Author: Richard Hazlett

While a junior at Occidental College in 1974, I received the equivalent of a Summer Undergraduate Research Program award to study the monitoring of active volcanoes in Hawaii. I spent 10 weeks on the Big Island exploring the operation of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, perched on the rim of Kilauea

In his essay “Beyond Sustainababble,” Worldwatch Institute President Robert Engelman writes, “We live today in an age of sustainababble, a cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool.” Through this kind of excessive and ambiguous use, the words “sustainable” and “sustainability” lose meaning

Every day, owing to modern conventional agricultural practice, soil is washing off our fields 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished. This destroys an area of cropland the size of Indiana each year, even as we run short of fresh arable lands to plow under. Every year

I am a geologist, whose training largely was supported by and geared toward benefiting fossil fuel industries. My Ph.D. stipend and tuition remission was substantially underwritten with oil company funds, for which I was and am grateful. But I now support the college fossil fuels divestment campaign. In fact, since