Across the Change-i-verse

by Emily Gertz

categories: Environmental Justice, Food & Agriculture, Health, Humanitarian Relief, Jobs & Economy, Social Entrepreneurship

Published July 06, 2009 @ 03:56PM PT

Just got home from my holiday weekend away, and easing back into the blogging routine. While I catch up with the news, here's a selection of what some of my fellow Change.org editors have blogged in the past several days:

Climate Change, People and Poverty: Oxfam's new report on climate change and poverty documents how "26 million people have already been displaced because of climate change." -By 2050, Oxfam estimates as many as "200 million people may be on the move each year...because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land." Humanitarian relief editor Michael Kleinman has used the sobering findings to create a good resource page on the humanitarian impacts of global warming. I'll have more to say about this report soon, too.

Goldman Sachs Owns You:: US Poverty editor Leigh Graham links Matt Tabbibi's "frightening" article on the investment bank's massive footprint in our economic system to some of the latest commentary on whether we're on the road to a recovery.

The Growing Threat of Malaria: Global Health editor Alanna Shaikh does a great job covering one of the big risks of global warming: the spread of tropical diseases into formerly temperate regions. "Right now, malaria is a tropical illness. It needs a climate friendly to mosquitoes and the malaria parasite that lives in them. Those parasites cannot survive in temperatures under 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius). That limits where malaria can spread, but global warming is going to bring a lot more of the world into the temperature range where malaria can survive."

Risk, Talent, and Why Some Become Entrepreneurs and Others Don't: Entrepreneurialism is a huge component of the growing clean energy market as well as other forward-thinking overlaps of sustainability, society and environment. So it's always interesting to see what Social Entreneurship editor Nathaniel Whittemore is covering -- here, considering "just how much opportunity there is to invest in the capacity of individuals and communities who, for whatever combination of reasons, have tended not to have access to the ingredients to let those capacities fully flourish."

Buffy vs Edward Cullen: Just like Women's Rights editor Jen N., I'm happy to see the Slayer take on a vampire (and the retrograde gender roles) of the sudsy "Twilight" teen horror-fantasy series.

Natasha Chart posts this amazing-sounding, vegetarian (and so, low on climate impact) recipe for Persian Eggplant Stew on the Sustainable Food blog.
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Image: First photograph made by a human being of the Earth rising over the Moon's horizon, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Dec. 24, 1969. Source: NASA. More about this image on a NASA history page commemorating the 40th anniversary of the image, late last year.