Documenting the efforts of scientists, social innovators, agriculturalists, inventors, traditional and grassroots leaders, and other visionaries who are working on ways to sustain responsible growth and development while preserving diverse environments and cultures.
The series is also available in Spanish. If you’d like a copy of any of the stories, please send us a note.
Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.
Although scientists and engineers have shown that hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, politicians and big business may never be ready to switch.
City officials from throughout Latin America come to Curitiba, Brazil, to learn about low-cost, environmentally sound planning from urban planner Jaime Lerner.
In Israel, where developing alternative energy was always seen as a matter of survival, solar technology is pointing a way out of dependence on fossil fuels. Story produced in 1995.
Have human beings always had the potential to destroy their own society, or is this a more recent, industrial phenomenon? Can anything be learned from the environmental missteps of our ancestors?
In India, where signs of faith are everywhere, a deeply spiritual farmer has found a way to grow abundant supplies of rice without the use of harmful chemicals.
In northwestern Brazil, a controversial doctor is on a mission to lower birth rates.
With few contraceptive options, Brazilian women seeking to control the size of their families often turn to sterilization and illegal abortions.
The cultural, religious, and social realities that stand in the way of lowering fertility rates in India are apparent in the tiny farming villages where one women’s group is trying to bring about change.
Indians have long considered “food security” to be a national priority. Now, dependence on the global economy sends India on an uncertain and, some say, dangerous course.
In India and Brazil, population control advocates have come into conflict with feminists over the contraceptive drug Norplant, considered by some to be among the most effective birth control methods available.
With funding from USAID, Indian health officials have launched a massive new family planning effort in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most densely populated state.
A group of Colombian visionaries has created a sustainable community in one of their country’s most inhospitable and dangerous places. This piece formed the basis of Alan’s award-winning book “Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.”
In the early 1970s, a group of South American visionaries realized that the coming population crisis would one day require people to live in places formerly considered unsuitable for human habitation. They decided that this was an opportunity to try to design a workable future, by and for the Third World, from limited resources.
The place they chose was on the desolate, barren plains of eastern Colombia, a country too often thought of as producing only coffee, cocaine, and bloodshed. The village they founded, called Gaviotas, has become a bright example of how to fashion an ideal tropical society.
Many of the ingenious, affordable technologies they’ve created have spread to other developing nations, and may have much to offer the developed world as well.
This piece formed the basis of Alan Weisman’s book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World.
It’s growing increasingly difficult for food production to keep pace with population growth. In India, failure could spell disaster.
While German automakers race to produce the world’s first pollution-free, hydrogen-powered car, the world’s largest consumer market for automobiles, the U.S. remains stuck in a Faustian bargain with fossil fuels. From 1994.