Dan Charles
Dan Charles is NPR's food and agriculture correspondent.
Primarily responsible for covering farming and the food industry, Charles focuses on the stories of culture, business, and the science behind what arrives on your dinner plate.
This is his second time working for NPR; from 1993 to 1999, Charles was a technology correspondent at NPR. He returned in 2011.
During his time away from NPR, Charles was an independent writer and radio producer and occasionally filled in at NPR on the Science and National desks, and at Weekend Edition. Over the course of his career Charles has reported on software engineers in India, fertilizer use in China, dengue fever in Peru, alternative medicine in Germany, and efforts to turn around a troubled school in Washington, DC.
In 2009-2010, he taught journalism in Ukraine through the Fulbright program. He has been guest researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 1990 to 1993, Charles was a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist, a major British science magazine.
The author of two books, Charles wrote Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, The Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (Ecco, 2005) and Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food (Perseus, 2001) about the making of genetically engineered crops.
Charles graduated magna cum laude from American University with a degree in economics and international affairs. After graduation Charles spent a year studying in Bonn, which was then part of West Germany, through the German Academic Exchange Service.
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In Cleveland, as in other cities, a move for "tree equity" is bringing more trees to low-income neighborhoods that often lack them. It also helps neighborhoods stay cooler as the planet heats up.
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President Biden wants to spend $200 billion renovating old homes or building affordable new ones. It's a move that would fight climate change in a way that makes people's lives better.
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The White House wants to fight climate change in ways that also remove economic and racial disparities. The city of Cleveland has a plan that describes what that might mean.
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Environmental watchdogs now can detect deforestation even when it's hidden from sight by rain and clouds. They're using data from radar on a European satellite.
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Scientists are calling for efforts to protect hundreds of wild plants in the United States that are related to native foods such as cranberries and chili peppers.
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The Trump administration has been buying food from farmers and getting it to food banks. Food banks, however, say the program was not set up to deliver food efficiently.
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For more than a century, food has been getting more abundant, and cheaper. Yet people keep worrying about food shortages. Some economists say the fears actually create their own problems.
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Some Americans, fearing food shortages from COVID-19, have cleaned out supermarket shelves. Yet there's too much food in some places. Farmers are dumping milk and vegetables that they can't sell.
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In the search for alternatives to coal and gas, some European countries have turned to a very old fuel. They're importing wood from the United States. Some environmentalists say it makes no sense.
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Let's imagine that we've ended global warming. Humans no longer are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Here's what life is like in a zero-carbon world.