About Me

My beat is looking for ways to create a future which is sustainable, dynamic, prosperous and fair -- a future which is both bright and green.

Exploring ways of building a better future has been my life's work. That work has taken me around the world, working as an environmental journalist on four continents (where I wrote about everything from Japan's fast breeder reactor program to the UN "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro). That work has also led me to provide strategic consultation to over 50 environmental groups (on issues like the fate of endangered species, the future of "smart growth" and "reframing" the environmental movement) and many foresight projects (anticipating, for instance, paths for a Pacific Northwest transition to sustainability, what green neighborhoods of the future might look like, and how to prevent the next use of nuclear weapons). I also served as president of the board of Allied Arts (the venerable Seattle urban design advocacy group), a co-founder of the Livable Communities Coalition and the Fuse Foundation, as well as having served on the boards or steering committees of something like twenty other NGOs and campaigns. I have been a newspaper columnist (for Seattle's the Stranger), a radio producer and guest host (for Seattle's NPR affiliate, KUOW) and an on-air television news analyst. I also started the short-lived but influential magazine, Steelhead, in the mid-nineties. Along the way I did graduate work at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies.

I've written or commented for the New York Times, USA Today, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, Fast Company, Red Herring, Blue: the Magazine of Adventure Travel, NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, Marketplaceand elsewhere. My essays have been widely reprinted, translated into German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish, and anthologized in the 2050 Project's book Choosing our Future and Das Science Fiction Jahr 2004. Lastly, I guest-edited the final issue of of Whole Earth Review.

I do a lot of speaking on these topics as well. You can hear the talk I gave at Pop!Tech here, and my keynote conversation with Bruce Sterling at this year's South by Southwest here. Besides the thousand-odd pieces I've done for WorldChanging, some of the my more frequently-quoted pieces include: an editorial on smart growth and sprawl, an op-ed on The Tech Bloom and a review of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

Member Since

Apr 12, 2007

Sites

• Worldchanging