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As a medicinal chemist, I tried to ignore my suspicion that an insidious and deliberate conspiracy to get each and every American hooked on drugs, while at the same time bankrupting them, existed between Big Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

I enjoyed my work. Drug design paid well and kept me comfortably isolated in a high-tech lab, fully equipped to help me bend and twist matter at will. The last thing I wanted to think of was a plot designed to sabotage health and wealth—while causing untold ecological damage—using my chemistry skills. But over time, experience confirmed my suspicion as fact and revealed something even scarier. Read on…

In a book written in 2009, The Life You Can Save, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer created the ethical quandary now known as the pond example.

This week, in his column for the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof introduced the pond example and applied it to the participants in the G-8 summit. In his version, the world leaders are walking by a pond and spot a young girl drowning. There are no cameras around and the leaders have very pressing concerns with profound global implications that a rescue operation will delay addressing. In short, every second counts.

The pond example asks a simple question: what should they do? Read on…

It is not enough for us to blame big government and big business for what is in reality our responsibility. It is our pursuit of goods and services that creates the demand for raw materials: coal, oil, timber, iron, etc. It is our consumption that causes forests to be harvested, mines to be dug and holes to be drilled in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And the decisions we make in our professional careers determine how forests are harvested, how safely and cleanly coal and iron are mined, and how holes are drilled in the Gulf (carefully or recklessly). Read on...

“Why is it that some walls are so vocal and others are so mute?”
–Eduardo Galeano

In 2006, before construction began on the almost 2,000-mile wall separating the US from Mexico, my family headed south for spring break. We wanted to escape the cold that would keep prairie dogs in their burrows for several more weeks. So we drove to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona to camp among the saguaro, ocotillo and teddy bear cholla—a landscape that writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey called paradise. Read on…

Normally, I try to squeeze a couple of big ideas together in one column. My goal is usually to take a new bit of information and tie it to some old bits and perhaps—if everything works really well and the stars are aligned—this all adds up to a small shift in perspective for the reader.

What I rarely do is plug a single technology, especially a green technology. There are so many new environmental wonders around that it’s often hard to separate wheat from chaff. But today I’m going to deviate. I’m going to describe an environmental breakthrough so important that everyone should sit down and drink one or two.

What am I talking about? Well, beer, of course. Read on…