News from April 2015
Angel Enters Foster Care Through Probation’s Door
"Like a picture in a magazine." That's how Angel's mother Leah wanted their small townhouse in Pacifica, California, to look. Picture perfect. Leah says that she got the idea of giving her 12-year-old daughter chores after Angel's school sent home fliers describing the importance of teaching children how to "become successful adults." When her adolescent daughter failed to manage perfection -- when Angel missed a task in her 16-point list of chores that ranged from cleaning the…
Peace Through Grids
When I served as the chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the World Bank, one project I found especially interesting was the construction of an electricity highway between the rich geothermal energy fields of the Rift Valley in Kenya through the Lake Turkana plains—where the best wind resource identified to date in Africa was recently mapped—to newly constructed hydroelectric facilities in Ethiopia. Not only are these indigenous renewable energy resources largely untapped,…