Across the Change-i-verse

by Emily Gertz

categories: Activism, Food & Agriculture, Health, Humanitarian Relief, International Action, Policy & Legislation

Published July 19, 2009 @ 06:04PM PT

Above: President Obama speaks in Accra, Ghana, on July 11, 2009. Via whitehouse.gov blog.

No summer vacations so far here at Change.org, where my fellow editors are keeping up the heat on their beats:

Sudan Is Number One*: "The most recent World Bank report on climate change - Convenient Solutions to an Inconvenient Truth - lists the countries most at risk for a range of climate change-related threats," blogs Humanitarian Relief editor Michael Bear, "including drought (Malawi), flooding (Bangladesh), increased storms (Philippines), rising sea levels (all low-lying island states), and greater agricultural uncertainty (Sudan)...Africa as a whole is particularly at risk."

Social Media and Obama's Ghana Speech: Nathaniel Whittemore, editor of the Social Entrepreneurship blog, takes a look at how the "bottom-up" approach to economic development articulated by President Obama's speech in Ghana has resonated -- and how the White House itself used social media to be sure its messages got out.

Living the Animal Life: "There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even beIt won't pass," writes Sustainable Food editor Natasha Chart. "Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start...If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity...As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious."

Expect More Katrina Scale Displacement: Despite what would seem to be hard lessons learned on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, the federal government is still not ready to provide emergency housing if there's a repeat disaster on the same scale. And the poor will be the hardest hit, writes US Poverty editor Leigh Graham. "If you weren't yet building your social movement for tenant rights or racial justice or economic equity, I suggest you start now."

What Not to Blog: Alanna Shaikh posts some prudent suggestions for how undergraduates hoping for careers in global health should conduct themselves online. They probably apply to students with earth science or environmental politics aspirations as well.

It's Not About the Stuff: On product placement & blogging: "The Federal Trade Commission is looking closely at "product placement" on blogs and online more generally. Eager to get the word out, companies are only too glad to send out samples of their products to bloggers," writes Kristina, an editor of the Autism blog. She gets a lot of offers, including some from manufacturers of devices to "help" autistic kids, she says, and accepts only books by and large. This is an issue in the world of "green" blogging as well.