environment

Tales of a TreeHugger

For the past four years, I've been writing for TreeHugger.com as the popular green website's Istanbul correspondent, blogging about environmental issues primarily in Turkey and the region, but also elsewhere in the world, following my interests in art, food, travel, urban planning, and other topics.

Blogging for TreeHugger provided an excuse to contact and meet all sorts of fascinating people; the opportunity to cover events such as the 5th World Water Forum and the London School of Economics' Urban Age conference; and the chance to raise the profile of places I care about – Istanbul, of course, but also Beirut, which I fell in love with on a 2010 visit, and Lake Urmia in Iran, where my grandfather originated and where I hope to travel someday. (It also let me occasionally indulge my nostalgia for San Francisco and baseball.) One of my posts got picked up by the popular tech site Boing Boing, while another led to an assignment for BBC Wildlife magazine.

Now, 656 blog posts later, I'm moving on due to some changes at the site. I've already wrapped up a baker's dozen worth of my favorite posts related to Turkey for my personal blog, The Turkish Life. Here's an assortment of 10 more stories on other topics that I enjoyed writing for TreeHugger.com:

  • “Artists Turn Water Into Masterpieces (Slideshow)” (June 26, 2009)

  • “Boosting Recycling, Scavenger Incomes in Jordan” (Aug. 23, 2009)

  • “Chasing Orchids and Fireflies in Central Colorado” (Sep. 27, 2009)

  • “Naturally Temperature-Conditioned Traditional Courtyard Homes: Ready for a Renaissance?” (Feb. 3, 2010)

  • “American University Students Help Create Afghanistan's First List of Protected Species” (Feb. 6, 2010)

  • “'Pretty' Pollution Photos Show Depths of Minnesota Lake's Environmental Distress (Slideshow)” (Feb. 11, 2010)

  • “Two Intrepid Cyclists Embark on a Silk Road Adventure With an Environmental Twist” (Jan. 12, 2011)

  • “Traditional Landscapes With a Twist: Photographer Yao Lu Makes Mountains out of China's Rubble Heaps” (May 11, 2011)

  • “Artist's 'Three Gorges' Video Installation Takes Viewers Into a Disappearing Landscape” (Nov. 5, 2011)

  • “Swim Down Through a Sea of Trash With Dramatic, Eerily Beautiful Photos by Mandy Barker” (Feb. 8, 2012)

You can find my full archive of TreeHugger posts (for now, at least) on my contributor page.

A little link love

Reporting on environmental issues in Turkey can be a lonely pursuit (and can sometimes feel like a lost cause), so it's always gratifying to have my work for TreeHugger.com cited by people I respect.

Writing about the resignation-under-pressure of a longtime Turkish columnist who had "railed against the Prime Minister and other government officials for their plan to build a series of controversial dams in a scenic part of northeastern Turkey," journalist Yigal Schleifer linked to one of my TreeHugger posts as context for the story:

On a related note, Jennifer Hattam of the TreeHugger blog has a great post up about just what is happening with the dam project that [columnist Oktay] Ekşi wrote about and why people are getting so fired up about the government's actions on the issue.

More recently, acclaimed Turkish environmentalist Çağan Şekercioğlu linked to my reports on his latest research in his own write-up for National Geographic NewsWatch.

Taking a regional view

Yesterday, the "Regionscape" editor for the Hürriyet Daily News ran across a post I'd written recently for TreeHugger about a reforestation effort in Armenia, Turkey's neighbor to the east, and asked to reprint it in the paper, where it appears in today's print edition. (TreeHugger maintains the online rights to the piece.) Unfortunately, I haven't yet had a chance to travel to Armenia to see the program in action first hand, but I hope to do so soon!

Boing!

A photo gallery I put together for TreeHugger got linked on the popular tech site Boing Boing yesterday. Photographer Mary Taffe was great to work with and her abstract images of pollution in the lake near her Minnesota home are both artistically striking and very sobering.

It's always gratifying to be able to help call attention to the local environmental battles that people are fighting across the world. Having that coverage get attention from my blogging peers is a nice bonus.

The cost of 'virtual water'

A presentation by Arjen Y. Hoekstra of the Water Footprint Network was one of the most interesting I heard at the World Water Forum this spring, prompting all sorts of questions about water footprints vs. carbon footprints and when it might not be best to produce goods locally – subjects that I could barely give a glancing look in a short news piece for the latest issue of Sierra. Working on it certainly piqued my interest in the topic further; hope it does the same for readers.

Read my article on water footprints, "Fluid Measures," in the July/August 2009 issue of Sierra magazine.