TED Talks: Peter Diamandis on Why Things Are Getting Better All the Time

It’s Friday afternoon on Ecocentric, which means it’s time for videos. And there’s no better place to find them than TED, the summit of smart people and the wealthy who’d like to be near them that just concluded last week. I picked out a strong one: Peter Diamandis, the tech veteran and chairman of the [...]

Eat Seafood. A Little Bit. And Mostly Plants.

I met Barton Seaver about a year ago, on a TED expedition to the Galapagos Islands. We were there as part of oceanographer Sylvia Earle’s TED wish—she had brought scientists, celebrities, financiers and a few writers on board a National Geographic ship to talk about the best ways to protect the world’s oceans. During the [...]

Table Scraps From the Nascent Food Revolution

I wrote about my TEDx Manhattan conference on sustainable food on the mainpage today, but before I moved on to hydrofracking, budget battles and the usual slate of depressing environment stories, I wanted to offer a few more tidbits from an excellent series of talks. And if you want to see the conference for yourself, [...]

Why the Food Movement Is Becoming an Environmental Force

Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have my weekly Going Green column, this time on the rise of the food movement. It was inspired by the TEDx Manhattan conference on sustainable food that I attended over the weekend, and specifically by something said by Brian Halweil—a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute and the publisher [...]

Thinking Outside the Box on the Oil Spill

If there were ever a time and place for “so crazy it might just work” ideas, it’s the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. More than 50 days after the Deepwater Horizon exploded, the finest minds in the offshore oil industry are still trying to figure out a way to plug the leak for good. Even [...]