SXSW Eco Recap: Caring About Food is a Responsibility

"Food is life."I have been known to say a similar thing, but when it came from the mouth of a Ugandan farmer, the words were more powerful than I could ever make them.Sitting to the right of Constance Okollet on a panel titled Food Anthropology at SXSW Eco in Austin last week, I was humbled as she emphasized what food meant to her and her community. Okollet is  peasant farmer from Osukuru......read more

From the Farm to the Voting Booth (or Vice Versa)

Alison Schneider for The Huffington Post: There's a generally accepted premise among food scholars that food scarcity, for the most part, is not what leads to hunger. Whether you're studying famines in various countries over the centuries, or modern day hunger in both the first and third world, the culprit is always the same: Distribution. There are more than enough calories on this planet to......read more

World Bank: 'Urgent Action' Needed on Climate

Climate change is undermining economic development in poor countries and pushing millions people back into poverty, the World Bank has warned. The droughts, floods, heatwaves, sea-level rises and storms that are likely to accompany unabated global warming will trap millions of people in poverty, the Washington-based bank said in a report. From AP: "Urgent action is needed to not only reduce......read more

Power to the Poor

David Roberts for Grist: In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must sail his ship through the Strait of Messina, between two terrible dangers. On one side, in a cave in the rocks, is a six-headed, sharp-toothed monster named Scylla. On the other side, an overhang of rocks where “the waves and whirlwinds of fire are freighted with wreckage and with the bodies of dead men.” There lies the......read more

Ninth Grader Invents A Devise That Harnesses Power From The Ocean

A few startups have spent millions developing massive underwater power plants that gather energy from ocean waves. But a Florida teenager has invented a small-scale alternative, designed for the developing world, that costs just $12. Hannah Herbst, age 15, started thinking about renewable energy after talking with her nine-year-old pen pal in Ethiopia. "I found out that she's living in energy......read more