DAMON ORION – Weaving Earth Education Center, an all-ages education center, reminds us that “we are a part of this earth, not apart from it.”
Category: Archive
Victims Win Historic Victory Against Chiquita in Colombia Paramilitary Case
DANIELA DIAZ RANGEL and JOSHUA COLLINS – The ruling against the banana giant formerly known as United Fruit makes history in holding a U.S. company liable for abuses committed abroad. Lawyers say the case is just the beginning.
The World Is Headed Toward Nuclear War
GERRY CONDON – Nuclear War Is Imminent — Unless the U.S. Embraces Peace – and Soon!
The only antidote to election anxiety is training to confront Trump’s threat
GEORGE LAKEY – No matter the outcome in November, we need training to transform despair into action and to build the kind of solidarity that offers protection.
California Communities Celebrate ‘Massive’ Victory as Oil Industry Drops Unpopular Referendum
LIZA GROSS – The oil industry withdrew its $40 million campaign to kill a historic law to protect neighborhoods from oil drilling’s toxic effects, but is threatening to challenge the measure in court.
Donald Trump’s Reckless Infatuation with Nuclear Weapons
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – Ultimately, the only long-term security for humanity lies in the global abolition of nuclear weapons and the development of a united world community.
Reaching Across the Generations to Oppose War
DONNA PARK – Relying on the force of law instead of the law of force is a better way to address conflicts among nations and, in this fashion, keep us all safe and secure.
French nuclear giant scraps SMR plans due to soaring costs, will start over
GILES PARKINSON – The federal Coalition has argued that nuclear might be expensive to build, but will deliver cheaper power to consumers. It has not explained how, but it has said that its reactors would be government owned, suggesting that – like France and Ontario – the costs would be borne by taxpayers and the supply of power to customers would be heavily subsidized.
This Election’s Impact on Immigration
ANDREW MOSS – With enough engagement and the right kinds of pressure, we might just get the kind of immigration system our nation needs: not the policies that squander tens of billions on a carceral, dead-end deportation machine, but a just system that invests in enough people and the right kinds of processes to minimize backlogs, expedite asylum claims, and provide the legal pathways that will help immigrants begin working and contributing to a land that needs them.
Big Banks Break Their Climate Promises by Propping Up Big Meat
MONIQUE MIKHAIL and WARD WARMERDAM – Massive industrial livestock financing sabotages major U.S. banks’ climate goals.
Joint Statement of U.S. Government Officials who have Resigned over U.S. policy towards Gaza, Palestine, and Israel
JOSH PAUL (for himself and eleven other former U.S. government officials) – We are former U.S. Government Officials who resigned from our respective positions over the last nine months due to our grave concerns with current U.S. policy towards the crisis in Gaza, and U.S. policies and practices towards Palestine and Israel more broadly.
Why Are Conservatives Undermining the Constitution They Claim to Love?
BOB TOPPER – The right’s strategy to overturn democracy is to make people hate the country they love. For organizations like Fox News and the would-be oligarchs the motivation is financial gain. For the fundamentalists, the goal is an American theocracy, and for Trump it is self-preservation. Strange bedfellows.
One woman just brought the entire UK fossil fuels industry to its knees
THE CANARY – A landmark decision by the UK Supreme Court on Thursday June 20 has raised major barriers to all new fossil fuel projects across the UK, including the proposed new coal mine in Cumbria and the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea.
Air Pollution Is Killing Millions and Rising Exponentially—A Shift in Agriculture Can Solve It
JIMMY VIDELE – Today’s biggest epidemic is the exponential rise of CO2-equivalent atmospheric emissions. With COVID-19, the world changed protocols within weeks of the outbreak. This shows that we can change today to stop the harm inflicted on the planet, the more than 8 billion humans, and countless other Earthlings. We need to realize that there is no bigger threat facing us currently.
Minding the Debate: What’s Happening to Our Brains During Election Season
MELINDA BURRELL – Some of us are convening watch parties and others deliberately will not tune in. Either way, the June 27 presidential debate is the real start of the election season, when more Americans start to pay attention. It’s when partisan rhetoric runs hot and emotions run high. It’s also a chance for us, as members of a democratic republic. How? By setting expectations for ourselves and our leaders. A peek at our neurobiology can help us make this debate something we learn from rather than something that divides us further.
Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT
EDWARD CARVER – Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid for a digital campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers, especially Democrats who are Black, The New York Times reported on Wednesday, June 3rd.
Banal Militarism Has Infiltrated Our Entire Society
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – The term is “banal militarism” – that is to say, violence and the preparation for violence so utterly commonplace that most people don’t even notice. Banal militarism is as American as apple pie. It’s also global in scope.
27,000 Virginia Teachers Win Historic Union Election with Presidential Election Implications
MIKE ELK – June 10, 2024 This morning, it was announced that Virginia Education Unions, a joint coalition of Virginia-based AFT and NEA locals, had won a historic union election to represent over 27,000 teachers and school staff in Fairfax County, Virginia.
How Donald Trump Worked to Destroy America’s Labor Unions
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – If Trump expects significant union support this November, it’s merely another of his many illusions.
Are the prospects for Small Modular Reactors being exaggerated? Five key characteristics examined
ED LYMAN – Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are being presented as the next generation of nuclear technology. While traditional plants face cost overruns and safety issues, SMRs are seen by their champions as cheaper, safer, and faster to deploy. But evidence casts these claims into doubt. In five sections of this article, the reasons why are listed and analyzed.
Facing a Surge in Wildfires, the U.S. Government Turned to Native Wisdom and Advanced Archaeology
IRINA MATUZAVA – Collaborative efforts between forest agencies and Indigenous communities are improving wildfire management by combining oral histories with long-term archaeological datasets, demonstrating the value of integrating an understanding of the past into solutions for a better future.
Republicans Claiming to Support Minority Voters Suppress Their Votes
ANDREW MOSS – There’s a breathtaking hubris at work when a political party seeks to suppress the votes of an entire people, then claims its leaders are the champions of that same people. You don’t have to look far to find such hubris in the Republican Party today.
Climate Superfund Law Enacted; Vermont Becomes First State to Hold Big Oil Financially Responsible for a Fair Share of Climate Damages
VERMONT NATURAL RESOURCES COUNCIL – Legislation authorizing the State of Vermont to recoup financial damages caused by climate change from major fossil fuel companies became law today (May 31, 2024) when Governor Phil Scott failed to sign or veto the bill during the constitutionally-mandated five-day consideration period.
Authoritarianism is on the Rise in Many Democracies
MEL GURTOV – Can we draw any general conclusions from these elections? Probably the most important is the authoritarian tendencies of leaders and challengers in these Official corruption, violence against critics, disrespect for domestic and international law, and disregard for public opinion are often features of democratically elected rulers as they are of rulers who are not elected. democracies. We keep learning that winning elections is not the same thing as governing democratically.
How the Military-Industrial Complex is Killing us All
DAVID VINE and THERESA (ISA) ARRIOLA – Though all too many of us will continue to believe that dismantling the MIC is unrealistic, given the threats facing us, it’s time to think as boldly as possible about how to roll back its power, resist the invented notion that war is inevitable, and build the world we want to see. Just as past movements reduced the power of Big Tobacco and the railroad barons, just as some are now taking on Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the prison-industrial complex, so we must take on the MIC to build a world focused on making human lives rich (in every sense) rather than one focused on bombs and other weaponry that brings wealth to a select few who benefit from death.
The GOP’s Stalinesque Plan 2025 to Shape the Future of U.S. Food and Agriculture
ELIZABETH HENDERSON – The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation wants to rid the USDA
of sustainability, climate change mitigation, and racial equity.
The Nuclear FREEZE Movement of the 1980s Has Lessons for Today
LAWRENCE S. WITTNER – The success of the freeze movement and its anti-nuclear counterparts of the 1980’s and 1990’s provides an important lesson for our own time. If substantial popular pressure can be stirred up by advocates of arms control and disarmament, government officials can be convinced to change their nuclear policies.
We Must Face Down the Expanding Anti-Reality Industry
BRYN NELSON – Exposing the antiscience playbook reveals the antiregulatory motives of its deep-pocketed bankrollers
Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People
PALESTINIAN BDS NATIONAL COMMITTEE (BNC) – People of conscience around the world are rightfully shattered, enraged, and sometimes feeling powerless about Israel’s #GazaGenocide. Many feel compelled to boycott any and all products and services of companies tied in any way to Israel. The proliferation of extensive “boycott lists” on social media is a result of this. The question is how to make boycotts effective and actually have an impact in holding corporations accountable for their complicity in the suffering of Palestinians?
Overcoming despair and apathy to win democracy
GEORGE LAKEY – Lessons on movement building from one of the founders of the Serbian student movement that brought down dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
What conflict resolution experts wish universities knew about conflict
MELINDA BURRELL – The protests roiling our campuses reveal a great deal about us as a country. Emotions are easily triggered, many of us are comfortable being angry, and most of us need help to handle conflict constructively. And these emotions are likely to keep running high as we head towards the November election. Understanding the importance of creating forums to listen – and of reaching for help in navigating conflict – are good bets.
What Biden Could/Should Be Saying…
WINSLOW MYERS – Imagine what a U.S. president might say to the nation if he or she were willing to break ironclad political taboos and admit some self-evident truths . . .
UMass Arrests: What Would Daniel Ellsberg Do?
CHRISTIAN APPY – What would Daniel Ellsberg do in the face of the Israel-Hamas war? We can’t know with complete certainty because he died last June at the age of 92. We do know that in the 50 years after he released the Pentagon Papers, he devoted his life to principled nonviolent activism and was arrested more than 80 times for acts of civil disobedience in the struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament. When Christian Appy saw UMass students protest Israel’s way of retaliating against Hamas for Hamas’ October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel, he took up with the students after asking, “What would Daniel Ellsberg do?”
Despite High-Level Encouragement, US-China Student Exchanges Are Diminishing
MEL GURTOV – The tit-for-tat warnings between the U.S. and China reflect the politics of their relations today: the “China threat” being pushed in Congress, and American public opinion now very unfavorable toward China; and Chinese upset with the US “Cold War mentality” and strategic containment of China. Sadly, students and researchers in both countries suffer from this negative dialogue.
How Can People Actually Protect Their Privacy in an Era of Total Digital Surveillance?
JOHN P. RUEHL – Governments and private entities have steadily eroded privacy on the internet. The trend toward internet functions centralizing within national borders and fragmenting internationally reinforces the need to safeguard both openness and security in cyberspace.
Looking Beneath the Surface of the End-the-War Encampments
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – The encampments are filled with students from different religious traditions — Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, unaffiliated as well as spiritual but not religious students. They are finding solace and courage among themselves.
Plastic Pollution Is a Crime Against People and the Planet
ERICA CIRINO – Plastic particles and chemicals pollute all of our bodies. But people living on the fencelines of the fossil fuel, plastic, and waste industries face even more life-threatening pollution.
War Culture Hates the Ethical Passion of the Young
NORMAN SOLOMON – With transcendent wisdom, this spring’s student uprising has rejected conformity as a lethal anesthetic while the horrors continue in Gaza. Leaders of the most powerful American institutions want to continue as usual, as if official participation in genocide were no particular cause for alarm. Instead, young people have dared to lead the way, insisting that such a culture of death is repugnant and completely unacceptable.
Columbia students are sick at heart — just as we were in ‘68
MARK RUDD – An organizer of the 1968 Columbia University protests, Mark Rudd analyzes why the message against war, then and now, is the same.
Nuclear Power’s Lethal, Larcenous End Game
HARVEY WASSERMAN – Burying the “Peaceful Atom” and its fossil-fueled partners will be the task of our lifetimes, and when it comes to the myth of nuke power helping to fight global warming…there’s no there there.
NOW is the Time for Action to Counter Two Existential Threats
WINSLOW MYERS – Everything has changed in our world; we have begun to become aware that everything I do affects you and vice versa. The nuclear deterrence system and George Will-Donald Trump-style climate denial leaves out too much of our reality.
How the Constitution Fails to Protect the Environment
KATRINA FISCHER KUH and JAMES R. RAY – The absence of clear and broad constitutional authority to protect the environment limits the scope of federal environmental law.
Climate activists in New England can finally celebrate ‘the end of coal’
SIOBHAN SENIER – With the last of New England’s coal plants now set to close, the No Coal No Gas campaign is reflecting on the power of fighting together.
Should Harming Mother Earth Be a Crime? The Case for Ecocide
REYNARD LOKI – The destruction of nature might one day become a criminal offense adjudicated by the International Criminal Court.
Inspiring Memoir of an Unrelenting Nuclear Resister
PATRICK O’NEILL – This Earth Day peace appeal by journalist Patrick O’Neill describes his work with others to act to reduce the chances of the ultimate self-inflicted disaster, nuclear war.
Climate movement elders revive monkey wrench tactics to save an old forest
NICK ENGELFRIED – Earlier this year, seven activists entered the site of a proposed timber sale in Washington State, intent on halting — or at least delaying — the destruction of trees with immense carbon storage potential. Over the course of several hours, they hiked off-trail through the dense understory, removing signs and flagging tape marking the boundaries of the controversial Carrot timber sale. The creative nonviolent direct action seemed to pay off, as a couple days later Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, announced it was cancelling the Carrot sale for the time being. The timing seems striking, even though the announcement did not acknowledge the protest. Now, the nonviolent saboteurs hope their actions have bought enough precious time to permanently protect the area.
How Unions and Joe Biden Are Launching a New Frontier in American Manufacturing
DAVID MCCALL – The Biden administration, in conjunction with unions and with clean energy aims, is supporting American manufacturing through substantial investments and grants coming from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Creating Community, One Conversation at a Time
MELINDA BURRELL – So much starts with a conversation. Try it for your own sense of wellbeing — and watch it become contagious.
Interdependency Is the Missing Understanding in International Relations
WINSLOW MYERS – New thinking motivates disarmament and accelerates new forms of sustainable energy. The opportunity is for everyone, citizens and leaders, to say no to obvious dead ends like the arms race and yes to new levels of cooperation—including reaching out with endless patience to our adversaries with a larger vision of self-interest that leads to life for all.
Donald Trump’s empty promises on jobs
LAWRENCE WITTNER – Overall, Trump’s record as a “jobs president” was deeply flawed, but also sadly appropriate for an individual who had become famous for telling participants in a reality TV program: “You’re fired!”