Waste More, Want More: America Throws Out Good Food

Forty percent of food in the US, worth $165 billion, ends up in garbage, says NRDC report

When I was young, I used to eat food taken from a supermarket’s garbage bin. We first came to America from Vietnam in the mid-70s as refugees, and my eldest brother got a job working in a supermarket across from our apartment.…
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by: Andrew Lam – August 28, 2012

Number of Environmental Refugees to Grow to 50 Million by 2020

No country is impervious to the threat of climate catastrophes, yet little is being done to address the growing population of climate victims

The modern world has long thought of refugees in strictly political terms, victims in a world riven by competing ideologies. But as climate change continues unabated, there is a growing population of displaced men, women, and children whose homes have been rendered…
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by: Andrew Lam – August 23, 2012

China must curb its appetite for ‘Wild Taste’

At Lang Son, a northern Vietnamese town on the Chinese border, I watched as hundreds of Vietnamese carried baskets of monkeys, pangolins, snakes, and a variety of exotic birds in rattan cages. On the way back, their baskets held electric fans, water pumps, rice cookers, farm tools, TVs, VCRs, jeans, and T-shirts. As one young man put it, "I can always sell forest animals to China. They buy everything we have. They…
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by: Andrew Lam – Spring 2004