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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Big oil companies are converting refineries to make "renewable diesel" from soybean oil or beef tallow. It's driven by policies intended to help the climate, but there's a big environmental risk. -
A major climate meeting has gotten underway in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a pivotal moment in the struggle against climate change. But it's taking place in the midst of political tensions. -
California wants to limit the water that farmers can pump from depleted aquifers. To enforce those limits, regulators are turning to remote sensing satellites. -
California's farmers, the country's biggest producers of fruits and vegetables, are facing a major shakeup. A new law limits their access to water from the state's depleted aquifers. -
Farmers in California's drought-plagued Central Valley have big plans for the next year of heavy rains. They want to use that water to replenish depleted aquifers, akin to depositing water in a bank. -
Most countries are failing to follow through on promises to meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions. A UN analysis shows that actions so far will allow emissions to keep increasing -
Simultaneous disasters, like the wildfires in California and Hurricane Ida this week, are happening more often as the planet heats up. Emergency managers are preparing for that future. -
Scientists who warned of heat waves and rising seas this week also say that it's possible to avoid the worst effects of the warming climate. They're relying on computer models of the world economy. -
In a landmark report, the world's top climate scientists are warning that Earth is headed toward unprecedented warming. Preventing the worst effects will demand a U-turn away from use of fossil fuels.
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A drift-prone herbicide called dicamba continues to plague the Midwest, despite promises to end the problem from the chemical's backers. A top seed industry executive now has joined dicamba's critics.
