Tokyo, you have cut out your ocean heart as we in New York have cut out ours. You should have taken a moment to pause before you demolished a market with a long and illustrious past. You should have paused and considered the ocean and the fishermen who harvest its treasures and the difficult future they are facing.

These thoughts drifted up in my mind as I watched a dispirited Olympics, devoid of crowds and sound-tracked by automated cheers. They came to me after a decade of looking into the troubled history of fisheries in my own country. My home…

Co-authored with Reverend Billy

Congratulations Jamie Dimon!

The world’s biggest birthday candle is burning for you!

This year you turned 65, the age at which many Americans step away from their jobs and claim a well-deserved retirement. After all you’ve done, you’ve certainly earned the right to do the same. For 20 years you’ve piloted J.P. Morgan Chase to a place where it is now the world’s largest bank commanding $3.4 trillion in assets. Yours is the most recognized name and face of banking in the United States. When the President or Federal Reserve makes an important statement about economic…

How can we possibly save the planet if we never really experience it in real time with our own senses? Lately, this question has been my primary concern and resulted in two books written in the same pandemical year: Goodbye Phone, Hello World and The Climate Diet. …

It’s been over a decade now since the writer Michael Pollan advised: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Ever since, a certain kind of progressive supermarket aisle has emerged: “Real” foods, calorie-limited portions and vegetarianism (or at least Meatless Mondays) have become culinary aspirations for millennials and boomers alike.

Mr. Pollan’s advice is sound. But what about the 71 percent of the Earth’s surface that provides humans with 350 billion pounds of food every year? …

100 days have come and gone with another boomer president. Another 1000 will pass before we’ll probably reelect him or reelect his rival who is also a boomer. Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg will bang his pans and so will Bernie Sanders. But silent, always silent are my people.

And that’s who I want to talk about? Why can’t we have a president born in that odd gap between the high 1960s and the low 1980s. Here are a few reasons why President X will get America out of its present mess.

Silent, always silent are my people

First off while we…

To get an idea of how American coastal waters might look just before they succumb to all the degradations they have suffered these past five centuries, it would be worth taking a July trip to Mobile Bay, an Alabama inlet that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. If the air is still and hot, an event may occur that Gulf Coast residents call a “jubilee.” The bottom-dwelling flounder will be among its first victims, growing agitated as each successive gulp of water brings less and less oxygen across their gills.

In a panic, the fish will head shoreward toward the…

The time has come for Americans to light a blazing inferno and throw pounds of carbon belching beef on the grill. Make no mistake, our annual 4th of July cooking event is a climate event. An all-beef, charcoal-cooked barbecue for 12 people is going to cost the planet about 160 pounds of emissions. Multiply that out by the population of the US and we’re talking 4.3 billion pounds of emissions for our annual national meal. For comparison’s sake that’s nearly double the yearly emissions of the nation of Burundi.

You can have an enjoyable, satisfying cookout and cut your holiday…

It was just another sweltering summer afternoon gathering blood samples from Shenandoah Valley birds when the news came in. The ornithologist Dan Cristolhad been conducting a preliminary assessment funded by DuPont to determine to what degree the company’s pollution of the watershed might have affected the avian community. DuPont was facing potential legal action and had cautiously agreed to one summer of funding for a small team to gauge just how expensive fixing the damages might be. True to his nature, Cristol hadn’t been tentative in his research. He and his students had skulked into stream-bank kingfisher nests, cornered screech…