A brief bio

Carmelo Ruiz 

Carmelo Ruiz is a Puerto Rican author, investigative journalist, environmental educator and self-described "renaissance hack". For more than 20 years he has written and reported for radio, television, print media and online publications on various environmental and geopolitical issues, including agriculture, natural resource conflicts, biotechnology, globalization, privatization, neoliberalism, climate change, corporate crime, peak oil, food security, green politics and ecological economics. His articles have been published by Counterpunch, the Organic Consumers Association, Inter Press Service, CIP Americas Policy Program, Corpwatch, Progressive Media Project, Native Americas Journal, Food First, Earth Island Journal, Grist, Alternet, The Ecologist, High Times, New York Daily News, Green Social Thought, La Jornada (Mexico), La Prensa (Panama), Biodiversidad en América Latina, Agencia Latinoamericana de Información, and many other publications and organizations.

Apart from being a prolific writer he is also a frequent public speaker. He has presented about the overlapping subjects of agriculture, biotechnology, biosafety, gene ecology, environmental health, agroecology and food sovereignty to the Harvard School of Public Health, the American Studies Association, the Caribbean chapter of the AAAS, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago, and various universities and colleges, including Tufts, Bates, DePaul, Burlington College, University of Puerto Rico, and Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia.

Through the years, he has worn many hats. In the mid 1990's he hosted "Don't Get Me Started", a radio talk show on community station WGDR in Vermont. From 1997 to 2004 he was a reporter for Puerto Rico's weekly Claridad newspaper. In 2012 he was social media director of the US Organic Consumers Association's Millions Against Monsanto campaign, where he played an important role in California's "Yes on 37" campaign, a measure that would have required the labeling of genetically modified foods. In 2015 he lived in Ecuador, where he worked as a producer for Telesur English and volunteered for the Tegantai ecologist press agency (Tegantai) and the Latin American Information Agency (ALAI).

Ruiz has a Masters degree in Social Ecology from Goddard College. But his education did not end there: in 2008 he studied biotechnology and biosafety at the University of Tromsø in Norway, and in 2013 he took courses in advanced agroecology and rural development at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. 

He is a Senior Fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program, a Fellow of the Oakland Institute, and a Research Associate of the Institute for Social Ecology. In 2004 he founded the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety, a bilingual and multicultural non-governmental organization that educates about the ethical, ecological, political, economic, environmental and human health impacts of genetically modified organisms, crops and foods.