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Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).

Finally, someone has paid me money to write about monks and beer!

My latest piece for the Weather Channel involves two of my favorite things: sustainability, and beer!

Specifically, it’s about a Trappist Monastery in Belgium that has instituted a cool new way to clean their beer tanks using phytoremediation, or plant-based fining. This is not only an environmentally-friendly method of beer production, but it’s also a scalable project that can ultimately help the monastery to produce more microgreens, legumes, and other human-edible food products, making the entire beer production process that much better for people, and the planet.

I also spoke with some other religious leaders about the role of God in environmental stewardship. While the popular narrative tends to show climate-denying Evangelical Christians, there are in fact many devout Christians whose faith actually calls them to actively protect God’s planet from the greed of mankind. And that’s a really powerful message that the world could use right now.

The word of the week is "Float-o-voltaics" →

In my latest piece for the Weather Channel, I spoke with the folks at the Anglo-American Mining Company in Chile, who have created one of the first major commercial floatovoltaic energy systems on one of their mining tailing ponds. What this essentially means is that they’ve floated a bunch of arrays of solar panels onto the semi-toxic water residue from their mine. The water actually helps to make the solar panels more efficient, and the solar panels help to re-purpose the otherwise-wasted space from the mine tailing pond.

It’s actually some pretty fascinating, forward-thinking science, and I’m really glad to have learned about it. Maybe you’ll be into it, too!

Hello I am the Weather Channel now

…Or at least, I’m writing things for the Weather Channel. Which is also pretty cool.

My first piece is for a partnership between the Weather Channel and IBM (who is also their parent company), on some of the cool climate calculation work they’ve been doing together to help better understand the multitude of factors that can affect water quality across the country.

This piece was culled from an hour-plus interview, chock full of a lot of fascinating stuff. I’m pretty pleased with the final product, but the interviewee Lloyd gave me so much more to work with. Maybe I’ll share it here some day.