At their annual conference earlier this month, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) held a panel called, “What’s in your email, Doc?” From the blurb: Scientists working or speaking out on hot-button topics like climate change and GMO foods are being peppered with open-records requests to see their data and emails. Is this a legitimate…Continue Reading…
A freakish element has long colored the historically impassioned GMO debate. The “frankenfood” term was first advanced decades ago by anti-GMO activists to play into health fears about foods produced from the (then) new genetic engineering technology. (These concerns have not been borne out by science.) Today, the meme is an ingrained feature of the discourse, echoed widely in the…Continue Reading…
The time has come for me to say goodbye to this blog. I started Collide-a-Scape in early 2009, when I was halfway through a year-long fellowship at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism. I knew I was about to embark on a new chapter in my professional life (from full-time magazine editor to…Continue Reading…
My mother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, recently mailed me a newspaper clipping. It was about a famous person who came to her state to publicly oppose a bill that would make it harder for parents to exempt their children from school-mandated vaccinations. This same famous person had just visited two other states to lobby against similar legislation…Continue Reading…
A Zurich-based think tank asks: “Who is influencing the way we think today? Whose ideas are determining ours?” To answer that question, it teamed up with an MIT researcher to rank the world’s top 100 thought leaders of 2014. The Oxford dictionary defines a thought leader as someone “whose views on a subject are taken to be…Continue Reading…
If you are late to the Food Babe phenomenon, by which I mean the rise of a food activist named Vani Hari, there are no shortage of recent media articles exploring her fame. The Atlantic profile is among the best, because it is not judgmental and it gives voice to the science-based critics who are exasperated by…Continue Reading…
If you follow climate and environmental discourse as closely as I do, then you know that the recent New Yorker piece by the acclaimed novelist Jonathan Franzen has triggered 1) applause, 2) denunciation, 3) head-scratching. The self-proclaimed eco-pragmatists at The Breakthrough Institute are cheering. One of the best essays on climate change and conservation I have…Continue Reading…
I recently spoke at Cornell about the public GMO discourse–who has shaped it and how some commonly held perceptions have taken hold in the media. In one talk, I discussed the importance of thought leaders, such as Michael Pollan and Vandana Shiva. Pollan and Shiva are cultural icons who speak to (and on behalf of) people who…Continue Reading…
Two years ago, a bill to label foods that contained genetically engineered ingredients was introduced into Congress by a Democratic representative from Oregon and a Democratic senator from California. It didn’t go anywhere, and we haven’t heard much about it, though since then proposed mandatory GMO labeling laws in some states have been in the news. As…Continue Reading…
[UPDATE: See media reaction at bottom of this post. Also, be sure to read the correction at end of the NYT article and the response from the NYT public editor.] I’m racing to meet a deadline, but this story in the New York Times is so dismaying I had to take a few minutes to call attention to…Continue Reading…