Ruth DeFries and Jeffrey Sachs have been named University Professors, the highest rank Columbia University bestows on its faculty.

Across the country, in distressed urban centers, hundreds of thousands of industrial sites have been left lying fallow. These properties, known as brownfields, embody the story of America’s twentieth-century industrial might and bear the mark of that period’s unenlightened practices. Their closing and subsequent abandonment culminated in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, the creation of urban blight and the legacy of environmental contamination. However, research suggests that brownfields may be the missing link in the emerging green economy and one of the keys to America’s economic comeback.