There are 56 items tagged:
Alan Weisman

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  • Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?

    Is the coronavirus pandemic Mother Nature’s revenge?

    On the 50th Earth Day, it’s long past time to recognize that this overcrowded planet has run out of room to cut us any slack. By Alan Weisman Originally published in the Boston Globe Magazine, April …

  • Back to the Garden

    Back to the Garden

    Alan Weisman reconsiders the Genesis story in the light of what we now know came after it. His essay originally appeared in the 2018 book “Eden Turned on Its Side” by photographer Meridel Rubenstein.

  • The Homelands Blog

    In a major piece for Pacific Standard magazine, Homelands’ Alan Weisman goes deep into the wilderness of northern Mexico and southern Arizona on the trail of jaguars who venture across the border. The 300-pound cats are at the …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Homelands’ co-founder and senior producer Alan Weisman is spending nearly a month in Colombia and Ecuador giving talks and interviews about his two most recent books, The World Without Us and Countdown.

  • The Homelands Blog

    This month, as part of a special issue on the environment, VICE Magazine asked leading thinkers to weigh in with their ideas about what to do about climate change. Below is Homelands’ Alan Weisman‘s essay, based …

  • The Homelands Blog

    What was the most important invention in human history? The printing press? Antibiotics? Nope, says Alan Weisman in this talk from TEDxSitka. And he has a couple of simple ideas for how to undo its damage.

  • Who We Are

    Senior Producer, Board Treasurer

    Alan Weisman has worked on seven continents, in the Caribbean and Oceania, and in more than 60 countries. The author of six books, he is currently at work on his next, Hope Dies Last, to be published …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Journalist and author Charles Bowden died on August 30. Homelands’ Alan Weisman describes an outsized man with an outsized personality in a remembrance on the blog of Orion Magazine. Alan writes: “Should you aspire to write yourself, absolutely do …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Alan Weisman‘s Countdown, which we’ve been urging our followers to read since it was first published in hardcover last September, has been named an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review’s “Paperback Row” column. The editors …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Newly discovered methane-spewing craters in Siberia are one more sign of a planet in trouble, writes Homelands’ Alan Weisman in an opinion piece on CNN.com. “Every day, you have a close personal encounter with methane, …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Back in the early 1990s, Homelands’ four founder-members lived together in a rented house in Costa Rica while working on the Vanishing Homelands series. But after that we scattered, and for the last 22 years or so we’ve …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Homelands co-founder Alan Weisman’s “Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?” was awarded the 2013 LA Times Book Prize in the science and technology category. “Countdown” was also named the best general nonfiction book of …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Homelands co-founder and senior editor Alan Weisman will be on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher tonight at 10 pm EDT. Alan will be talking to Maher about his latest book, Countdown: Our Last, Best …

  • The Homelands Blog

    We are thrilled to welcome journalist Ruxandra Guidi and photographer Roberto (Bear) Guerra to the Homelands family. As our newest producers and members of our board of directors, they bring a wonderful mix of skills, experiences, and …

  • The Homelands Blog

    The novelist Louise Erdrich has written a glowing review of Alan Weisman’s Countdown for her blog, Birchbark. She calls the book “urgent, eloquent, harrowing yet hopeful.” Please read this book. Take your time. You will …

  • Countdown

    Countdown

    In this monumental piece of reporting, Alan Weisman travels to more than 20 countries, beginning in Israel and Palestine and ending in Iran, on an urgent search for ways to restore the balance between our species’ population and our planet’s capacity to sustain us.

  • The Homelands Blog

    We’re thrilled to announce the publication of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, by Homelands senior producer and co-founder Alan Weisman. You should be able to find it in bookshops today, and if …

  • The Homelands Blog

    We can’t wait for Homelands co-founder and senior producer Alan Weisman‘s latest book to hit the shelves on September 24. It’s called Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? and it’s been getting terrific reviews. “Spirited …

  • The Homelands Blog

    The Homelands blog may have been idle, but that doesn’t mean we have been! Clearly, though, it’s time for a quick catching up. In October, Jon Miller’s feature Greece’s diet crisis aired on Marketplace as part …

  • The Homelands Blog

    A few comments on Marketplace’s story page for the first piece in the Food for 9 Billion series talk about the need to control population. It’s an important point, and one of our upcoming pieces, …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Loyal readers will be pleased to learn that the entire Homelands Productions oeuvre is now downloadable from our website. For the last couple of years you could listen to our radio features on a special …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Happy New Year, everyone! I wanted to thank you all for listening to our radio programs and for visiting our burgeoning Internet empire (Homelands.org, this blog, the Worker Browser, the WORKING section of Marketplace.org, Worlds …

  • The Homelands Blog

    Homelands Productions has been around since 1989, creating public radio features and documentaries, writing articles and books, and generally doing our artfully journalistic (journalistically artful?) bit to promote world peace and understanding. In the last …

  • The World Without Us

    The World Without Us

    How would the Earth respond if humans were suddenly to disappear? How quickly would our cities, our objects, our waste, and the myriad other changes we have wrought disappear – or would they disappear at all? Most urgently, asks this New York Times bestseller, what can we do to lessen the damage we’re inflicting on the only planet we have?

  • Cotopaxi Pilgrimage

    Cotopaxi Pilgrimage

    For the Tigua Indians of Ecuador, the spectacular 19,000-foot Cotopaxi volcano is both a sheltering spirit and a source of artistic inspiration. But the Tigua stopped visiting their sacred mountain when the government declared it a national park and began charging admission. Recently two Tigua painters led an improvised pilgrimage to the volcano’s glacier.

  • Competing for Souls

    Competing for Souls

    Korea’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse has been accompanied by an equally dramatic spiritual shift. With Christians now dominant in political and economic life, Buddhists wonder whether they have a role to play in the country’s future.

  • Resurrecting the Zápara

    Resurrecting the Zápara

    The Zápara once ranged far across the western Amazon. By the 1970s, anthropologists concluded that their culture was extinct. But a handful of native speakers survived. Now they’re trying to resuscitate their language and culture. But a new danger looms.

  • Luis and Negra

    Luis and Negra

    Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea returns to the slums of Tijuana, where he worked as a young man, to see a woman he knew as a girl. His story, for This American Life, explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between “first world” writers and their “third world” subjects.

  • Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?

    Chiloe: A Bridge Too Far?

    The island of Chiloé, off the coast of Chile, is known for its misty beauty, quaint architecture, and distinctive cuisine. Now Chile’s government is proposing to build the longest bridge in Latin America to connect Chiloé to the mainland. Islanders aren’t sure they want to be connected.

  • Border Stories

    Documentaries and features in English and Spanish exploring social, economic, legal, and environmental issues along the U.S.-Mexico border.

  • LA Ecovillage

    LA Ecovillage

    Bringing ecological living to an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.

  • Casas de Paja Sonorense (Spanish)

    Casas de Paja Sonorense (Spanish)

    A story of the birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico. In Spanish.

  • Laguna Madre

    Laguna Madre

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Laguna Madre (Spanish)

    Laguna Madre (Spanish)

    A profile of people and place – a fragile ecosystem spanning both sides of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo near the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish version.

  • Gloria Flora and the Elko Uprising

    Gloria Flora and the Elko Uprising

    A rising star in the U.S. Forest Service runs afoul of monied interests – and her own agency – as she tries to protect public lands from depredation.

  • Solar Energy and Middle East Peace

    Solar Energy and Middle East Peace

    Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.

  • Can Hydrogen Fuel the United States?

    Can Hydrogen Fuel the United States?

    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.

  • The State of Solar Energy

    The State of Solar Energy

    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.

  • Gaviotas

    Gaviotas

    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.”

  • The Great Hydrogen Car Race

    The Great Hydrogen Car Race

    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.

  • Flowers for Export

    Flowers for Export

    Outside Bogotá, some of Latin America’s best soils have been covered with a sea of greenhouses for growing flowers for export.

  • Caribbean Dreams

    Caribbean Dreams

    Different sorts of dreams collide in the Dominican Republic, where industrial parks, sugar cane fields, and a posh resort all belong to a single U.S. corporation.

  • Life on the Edge of the Ozone Hole

    Life on the Edge of the Ozone Hole

    The world’s southernmost population, in Chile’s Magallanes province, finds itself on the brink of a deepening danger that may one day force them from their beautiful homeland – and eventually imperil us all.

  • Yacyretá

    Yacyretá

    A giant dam project on the border of Paraguay and Argentina raises questions about the social and environmental impact of major infrastructure projects.

  • Argentina’s Guaraní Indians

    Argentina’s Guaraní Indians

    Once the largest tribe in South America, the Guaraní have nearly all left their native forests. But one last band is holding out.

  • Celebrating the Discovery

    Celebrating the Discovery

    Preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas raise questions about the value of celebrating the event that led to the European conquest.

  • Miskito Coast

    Miskito Coast

    On Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, Miskito Indians and American investors face off in a battle over the future of the region’s resources.

  • Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola

    Sugar and Sorrow in Hispaniola

    Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic live in squalid conditions. Although the sugar they produce is exported to the United States, the U.S. government has declined to intervene.