Amanda Little is an award winning environmental journalist who writes about innovations in the environment. She is also a professor of investigative journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University, and has a particular fondness for far-flung and hard-to-stomach reporting that takes her to ultradeep oil rigs, down manholes, into sewage plants, and inside monsoon clouds.
She is the author of the new book The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World (Random House: Crown/Harmony). In this fascinating look at the race to secure the global food supply, the environmental journalist investigates how we’ll feed humanity sustainably in the coming decades. She weaves together stories from the world’s most creative and controversial innovators on the front lines of food science, agriculture, and climate change.
She also wrote Power Trip: The Story of America’s Love Affair With Energy (HarperCollins). Amanda has published her writing in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Wired, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, NewYorker.com and elsewhere. A former columnist for Outside magazine and Grist.org, she is a recipient of the Jane Bagley Lehman Award for excellence in environmental journalism.
Little has interviewed figures ranging from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, and National Public Radio. A graduate of Brown University, she serves on the Board of Trustees at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives with her husband and kids.
Little will be discussing how climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?