Quitting a Bad Habit
Quitting a bad habit: Revelations from Obama’s tar sands decision If you smoke cigarettes, you may have reached a desperate point where you’ve picked up a half-smoked butt from an ashtray and lit up. Sure, it’s dirty, takes a lot of work for a relatively small reward, and is more than a little disgusting. But it [...]
When is a national park not a national park?
In 2002, the west African country of Gabon made international headlines with one of the boldest moves in conservation history: then-President Omar Bongo Ondimba announced the creation of 13 national parks, comprising more than a tenth of the country’s territory. In a recent trip to Gabon, I learned that nearly a decade later, Bongo’s bold [...]
Why is climate change awareness declining?
I contributed to my first climate change story in 1992, when I was working for Newsweek in the Washington bureau and people were still quaintly referring to the problem as the “greenhouse gas effect.” Newsweek was by no means a leader; this was four years after James Hansen famously told a congressional committee that humans [...]
An introductory blog from Dan
I will be honest about blogs. I don’t trust them. The proliferation of “citizen-journalists” has its upside, to be sure. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen a steady decline of smaller, independent journalism outlets. In their place, we’ve seen the growth of newspaper chains and the consolidation of broadcast outlets. We’ve seen a shift [...]