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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America's supply of sugar is shrinking because of a poor sugar beet harvest in the northern Midwest. As a result, the U.S. will import more sugar this fiscal year than it has in almost 40 years. -
In the search for alternatives to coal and gas, some European countries have turned to a very old fuel. They're importing wood from the United States. Some environmentalists say it makes no sense. -
Researchers are worried that the lithium ion batteries powering our phones, and soon our cars, will turn into a big waste problem. They're trying to figure out how to recycle them.
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Companies are trying to figure out the risks to their profits from a warming planet. Some of them are turning to high-tech tools of climate science. -
A stowaway from China, the spotted lanternfly, is eating its way across Pennsylvania, killing trees and grapevines. Scientists are considering importing the bug's natural enemies from back home. -
Some of the oldest companies in America are in the climate change debate. Utilities are supposed to deliver electricity cheaply and reliably. Now, regulators are trying to make them go green.
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Humans must drastically alter food production in order to prevent the most catastrophic effects of global warming, according to a U.N. report.
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North Carolina's governor is promising to quickly cut greenhouse emissions but will need to convince Duke Energy, the state's dominant utility, to abandon coal and gas in favor of solar and wind. -
Grocery stores are full of food with labels like organic, cage-free or fair trade that appeal to a consumer's ideals. But there's often a gap between what they seem to promise and what they deliver. -
The world's most widely used weed killer was once seen as one of the safest pesticides. Now it is blamed for causing cancer. Yet the scientific evidence remains disputed.
