Kiera Butler

Senior Editor

Kiera answers your green questions every week in her Econundrums column. She was a hypochondriac even before she started researching germ warfare.

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Kiera has written about the environment, arts and culture, and more for Columbia Journalism Review, Orion, Audubon, OnEarth, Plenty, and the Utne Reader. She lives in Berkeley and recently planted 30 onions in her backyard.

The Greenest (Richest) Colleges

—By Kiera Butler

| Wed Oct. 24, 2007 3:07 PM PDT

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The Sustainable Endowments Institute released its 2008 College Sustainability Report Card this week. Download the full report (including a list of the 200 colleges included and their overall green grades) here.

The grades themselves are not especially interesting—with a few exceptions, giant endowment=giant sustainability program. While no one got an A, Harvard and Dartmouth received an A-, and Yale got a B+. Yawn.

But the report does offer a few more newsworthy nuggets. It's interesting to note, for example, that more than one in three schools included in the list have full-time staff dedicated to sustainability, and three in five schools have green building projects.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

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Factory Conditions Sicken Chinese Workers

—By Kiera Butler

| Mon Oct. 22, 2007 10:52 AM PDT

The fact that lead-laced toys put kids at risk is bad enough, but Chinese factories also cause big problems for another population—workers.

A few of the ways factory employees risk their lives to produce goods bound for the U.S., according to the Salt Lake Tribune's series on the hazards of manufacturing plants in China:

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]

Nadje al-Ali, senior lecturer in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter

—By Kiera Butler

| Thu Oct. 18, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

Mother Jones: What would a withdrawal of U.S. troops mean for women in Iraq?

Nadje al-Ali: Women have been the biggest losers of the post-invasion period. I worked on the modern history of Iraqi women, and of course there were horrible problems related to living under a dictatorship, living with wars, living with sanctions. But one of the most tragic things is that really, women have been pushed back and have lost out quite a bit. And what I am seeing in Iraq is what one might call the Talibanization of Iraqi society. And of course everybody is experiencing the suffering from the deterioration of the infrastructure, lack of electricity and all this, but it is women who bear the brunt of it. And in terms of violence, again, while it is probably more men who are being killed as a result of sectarian violence, as a result of the occupation, as a result of criminal gangs, women are especially vulnerable to gender-specific violence. Women have been harassed by soldiers at checkpoints, during house searches, and have also experienced harassment and actually sexual abuse in prison. And one of the big problems in Iraq, and it is a problem that has been on the increase, is so-called honor killings, which even happen to some women who might have been arrested because they are suspected of being related to insurgents. Then when they come out of prison, if they come from families that are quite conservative and who suspect that they might have been victims of the sexual harassment or even rape in prison, they might end up being killed by their families.

[Read the full article]

Zeinab Salbi, founder, Women for Women International

—By Kiera Butler

| Thu Oct. 18, 2007 12:00 AM PDT

Mother Jones: Have you done any recent studies or surveys about the situation of women in Iraq?

Zeinab Salbi: We are in the process of accumulating the results of a new survey that we are doing. At this point, we are waiting for our field office to basically give their results so we can analyze them and study them.

MJ: What you have heard from people in your organization? Do you have a sense of how things are right now?

ZS: Bad. Every time I call our office in Baghdad it is just more and more horrible.

[Read the full article]

Tobacco Industry Cover Up

—By Kiera Butler

| Tue Oct. 16, 2007 11:22 AM PDT

Scientists know that secondhand smoke increases risk of heart disease by 30 percent, but cigarette makers are doing their darnedest to make sure we're kept in the dark.

A report in the current issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, says that the tobacco industry has repeatedly tried to suppress evidence of the detrimental effects of cigarette smoke.

[Read more in the Blue Marble blog]