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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: There’s a US-based non-profit organization that’s also trying to make the electronics industry more environmentally friendly. It’s called The Green Electronics Council and it’s based in Portland, Oregon. The Council rates companies based on their environmental footprint to help consumers and businesses make informed choices when buying computers and other gadgets. Sarah O’Brien is the Council’s communications director. Sarah, you just heard Clark Boyd’s story. Based on what you heard about United Pepper and its production of computer gadgets, would this company’s products hold up to your standards for greenness?

SARAH O’BRIEN:  Lisa, I believe that they are doing some really important things in pursuing bio-based materials that are sustainably produced, in looking at fair trade and worker safety and protections. The EPEAT standard that The Green Electronics Council manages, rates products on a wide variety of criteria. So there are 51 criteria in all.

MULLINS:  Now, EP stands for what?

O’BRIEN: EP originally stood for the Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool.

MULLINS: That’s E-P-E-A-T and what does it take into consideration?

O’BRIEN: It takes into consideration 8 general areas. Reduction of toxics, looks at material selection, things like bio-based materials, recycled content. Looks very importantly at design for end-of-life. Is the product easy to disassemble and recycle in a positive way? Energy efficiency is very important. We address that. We address end-of-life management with a manufacturer takeback and recycling set of criteria. And we look at options for greener packaging. So there’re over 50 criteria in all, but those are the buckets that they fall into.

MULLINS: Do you think, though, that you folks are prominent enough to provide an incentive for companies who can probably make notebooks or work stations cheaper by being less green?

O’BRIEN: Well, I think the results speak for themselves. I mean we have seen companies competing very strongly, large leading global companies like Apple, Dell, HP, and many others. We have 50, over 50, participating manufacturers. We’ve seen them competing very strongly to claim the mantle of the greenest, the most [INDISCERNIBLE] products in the EPEAT system, and so forth. So we think that having a central yardstick against which everyone can be measured really does perform a very significant function of creating that competitive field for the manufacturers, where they want to trump each other’s accomplishments in environmental terms.

MULLINS: But how does a consumer know if a particular product has gotten either your certification or anyone else’s?

O’BRIEN: Well, we have a central database on our website at www.EPEAT.net. You can find, consumers can find, EPEAT information actually on Amazon, on the Tech Depot website, on Best Buy For Business, on Buy.com. So there are ways that consumers can access this information. And we’re working very diligently to move the information towards consumer retail, towards the bricks and mortars stores.

MULLINS:  Well, there is a lot more, of course, to talk about here, so we are going to be continuing this conversation online. In fact, Sarah, as you know, you’re going to be taking listener questions in our Science Forum through next week. So, for our listeners, those of you who want to join the conversation will find Sarah at our science website which is TheWorld.org/science. Sarah O’Brien, Communications Director with The Green Electronics Council, speaking to us from Montpelier, Vermont. She works with institutions and electronics companies to make the industry greener. Thank you very much, Sarah.

O’BRIEN: Thank you, Lisa.

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MARCO WERMAN: There’s a ray of hope for the future of the Siberian or Amur tiger. China and Russia have just announced a plan to set up the first cross-border protection zone for these big cats. John Seidensticker heads the Conservation Ecology Center at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington DC. He’s also an advisor to the Global Tiger Initiative. He joins us now from the BBC studios in Washington. John, how is this new cross-border protection zone actually going to help the population of Amur tigers?

JOHN SEIDENSTICKER:  This has been in the works for a while. I think it’s a very positive development. They have to reduce poaching and increase prey. The tigers from the Russian side will in fact repopulate the Chinese side.

WERMAN:  I mean there’s such a high demand for tiger parts in China and the whole system seems constantly under pressure from corrupting forces. How will that be addressed?

SEIDENSTICKER: To save tigers you need to do a lot of things basically at the same time. Poaching is one, but if you can’t stop poaching, if you haven’t reduced demand and to reduce demand you have to deal with some deep cultural issues which will take a wide ranging awareness building process. And you have to establish policies that both recognize and protect tigers and tiger habitats.

WERMAN: We heard author John Vaillant talking earlier about tigers killing humans and their dogs that was in Far East Russia. Every now and then we hear or see such reports from other parts of the world as well. For example, in the Mangrove Forest of India and Bangladesh, which is home to the Royal Bengal tiger. How do you conserve the tiger in places where they pose a threat to livestock and human lives?

SEIDENSTICKER: First of all, in human-tiger conflict, the tiger will always lose. If there isn’t an incentive to make live tigers worth more than dead tigers, we’ll lose tigers.

WERMAN: Are there countries in, kind of these so-called tiger zone, that are taking innovative approaches to conserving tigers? I mean an approach that’s beneficial to both tigers and humans?

SEIDENSTICKER: Most all the countries are trying [SOUNDS LIKE] one best practice or another. In fact, in Nepal for example, almost 20 years ago they began a process whereby the local communities shared profits from the national parks where tigers live, so that there’s many went back into the local community, not to individuals, but went into the public good such as improving health clinics and schools and training people who live near the park. And that’s been very successful and it probably can be applied much more widely.

WERMAN: John, we’ll leave it there, but you’ll be continuing this conversation online with our listeners in The World’s science forum. John Seidensticker, conservation biologist at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington. Thanks very much.

SEIDENSTICKER: Thank you.

WERMAN:  To listen to a longer version of our interview with John Seidensticker and to join the online discussion with him, just go to TheWorld.org/science. John will take your comments and questions through next week.

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MARCO WERMAN: It seems we’re constantly hearing bleak news about the environment. Tropical forests are falling. Species are disappearing. Fresh water supplies are dwindling. The climate is changing. Many environmentalists will tell you there’s one root cause of all these troubles. There are simply too many humans. Seven billion of them. And the number keeps rising. But a new book argues that population growth is not the threat many say it is. In fact, the book suggests that focusing on population could distract us from the real threats. It’s called The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future. The World’s science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee spoke with the author and is with me now. Hello, Rhitu.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  Hi, Marco.

WERMAN:  Now does the author disagree that there will another two billion of us by 2050?

CHATTERJEE: Well no, he doesn’t. The author by the way is Fred Pearce. He’s a veteran environmental journalist based in London. He agrees that the earth’s population will continue to grow for the next few decades. But Pearce says that after that our numbers will fall and then stabilize.

FRED PEARCE: The big news and the really good news is that women are having many fewer children. Not out of compulsion but out of making their own choices about their own lives, so women today worldwide have an average 2.6 children.

WERMAN: So, Rhitu, does that average really apply to poorer parts of the world? I mean I know that birth rates have fallen in places like Italy and Japan. But what about parts of Africa and South Asia?

CHATTERJEE: True. You know there are places where women still have 4 or 5 kids, but by and large Pearce says even poor and uneducated women in developing and underdeveloped countries prefer to have fewer kids. For example, he told me about three women he met in a sweat shop in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.

PEARCE: And these young women in their early twenties came from three families with a total of 22 siblings between them. And they planned to have between them six children. A massive revolution just kind of going on. You could see it in that small shack in Dhaka. But it really is symbolic of what’s happening around the world.

WERMAN:  So that would be pretty good new for sure, Rhitu. But I can’t help going back to the fact that no matter what, our numbers will keep growing in the next few decades and more people means more consumption, right, so, I’m a little bit skeptical of what Pearce is saying, that population is not at the heart of many environmental problems.

CHATTERJEE: Marco, that’s exactly what I asked Pearce and he says he isn’t arguing to stop our efforts to slow down population growth in some parts of the world. All he’s saying is that, hey, let’s not blame it all on population. Look, we’ve already diffused the population bomb, now let’s face the real task at hand and that’s tackling what he calls the consumption bomb. He says it’s those of us in the rich world who are causing the world’s environmental problems.

PEARCE: Let me put it this way. All the extra population growth that is going to be on this planet in the next 50 years is going to be in the poor half of the world. Now the three and a half billion people in the poor world today produce just 7% of our carbon dioxide emissions, the gases causing climate change. The richest 7% of the population, you and me in other words, are producing 50% of the emissions. So extra numbers in the poor part of the world has quite a small effect on carbon dioxide emissions.

WERMAN: A fascinating and important topic indeed, and our listeners will have a chance to continue this conversation online in our Science Forum.

CHATTERJEE: That’s right Marco. Fred Pearce will be taking their comments and questions at TheWorld.org/science.

WERMAN: Again that website for you, our listeners, to join the conversation is TheWorld.org/science. Rhitu, thanks for coming into the studio.

CHATTERJEE: Thanks, Marco.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Now Stephen Palumbi, you’re a Marine Biologist at Stanford University and you study whale populations around the world.  Do you think the current system with a moratorium on commercial whaling is broken?

STEPHEN PALUMBI:  I do think the current moratorium has got all those loopholes that we heard about a few minutes ago.  There’s scientific whaling, as we talked about, but there’s also aboriginal whaling and there’s also a little known kind of whaling called accidental whaling, where a whale is caught accidentally in fishing gear allowed to be sold into the meat market.  With all those loopholes and with all those complex negotiations around them, it’s very difficult to know that whale populations are going to be protected now and very difficult to say that this current proposal is going to protect them into the future.

WERMAN: But even if there are those loopholes, even if it is broken, it sounds like the moratorium has helped at least some whale species.  Many have rebounded, haven’t they?

PALUMBI: There is no question that the moratorium has been a major international event, and somewhat of a success story.  The whale populations around the world have been increasing as a result of it.  It’s difficult to know, though, whether that increase is going to continue with global climate change cutting into the food supply of a lot of whales.

WERMAN: Now the proposal by the IWC that we just heard about has several elements to it.  But at its heart is the idea that it would legalize commercial whaling by some countries, although at a very limited scale.  Some critics say it would open the door to rampant hunting because it would be difficult to enforce.  Do you share that concern?

PALUMBI: I do share that concern and the other problem of course is that the registered hunting is just a small part of the issue.  And so unless the agreement can actually take into account the fact that many whales are now under stronger threat because of smuggling and climate change, then the agreement will not, in fact, be a good things for whale populations around the world.

WERMAN: Now with this IWC meeting in Morocco this month, how much will the representatives there be looking into the future and taking into account global warming and its effect on whale food supplies?

PALUMBI: Well Marco, I don’t know how much they’ll take that into account, but a lot of whales get their food out of the arctic pantries of the ocean.  They swim up there during the Arctic and Antarctic summers, they do their feeding solely there.  And those are the environments of the world that are changing the most quickly because of climate change.  Fish stocks are changing in density, krill populations are varying, the grey whale eats a small crustacean that lives on the bottom and those animals are having to forage further and further and further to find that food.  Swimming now not only into the Bering Sea, but up north, north of Siberia and Alaska.  So these whales are basically traveling the world looking for their food in a world where the oceans are changing dramatically.  It’s very difficult to know that their populations, the whales’ populations are going to be able to grow in the next decade they way they were able to grow in the eighties and the nineties after the moratorium.

WERMAN: So let’s go from the scientific to the ethical.  Americans generally have no problem with the idea of regulated fishing, but the idea of whaling, any whaling, strikes many as cruel and just plain wrong.  What is you position?  Would you support whaling of any kind for any reason?

PALUMBI: My personal position is that I don’t find whale meat to be particularly attractive and I don’t find whaling to be a particularly great thing to do.  On the other hand, I also think that it’s very dangerous and not appropriate for the United States to impose a cultural restriction on people around the world.  The ethical issues about it are on one side of the table, as a marine population biologist, what I’ve really tried to approach the things is to say under what circumstances can whales be sustainably hunted?  Under what circumstances can they be protected around the world?  What are the kinds of ways that new technology can be applied to actually control the whaling that the rest of the world decides ethically is in its best interest?

WERMAN: Professor Stephen Palumbi, we’ll have to leave it there, but the conversation will continue online.  You’re our guest in The World Science Forum this week.  Listeners can bring their own questions and comments to you about the science, politics and ethics of whaling.  For listeners to join the discussion, just go to the world dot org slash science.  Dr. Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University joined us from Monterey, California.  Thank you very much.

PALUMBI: Thank you Marco.

WERMAN: News headlines are coming up here on PRI.

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MARCO WERMAN:  We’re joined now by journalist and author Ethan Waters.  His new book is called Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American Psyche.  Ethan Waters, you argue that other cultures have their own ways of dealing with mental illness and those can be as good, sometimes better, than western diagnoses and treatment.  So what is your take on the story we just heard?

ETHAN WATERS:  Well it’s difficult to know because without knowing a great deal about those individual cases, it’s hard to say what would have been best for those people.  But if you take a global look at this, take for instance a look at the World Health Organization studies on outcomes of schizophrenia around the world, I do think it challenges a premise that was in that story that suggested that these people would necessarily be better if they were left in the west.  And the results of that World Health Organization study done over decades, multi-cultured studies, suggests that indeed, schizophrenics in the developed world do better than schizophrenics in the developed countries and in the west.  So often times, there is something going on in these cultures that we, I think, under-appreciate that has a remarkable ameliorative effect on even illnesses as severe as schizophrenia.

WERMAN: Now you contend that Americans are forcing their ideas of mental health on the rest of the world.  But isn’t the western understanding of the mind, a scientific objective approach that transcends culture.

WATERS: I don’t think it is.  Every generation of psychiatrists believes they they’ve finally got past cultural influence.  But mental illness and the expression of mental health are always shaped by culture.  You can look across time and you can see every period and every era there is a way to express mental illness.  Scientists refer to this as the symptom pool and each culture has it’s now symptom pool and each period in history has its own symptom pool by which the person learned those symptoms.  In one period it might be symptoms of anorexia, in another period it might be depression, in another period it might be anxiety.  And in this moment in history, the west I believe globalizing ideas about the mind and also beliefs about what are the valid psychiatric symptoms such that we’re homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

WERMAN: Give us an example of that.

WATERS: Well I went to Hong Kong and spent a lot of time with a psychiatrist named Sing Lee there who documented the rise of anorexia in the middle 1990′s of Hong Kong.  This was a very nervous time for Hong Kong.  This was after Tiananmen Square on the mainland.  Families were being broken up.  And there was a great amount of, as Sing Lee says, a general loading of psychopathology in the population.  Into that moment in history, a young woman who was clearly an anorexic died on a downtown Hong Kong street and suddenly the culture was very interested in this disorder.  And flooding into Hong Kong on this very nervous moment in time was the western knowledge about anorexia and western experts saying, dictating basically, what this disease was.  It was only after that moment in time when there was this sudden understanding of anorexia did you see indeed a rise of the disease.

WERMAN: Are you saying that before the nineties there weren’t any presentations of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong?

WATERS: They were extremely rare.  Sing Lee was studying one in a million anorexics in Hong Kong and he was discovering that they weren’t like American anorexics in a lot of ways.  They didn’t, for instance, have fat phobia.  They didn’t have body dismorphia.  They often came from poor populations on the outskirts of cities and he was trying to find out what this particular rare form of anorexia was at the moment in time when suddenly the earth shifted underneath him.  Suddenly there was an influx of this American form of anorexia.  And I believe that had partly to do with how American experts came in and began to explain to Hong Kong who is at risk, what this disease was, and what it meant.

WERMAN: I guess I’m having a hard time getting my head around the idea that other cultures and nations would essentially adopt American mental illnesses, or diagnoses of mental illness, when, as you argue in your book, they’ve got their own mental illnesses.

WATERS: That’s true, but every culture, including ours, the new mental illness that comes down the line, the new kids are now cutting, or there is a suicide spike.  We are fascinated as a culture by the new mental illness and that’s true of cultures around the world.  And it’s also true that other cultures around the world looked to the west for innovation.  They looked to the west for technology and they looked at the west for modern drug treatments.  They expect innovation from the west.  And so when a newspaper reporter in Hong Kong has to explain what anorexia is, it makes perfect sense for them to look to a western expert.  So it’s not just us forcing these ideas on the rest of the world, it’s the rest of the world literally reaching out and asking for this information from us, because they expect it.

WERMAN: Now even before I let you go, I should tell our listeners that you’ll be taking their questions online.  You’re the guest in our world science forum through next week.  And you listeners can join the online discussion with Ethan Waters.  Go to the world dot org slash science.  Journalist Ethan Waters, author of the book Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American psyche.  He joined us from San Francisco, thank you very much Ethan.

WATERS: It’s been a pleasure.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Training is key; not only for the Afghan Army, but for the suicide bombers the Army has to contend with.  Getting people to kill themselves for a cause takes a kind of psychological conditioning.  And researchers have been studying how this works, how it is that suicide bombers are created.  The World’s science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee is here.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  Hi Marco.

WERMAN: Hi Rhitu.

CHATTERJEE: Yes, so for my broadcast I interviewed science journalist and author [phonetic] Shankar Vendantam.  He has a new book and it’s called “The Hidden Brain, How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Precedents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Lives”.  One of the chapters in this book is about the psychology of terrorists and suicide bombers.  Vendantam told me that psychologically, suicide bombers aren’t that different from you and me.

SHANKAR VENDANTAM:  There’s been a lot of interesting research conducted among suicide bombers who have failed to complete their missions and are now in prisons of various kinds around the world.  These psychological evaluations show that if anything, suicide bombers tend to have better mental health than the rest of us; they tend to be more idealistic than the rest of us.  They’re often not crazed, religious nuts as we usually think.  They’re also not necessarily people who themselves have suffered great acts of humiliation and are acting out these narratives of revenge.

WERMAN: Suicide bombers are mentally healthier and more idealistic than the rest of us.  So Rhitu, why would they then do something that most of us would deem extreme, irrational or unhealthy?

CHATTERJEE: It all has to do with group psychology Marco.  You have to remember that human beings are hard-wired to be strongly influenced by the people around us.  Whether it’s a group of investment bankers in the game of making money, or missionaries preparing to save the world, Vendantam says small groups of people develop their own norms and aspirations that are different from people outside the group.

WERMAN: Right.  But for suicide bombers the norms and aspirations are killing others and killing themselves.

CHATTERJEE: Right.  And of course the leaders of the terrorist groups are the ones that are creating this norm and imposing it on the young men and women.  Vendantam says that psychologically, the training process is like being in a tunnel.

VENDAMTAM: Within the tunnel that is the suicide bomber’s tunnel, becoming a suicide terrorist is not aberrational; it becomes aspirational.  And when you turn the norm so that suicide terrorism is not aberrational but aspirational, you no longer have to go out to recruit people to come to you.

CHATTERJEE: So you feel privileged to be here.

VENDAMTAM: You feel privileged to be a suicide bomber, so within the world of, for example, Islamic suicide terrorists today, becoming a suicide terrorist is not to be someone who is looked down upon as the dregs of society; it’s to become the rock star.

WERMAN: Wow.  And that sounds like a dangerous status for anyone who is hell-bent on destruction.  Fascinating stuff Rhitu, but we’ll have to leave it there.  Listeners can hear the rest of your interview, though, with Shankar Vendantam on your science pod cast.

CHATTERJEE: That’s right Marco.  I spoke with Vendantam about how unconscious psychological processes influence our decisions and behaviors in many ways.

WERMAN: To download The World’s science pod cast, go to the world dot org slash science.

CHATTERJEE: Yes.  And listeners can chat directly with Vendantam online.  He’s our guest through next week in The World Science Forum.  You can find that as well at the world dot org slash science.

WERMAN: Great stuff, thank you Rhitu.

CHATTERJEE: My pleasure.

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Neuroscientists are teaming up with magicians to learn about human behavior and the brain. The World’s Science correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee recently spoke with neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde about what the two professions are teaching each other. Macknik and Martinez-Conde are also the authors of the new book “Sleights of Mind,” and they are taking listener questions on The World’s online Science Forum discussion.

The World’s science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee explores such aid projects in our latest science podcast. It features an interview Anu Ramaswami, an environmental engineer at the University of Colorado in Denver. And listeners have a chance to ask Ramaswami their own questions in our online science forum.

Reporter Eliza Barclay has this story from Nicaragua where two American brothers tried a technological fix to poverty in that Central American country:

Barclay: Mathias Craig is an engineer and social entrepreneur. He’s obsessed with windmills.

M. Craig: To me they seem a perfect mix of an opportunity to do something that has sort of a social good and an environmental good.

Barclay: As a child, Craig spent a lot of time in Nicaragua, visiting impoverished villages that had no electricity. Later, as an adult, he got an idea: why not bring windmills to these villages? The windmills could provide clean power and help people escape poverty by lighting schools and health clinics and…creating jobs. Craig explored this idea as a graduate student at MIT.

M. Craig: I took a class called entrepreneurship in the developing world. So I combined that with my interest in Nicaragua from my childhood, and came up with blueEnergy.

blueEnergy founders Mathias Craig (left)and his brother Guillaume (courtesy of blueEnergy)

Barclay: BlueEnergy is a company Craig founded in 2004. He started it with his brother, Guillaume. Guillaume Craig now oversees the company’s headquarters in the town of Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.

G. Craig: We started here in this workshop. It’s about 30 feet by 40 feet deep. So that was our space for the first couple years…

Barclay: Guillaume Craig walks around the cavernous building where blueEnergy’s technicians build wind turbines. He points to a turbine inside.

G. Craig: It’s got the magnets and the copper coils and the lights that light up…

Barclay: When the brothers arrived here, they had their work cut out for them: 80 percent of the coastal population lacked electricity.

The Craigs installed their first wind turbine in 2005, and since then they’ve added 11 more. Gradually, they’re reaching the forgotten outposts of the Nicaraguan coast, places like Monkey Point.

The

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Barclay: In this tiny community, a spindly white windmill towers above the mango trees and fishing boats.

Last year, blueEnergy installed the wind turbine and a handful of small solar panels. Together, they produce about half the energy consumed by a typical American home. But here it’s enough to power 27 households, a school and a health clinic, at least for part of the day. Locals appreciate the electricity.

Georgina Marque is a young mother of two (Photo: Eliza Barclay)

Marque: “Before we were using candles. Everyone did. Now it’s better that we have light. I use it to cook, make the bed in the evening. “

Barclay: But the arrival of electric power has not transformed this community in quite the way the Craig brothers had hoped. The town is still poor and jobs are scarce. And if you talk to locals, and ask them, what’s the best thing about having electricity? Here’s what they’ll tell you: television.

M. Craig: “We’ve had a lot of debates internally about that.”

Barclay: Mathias Craig says promoting TV was not why he and his partners started their venture.

M. Craig: “Definitely some people within the organization, within BlueEnergy, were a bit frustrated, a bit disappointed that they had worked so hard to bring development and opportunity to the community and here they were using it on television.”

Barclay: Some volunteers who came from America complained about locals frittering away the electricity on TV. In fact, many residents emptied their small savings to buy televisions to watch soap operas.

The Craigs learned a lesson: they can’t dictate how people use the energy they bring.

Now, Monkey Point residents contend television is educational. Wayne MacClean, who manages the windmill, says TV helps kids develop their language skills.

MacClean: “The children them could come and watch TV and develop their minds even with the one word or one letter of the alphabet.”

Wayne MacLean (Photo: Eliza Barclay)

Barclay: But whether or not television is an ideal use of the electricity blueEnergy provides, the Craig brothers say they’ve learned another, deeper lesson. People in places like Monkey Point need many things: good roads, clean water, education. And these may be more important than electricity. Guillaume Craig conceded this point over beers at a bar in Bluefields.

G. Craig: “Their priorities are not always energy. Sometimes they’re drinking water because they’re getting sick and the children are dying from diarrhea. But we don’t impose now energy as the “what we do.”

Barclay: The “what we do” of blueEnergy is now much broader. The Craig brothers have turned their energy company into an organization that takes a holistic approach to poverty. Mathias Craig says he now understands that alleviating poverty is more complex than installing windmills.

M. Craig: “When you come at it from a technology perspective, you think your end goal is you build the system, you install it, and it delivers energy. And you do that, and then you get to the end of the path, and then you realize that that’s not actually the end of the path. That’s somewhere near the beginning of the path.”

Barclay: The new beginning of the path is asking people what they need before deciding what to give them. And that’s something the Craigs are just learning to do.

For The World, I’m Eliza Barclay, Bluefields, Nicaragua.

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