Mark Hertsgaard
Mark Hertsgaard (born 1956) is an American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now. He is the environment correspondent for "The Nation", and the author of seven non-fiction books, including "Earth Odyssey" (1998) "and Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth" (2011). He has covered climate change, politics, economics, the press, and music since 1989. His best-known work as an author is "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency" (1988), which described the way the Reagan White House "deployed raw power and conventional wisdom to intimidate Washington 's television newsrooms." He has also written for magazines and newspapers such as "The Guardian", "Vanity Fair", "Scientific American","Time", "Harper’s", and "Le Monde". He has been a commentator for the public radio programs Morning Edition, Marketplace, and Living on Earth, and taught writing at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. Hertsgaard lives in San Francisco. Career. Hertsgaard received a B.A. in international studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and was one of the founders of the "Baltimore City Paper". According to his fellow Johns Hopkins alumnus Russ Smith, he worked in the Institute for Policy Studies  in Washington, D.C., after graduation. While compiling a feature article for "The New Yorker" in 1993, Hertsgaard broke the news that the three surviving members of the Beatles were due to issue previously unreleased music from the group's career, as part of their multimedia "Anthology" project, in addition to reuniting to work on new recordings. At this time, he was granted rare access to the band's EMI recording archives in London, gaining an insight that informed his 1995 book "A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles". Writing in 2000, Nick Bromell, professor of  English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the founding editor of "Boston Review", described "A Day in the Life" as "the best single book on the music of the Beatles". During the 1990s, Hertsgaard's attention turned to the ecology of the Earth. He embarked upon a seven-year global tour to investigate the issue of environmental degradation. The journey spanned four continents, 19 countries and hundreds of interviews. This resulted in the book "Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future" (1999), which was reviewed favorably in "The New York Times Book Review" and "Time  magazine. Hertsgaard also wrote climate change adaptation, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, titled Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth" (2011). From 2011 to 2013, he was Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow at New America Foundation researching the linked challenges of climate change, food security, poverty and ecological agriculture. During a Mother's Day second line parade in New Orleans in 2013, Hertsgaard was shot and wounded along with 19 other people at the corner of Frenchmen Street and North Villere in the city's 7th Ward.