One of the great failings of the American education system (in our view) is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad.

If you just try to make rational arguments about why people should care about Congo and how 5 million people have died, then people tend not to be receptive. But once you've created a connection of empathy, rational arguments can play a supportive role.

...Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.

America's education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.

Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

Every year 3.1 million Indian children die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.