Special Report

Jonathan Rose Companies LLC is one of America’s largest green developers of affordable housing and other ventures, with more than one billion dollars worth of projects under management. Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner spoke with CEO Jonathan Rose. Kuttner: What makes a building “green”? Rose: For affordable housing, we recommend a level we call “practical green,” […]

Twenty years ago, on a farm outside my hometown of Aberdeen, South Dakota, I stood with a few dozen local corn growers in a machine shack, huddled around a still. We were trying to show the farmers that their crops could be turned into what we then called gasohol — a liquid fuel that could […]

If the “mission accomplished” photo-op was the defining moment of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, the president’s recent visit to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, defined its energy policy. One week after he embraced alternative energy in his State of the Union address, Bush’s budget axed 32 employees at the nation’s premier […]

Scarcely a week goes by without coverage of a new discovery by scientists revealing that yet another disease is linked to one or another gene. The range of health conditions now known to be gene related is astonishing. Some are just what you would have expected 50 years ago: many cancers, birth defects, obscure metabolic […]

Brian Schweitzer is an agricultural scientist, a gun owner, and a third-generation Montana farmer. He is also a popular Democratic governor of a usually conservative “red” state. Schweitzer likes to joke that he has a rule for himself: If he stays longer than 24 hours in Washington, D.C., he takes a bath in tomato juice […]

Less than 200 years ago, industrializing societies were carbohydrate economies. In 1820, Americans used two tons of vegetables for every one ton of minerals. Plants were the primary raw material in the production of dyes, chemicals, paints, inks, solvents, construction materials, even energy. For the next 125 years, hydrocarbon and carbohydrate battled for industrial supremacy. […]

While people choose to risk life and limb to enter this country illegally for many reasons, the vast majority come to seek employment — and they find it. What would happen if employers were effectively penalized for hiring the undocumented? Would there be fewer job opportunities for those who should not be here and, consequently, […]

As the temperature surrounding immigration issues rises, let’s remember that our political system walked this road 20 years ago during the debate that led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. In its attempt to tackle illegal immigration, Congress struck a deal in which border control and employer responsibility were combined with […]

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the integration of immigrants in this nation of immigrants is just how much it is being done by the immigrants themselves, with a minimum of effort by government or society at large. Despite widespread hand-wringing that today’s immigrants are not learning English or becoming “like us” as they used […]

Immigrants are good for business. In fact, the rapid clip of U.S. economic growth might not be possible without them. Even as academics debate whether immigrants take jobs away from domestic workers, and as homegrown militias organize to patrol the nation’s southern border, hundreds of thousands of immigrants — more than half of them undocumented […]