Danny Bloom

Danny Bloom is a U.S. reading and technology blogger and climate activist who has two mains campaigns underway: he advocates using the word "screening" for reading text on a screen; and he also proposes building "self-sustaining cities in the polar regions," since "climate change will eventually make most of Earth uninhabitable." He calls these future adaptation strategies for global warming "polar cities" or "Lovelock retreats".

"Bloom isn't a scientist or any other kind of expert," according to IPS News. "Bloom has contacted scientists, experts, reporters, and many others around the world about his polar cities idea. A few months ago, a Google keyword search for 'polar cities' would have produced no results. Today, there are nearly 3,000 sites that feature or offer comment on Bloom's idea, including one with a series of polar cities illustrations. Plenty of the comments are from Bloom himself, in a one-man-who-doesn't own-a-computer attempt to spread the word."

Bloom, a graduate of Tufts University in 1971, identifies himself as an "envisionary futurist" and currently serves as the acting director of the non-profit Polar Cities Research Institute.

Bloom has also coined the neologism "screening" to define the kind of reading people do on computer screens, in order to differentiate it from reading on paper surfaces. Alex Beam of the Boston Globe wrote about this in a June 19 column at the Globe.

SourceWatch resources

 * Climate change