish—rather than defend these species, environmentalists are encouraging the American public to eat them. As many of them as possible.
A new website, www.eattheinvaders.org, asks the public to help in a campaign to protect endangered species and...
In the summer of 2011, a group of artists, leaders of a local women’s center, students at a girl’s school, and other local residents gathered in Balata, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank. Together with the artist Lily Yeh, founder of the nonprofit arts organization Barefoot Artists, they...
Frances Moore Lappé takes on big issues in big ways with important results. In her mid-20s, she set out to understand why there is hunger in the world. The result was Diet for a Small Planet, which sold millions of copies. It challenged the notion that hunger comes from scarcity, presciently...
Clay Shirky popularized the notion of “cognitive surplus,” the idea that in modern life people have hours of free time to engage in extracurricular activity, provided they can break away from the television. Shirky was thinking about how this notion applies to the Internet, where web users can...
Early in 2000, the Institute for Policy Studies, where I work, hosted a regrouping session for the veterans of the Battle in Seattle—the massive, mostly peaceful protest that disrupted the World Trade Organization’s 1999 Ministerial Conference. The “battle” was the anticorporate globalization...
How big is your house or apartment? What (and how much) do you eat? How much bling do you wear? How many times have you paid for sex? Slavery Footprint’s survey asks you these questions—and many others—to determine how many slaves worldwide work for you. The results are shocking. The average score...
We have made much progress in understanding how ecosystems (forests, oceans, the atmosphere, and so on) function and provide the services upon which human communities depend—air and water purification, waste disposal, climate stabilization, pollination, photosynthesis, and soil generation. These...
Misuse of European Union subsidies aimed at tackling overfishing has put increased pressure on dwindling fish stocks. Taxpayer subsidies to the tune of 1 billion euros are paid each year to owners of fishing vessels and others working in the fishing industry under the European Union’s Common...
In The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters (Princeton University Press, 2011), economist Diane Coyle gives us a thoughtful, thorough, and somber account of the West’s, and the world’s, ecological and economic problems. Coyle correctly observes that these cannot be...
The year is 2020. Climate change has been ignored, resources are running low, and the world is faced with environmental and financial crisis. Can you solve the world’s problems?
This is the challenge posed not to world leaders, but to video gamers who log onto Fate of the World, a new online game...
Readers of Solutions do not need to be told that we are faced with monumental problems. At the center of our many challenges is the fact that the poorest billion of the earth’s inhabitants live on less than the equivalent of $U.S.1 per day, while the richest 1 billion live in luxury based on...
Before 1970, the land around the village of Qiugang, in Anhui Province, China, was green, with date orchards and wildlife, and the nearby Huai River was full of fish. “It can only exist as memory now,” says local farmer Zhang Gongli. Factories sprang up near the village, pumping out pesticides and...
On March 6, 2011, a satellite captured images of a burning village, Tajalei, in Sudan’s Abyei region. Earlier that month, two other villages in the area, on the border between northern and southern Sudan, had also been deliberately set ablaze. At the time of this writing, Abyei’s status following...
The workings of Congress are often mired in controversy, with only the legislation that polarizes the left and the right gaining public attention. Now you can find out for yourself what exactly the politicians are doing with Many Bills, a new website from IBM, that lets you visualize the work of...
For the past eight years, Yafit Gamila Bison, a Syrian-born Israeli citizen, has driven Palestinian children past the checkpoints into Israel to be treated at Israeli hospitals. When their parents are not granted permits to accompany them, Bison stays with the children, using her native Arabic to...
Would you be better off, in financial and lifestyle terms, if you lived in Europe? This is the basic rhetorical question that Thomas Geoghegan raises in his book Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? (The New Press, 2010). Having lived in both the United States and Germany, I have been asked this...
Despite the country’s struggling financial situation, educators find it hard to convince people to put down their celebrity magazines and educate themselves about basic finance. So why not combine the two?
Equipped with three degrees from Harvard, including a master’s in business, Professor Peter...
In 2005, former journalist and digital media pioneer Fabrice Florin founded NewsTrust, a nonprofit online news service that aims to restore public trust in journalism. NewsTrust creates a daily feed of top-rated news stories and opinions drawn from mainstream and independent media. Readers and...
In her provocatively titled Who Does She Think She Is?, filmmaker Pamela Tanner Boll follows five women as they struggle to balance the demands of artistic invention and motherhood. The five artists featured in the film, released in 2008, each offer insight into the complex intersections of...
From March 17 through 19, Los Angeles will host a forceful three-day run of Women’s Voices from the Muslim World: A Short-Film Festival. The festival is organized and hosted by Women’s Voices Now, a New York organization founded in January 2010, and will give voice to “women of all faiths living in...
Juliet Schor has been one of the most articulate critics of American consumer culture over the last couple of decades. Her bestselling books have charted the rise, first, of the Overworked American and, then, of the Overspent American. Her work offers a persuasive exploration of the damaging work-...
Google Earth’s ocean layer, added in February 2009, lets its users track white sharks, navigate the ocean floor, and explore marine sanctuaries with leading ocean scientists as their guides.
This virtual, three-dimensional tour takes the Google Earth team one step closer to creating a complete,...
A team of 20-something Cambridge University graduates is attempting to take a 32,000-mile journey circumnavigating the Atlantic overland along the one-meter contour line—the level scientists predict that sea level may reach in the next 100 years. The team’s new website/charity, www.atlanticrising....
Friends, heroes, frenemies, ex-girlfriends in bikinis: Facebook grants access to a lot of people. The limit of the social networking giant is that it includes only humans. As we become increasingly urbanized and isolated from wilderness, important interactions with other members of life’s fabric...
As foreign news bureaus continue to shrink—or disappear entirely—the blogosphere is changing the way news spreads. Global Voices, at the forefront of this change, is an international team of over 300 bloggers and translators that aggregates, translates, and explains the best blog posts worldwide....
Much of the human population still goes hungry, yet both public and private investment in agricultural development have reached historic lows. To raise awareness and to direct available funds effectively, Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project is working to assess global agricultural...
It begins with two birds in a maple tree rooted atop a glass building. The camera pulls quickly back, passes below a monorail, ascends, and pans to capture a strangely tranquil, computer-generated cityscape. Birds chirp. Popular Science magazine has never been short on creativity, and this, their...
A low- or zero-carbon world without nuclear power: is it possible? Perhaps the most qualified person to address this issue is Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He (together with Alan Lichtenberg) conducted one of the first bottom-up...
Water and energy are inextricably linked: it might as well be water flowing through the overhead power lines and electricity dripping from our faucets. Much of our energy is produced with hydro turbines, and energy is required to purify and transport water. The Institute of Electronics and...
A new wave of mobile phone applications strives to do more than provide mindless amusement; instead, these apps help users take the first steps in effecting positive social change. For example, the iPhone app GoodGuide lets you scan the barcode of a product and immediately access its ratings...
Design for the Other 90%, a traveling exhibition of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, is bringing creative design to the people who need it most. Divided into six focus areas—shelter, health, water, education, energy, and transport—the exhibit is the brainchild of a global community of...
Famously instructed to follow the money, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein eventually uncovered Watergate, one of America’s great presidential scandals. Richard Nixon has since disappeared from the political scene. Money has not.
OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan website established and maintained by...
One of the newest ways to take climate change seriously is to play a game. Recently released by Princeton University, the Stabilization Wedges Game challenges players to take on a changing climate and set the course for a sustainable global energy future.
Worldwide, human societies will emit...
In Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen declares, "I believe the biggest obstacle to solving global warming is the role of money in politics." Subtitled The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen's book is part science, part biography, and part...
Adaptation Learning’s website showcases the latest reports on global readiness for climate change. Launched in 2007, the organization explores some of the key challenges we face: adapting to climate change on the ground and developing policies and plans to support this adaptation over time. The...
Most of the stories that reach us from Africa are about drought, famine, war, brutality, and desperation. AfriGadget looks to reveal a quirkier, more inspiring side of the continent. A multiauthored blog created by tech expert Erik Hersman, AfriGadget showcases innovation and entrepreneurship on a...
With over 3.5 million pounds of explosives detonated each day, mountaintop removal has devastated a land area larger than the state of Delaware and buried roughly 2,000 miles of streams with rubble. Coal Country Music, released last year with the provocative mountaintop-removal documentary Coal...
Stewart Brand issues his latest challenge to the environmental movement in his Whole Earth Discipline. Using climate change as his big stick, Brand does not walk softly as he attempts to overturn some of the key presuppositions of the environmental movement.
This quirky, nonlinear compendium is a...
For the last two decades, the following narrative has powerfully and decisively shaped debates over climate stabilization:
Cutting greenhouse gas emissions would impose large economic costs.
The impacts of climate change are uncertain and too far in the future to justify early action.
Society’s...
We hear a lot about a postcarbon world, but what might that actually look like? A new media exhibit and website have been created to answer that question.
The Future We Want project gives Americans a virtual experience of what life could be like in a "clean-energy economy." It includes life-size...
MTV News producer Todd Brown was sitting in his car outside the UCLA mental hospital waiting for Britney Spears to emerge when he realized his career had taken a wrong turn. After graduate school, he had envisioned becoming an international TV-news producer reporting on social issues from the...
Envisioning a positive future is a fundamental prerequisite for getting there. The Great Transition Initiative is a large and growing international network that has been creating and analyzing alternative future scenarios for decades. They now have a fantastic website that lays out these...
On the Google Earth Heroes webpage, short videos document how people and organizations are using Google Earth to, for example, coordinate firefighting efforts in California, help the Mars Rovers navigate Mars' treacherous terrain, map Borneo's deforestation and promote conservation, and educate the...
Who cannot appreciate the intensity of Frances Moore Lappé’s vision “that ideas have enormous power and that humans are capable of changing failing ideas in order to turn our planet toward life”? Starting with Diet for a Small Planet (1971), she has written ten books describing democratic, humane,...
When the modern environmental movement was rejuvenated about 40 years ago, the predominant vision of environmental purity was the wilderness, perhaps alongside the working rural landscape. In those days we in the movement, like much of America, tended to vilify cities and romanticize the...
Solutions to the world’s most pressing problems often originate at the grassroots level. A new non-profit organization uses multi-media technology and a global team of volunteers to find those solutions and broadcast them. Based out of British Columbia, SAWA Global has video volunteers in 50 of...
With revenue from video games set to overtake the film industry this year, socially-minded programmers have started taking advantage of the format's ability to reach younger generations. Games for Change hosts an annual conference in New York that aims to bring together the emerging world of...
In 1992, the year of the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that a “great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this...
The news from China usually consists of untold environmental devastation scarcely hidden by a monolithic single party state that seems content to expend the environment for the sake of creating factory jobs for its rural poor. In other words, rather grim news, which is why this website provides...
Proudly hailing Obama as “the most food-centric chief executive since Thomas Jefferson,” www.obamafoodorama.blogspot.com takes the indulgence of niche interests on the web to an entirely epicurean level. The foodie blog combines irreverent observations of the First Family’s dining choices with...
Move over Obama! Fancy a shot at playing a politician who must rescue his country from global warming, whilst juggling the demands of his constituency for basic resources? This game throws you in at the deep end as the president of a newly-amalgamated European Union. You get to do everything from...
If you ever wondered what happened to the anti-globalization and climate change protests of the late nineties and turn of the century, then look no further than "It's Getting Hot in Here," the dynamic grassroots blog of the newest generation of activists. The site was originally set up by...
For several years, a trip to Zarqa was an obligatory part of the circuit for reporters covering the Iraq beat. The attraction was to understand the motivations of the town's most infamous export, Musab al-Zarqawi - the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in 2006 - as well as gain a window...
