Climate in Crisis: Are We the Ostrich or Hawk?

The Climate in Crisis panel at the Los Angeles Times book festival had far more concurrence than conflict, agreeing that the challenge before us is great and immediate, and that decisive action is required. None of us prescribed an easy fix — technology alone will not save us, as many seem to hope (Electric cars! Solar [...]

Climate in Crisis: LA Times Book Festival Sunday

Come on out to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books Sunday and stop by my 11 am panel, Climate in Crisis, which promises to provide a provocative look at the biggest challenge of our lifetimes, global warming. I’ll be talking about the Eco Barons‘ response to global warming – and why, contrary to conventional wisdom, we already have laws [...]

Earth Day: The View from Space

For many years, NASA sponsored a contest called Spaceset. Teams of top high school students from around the world competed to design the best possible space colonies on the moon or Mars, using real science, real technology, real engineering. 
The winning entries all tended to have some common characteristics that might be useful back here on [...]

Eco Barons book tour tidbits

It’s been a busy couple of days (photos below, left to right): I was at the Center for Biological Diversity’s 20 Anniversary celebration in Tucson, then headed up to San Francisco to be named a San Francisco Library Laureate, which put me in good company (hobnobbing with fellow authors Stephen J. Cannell, Firoozeh Dumas, Randy Shaw, Frank Sulloway [...]

Environmental heroes: Listen on KPFK Today

Jon Wiener and I will be discussing environmental heroes and likely changes in US environmental policy under the Obama Administration on his radio show today at 4:20 pm (PST). In Los Angeles, tune to 90.7 FM; it’s 89.3 in Santa Barbara. Live streaming audio is available on the KPFK website, too.
Jon is a historian, contributing [...]

Eco Barons who inspire: a 20th anniversary

“The scrappy Center for Biological Diversity,” writes Debi Kinkaid at BookLoons, “founded by (former owl wranglers) Kieran Suckling and Peter Galvin… expertly uses the Freedom of Information Act, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and America’s legal system as primary weapons to protect vulnerable species and habitats from rapacious commercial interests and craven politicians.”
The Center [...]

Green on the Air

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Boyd Matson for this week’s radio broadcast of National Geographic Weekend. Here’s part 1 of our discussion of Eco Barons, which focuses on former Esprit CEO Doug Tompkins’ work to preserve millions of acres of South American rain forest, and part 2, in which we discuss the endangered [...]

Eco Barons vs the Car Guy

I don’t normally respond to book reviews, but in the case of Dan Neil’s strange diatribe in the Sunday Los Angeles Times, I’m compelled to point out that the Times’ auto writer is just making things up about Eco Barons to support his own class warfare rant about the rich. Here’s the letter to the [...]

Barons in a Borrowed Warehouse

“When you talk about a baron, you’re probably thinking of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt or others of that ilk,” writes Mark Kimble of the Tucson Citizen. “You’d be unlikely to apply the label to a group of young people working in a borrowed and cramped Tucson warehouse. But they are ‘Eco Barons’…”
Read more [...]