My post for last year’s Blog Action Day on poverty focused on my friend Halle’s fair trade organization in Uganda, One Mango Tree.

This year’s topic is climate change, and I’m equally excited to talk about the work another of my friends is doing. For the last six weeks I’ve been working with Global Voices on a project with MS Action Aid Denmark called Global Change.

Global Voices has paired its own bloggers — myself included — with students in the Global Change course, who have been studying climate change and climate justice in preparation for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

I met Sarah through the project: she’s a student in Copenhagen, and she’s leaving in a few days for Kenya with some other Global Change-ers, where the group will continue their studies and, hopefully, bring back stories of how climate change is affecting people’s lives there.

Today Sarah and her colleagues are in front of the Danish Parliament, where they’re observing World Food Day by banging pots and pans to, in Sarah’s words, “get the politicians to pay attention to the fact that 1 billion people are suffering from hunger right now.”

treehugger
demockratees

It can be easy to forget that climate change is about more than trees and cuddly animals and fish swimming around in some distant ocean — all of which I care about, don’t get me wrong (especially the cuddly animals). But climate change also has real, physical effects on humans: it’s altering weather patterns in unpredictable ways, causing crops to fail for lack of rain in some places while floods wash away entire fields in others.

Climate change is one of the driving forces behind the world food crisis, which, as Sarah pointed out, affects a substantial portion of the world’s population.

To sum up: Climate change. It’s not just koalas.

Kudos to Sarah and the entire Global Change crew for realizing this.

Posted in climate change, food, global voices | 2 Comments

Tonight the United Nations Studies Program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs is hosting a panel on the world food crisis titled “Hunger turns to anger: a priority of the United Nations?” Jeffrey Sachs, UN Under-Secretary-General Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, UN Under-Secretary-General of Humanitarian Affairs Sir John Holmes, and International Federation of Agricultural Producers President Ajaykumar Manubhai Vashee are presenting. I’ve been tapped to cover the event for The Morningside Post, but I’ll also be liveblogging below:

Posted in SIPA, food, united nations | Leave a comment

I moved to New York earlier this month to start grad school at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. I’ve been neglecting most things online during the process of packing/traveling/unpacking/buying lots of stuff that I already own but that didn’t make the ruthless weight and space requirements for the move and was consequently left in Kansas.

I’ve settled in to my new home, made it through the first week of orientation (including 14 hours of the euphemistically titled “Math Camp”) and procured Internet access. Now that I’m online again, I realize it’s BlogDay 2008.

Hash at White African posted a list of 5 great African blogs, which I wholly recommend that you check out (disclosure: one of them is Jackfruity). I’m going to take a geographically minded cue and, in honor of my new home, share a handful of NYC blogs.

Whenever I travel (or move), I try to check out a few local blogs before I go. I get a more well-rounded sense of what’s happening in a particular place than I do from following local news media, and I like to see what the hot blog topics are. In New York, one of the hottest topics is food. So, showcasing the city’s array of amazing treats, here are my top five NYC food blogs (in no particular order):

Midtown Lunch is what I read when I pretend I am a successful working New Yorker instead of a woefully indebted graduate student. It’s cheap and dirty and has a list of food types down the righthand side that includes Peruvian, Scandinavian and Filipino — options I didn’t even know I had.

The Amateur Gourmet makes me want to travel to boroughs afar for Senegalese coffee and follow the Dessert Truck all over town. This article on lox had me fascinated. I read it twice and have planned a trip to the Lower East Side to sample the twelve different kinds available at Russ & Daughters. Mmmm, lox.

Serious Eats is big on food events like street fairs and falafel eating contests: cheap foodie fun for those of us who can’t afford $300 truffle dinners in Midtown.

The City Sweet Tooth is a blog by comic artist Abby Denson. She reviews New York’s best desserts in comic form,
like this neon masterpiece about gelato and this one about ice cream and dragons. So far she’s covered mostly frozen confections, but the concept’s engaging, and I’m hoping as the weather gets colder she’ll start blogging about warm treats as well.

Reading The Girl Who Ate Everything is a bit like talking to your crazy funny happy hipster friend. In other words, it’s great. And the photography is fantastic. Yay!

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