Entries by Aubrey Blanche

David Garman

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Combining disciplines is the key to dealing with serious freshwater issues. At least, that’s what Dr. David Garman thinks. He’s the founding dean of the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — the only graduate program in the United States that is solely dedicated to the study of fresh water — where […]

Seth & May

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Music entwined Seth Bernard’s formative years on his family’s Earthwork Farm. “It wasn’t anything separate that was just for entertainment. It was part of our work; it fueled our work,” he says. In the neighboring county, May Erlewine — Seth’s future wife — picked up a guitar and wrote her first song at the age […]

Jerry Dennis

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Jerry Dennis didn’t start out trying to be guardian of the Great Lakes. Or of the rivers, lakes, forests, and wildlife. All he ever wanted to do “was write books and tell some entertaining stories,” he says. But after 10 books and countless articles and essays about nature in Michigan, Dennis has become just that. […]

Brent Stirton

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Photojournalist Brent Stirton often finds himself in the world’s ‘hot zones,’ places where conflict and poverty unravel the very fabric of human life. Reporting on African conflict first made him aware of the world’s water problems. “I was just noticing that there were far more deaths coming out of a basic lack of resources that […]

Action Figures

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This is not a Top 10 list. There is no ranking. But the truth is that today’s real superheroes don’t have alter-egos and they don’t wear capes — people like you and people you know are shaping how we understand the world’s greatest challenges. In Circle of Blue’s Action Figures series, we’re profiling innovators who […]

Fred Pearce

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In The Land Grabbers, the first book to expose the global hunger for land acquisition, author Fred Pearce details how a spike in world food prices led to large-scale land investment around the globe. “Speculators started moving on the idea of buying up land, because many commodities require land to grow, so it looks like […]

Ashley Murray

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In developing countries, environmental arguments for keeping rivers clean sometimes just aren’t feasible. So entrepreneur Ashley Murray decided to create a financial incentive for cleaning up wastewater. She says her graduate work was spent trying to quantify the financial benefits of reuse and harnessing the resources in human waste. Murray proved that what most people […]

Yang Xin

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In 1986, Yang Xin and nine friends explored the Yangtze River, from the source to the Shanghai estuary. That 1,472-kilometer journey began Yang Xin’s lifelong work with the environment and, nearly three decades later, his passion has not changed. “If I do not take care and protect it, there will be hardly any people to […]

Julian Cribb

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“I’m doing my best to alert people to this perilous situation,” says Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine. A longtime science journalist in Australia, Cribb works around the globe, reporting on the increasing shortage of food, water, land, and energy. He says that the situation is the most dire that humanity has ever faced. […]