Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Los Angeles is the nation’s garment production capital and the city’s second largest manufacturing sector, yet workers face injustice, usually associated with the developing world, right here in one of the largest cities in the United States. Jessica Aldridge interviews Mar Martinez from the Garment Worker Center a worker rights organization leading an anti-sweatshop movement to secure social and economic justice for tens of thousands of Los Angeles garment workers.
As outbreaks of “crazy sickness” continue to afflict Nicaraguan Miskitu towns and villages, we revisit the story of the Duhindu of Kambla, or how the community overcame their first case of this “culture-bound syndrome,” blamed on the dark supernatural forces out of the wild bush.
When we get dressed in the morning, most of us don’t consider the environmental costs and human rights issues that may be attached to the clothing on our bodies. Jessica Aldridge interviews two women who have made it their business to not only consider how to clean up the global fashion industry, advocating for environmentally-supportive and equitable solutions to water pollution, pesticides, microfibers, and waste associated with making, washing, and disposing of our clothing.
Santa Barbara Literary Journal releases Bellatrix: Volume 3 this June, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Join us for readings and other entertainments in SB on June 14.
A story from the Nicaraguan Miskitu People about the mango trees planted to feed the dead in the cemetery, and the fear of stealing the ripe fruits.
The Sonoma Valley in Northern California is known for it’s world-class wine, gentle hills, and year-round temperate climate, where novelist-gentleman-farmer Jack London set up his ode to wild sustainability one hundred years before it became a thing. Flying over in a hot air balloon, hiking the protected hillsides to find a precious Pinot Noir at one of the 425 wineries, sailing off the coast, there are many ways to get lost in them hills.
Massive climate disruption continues to strike all over the world, one disaster after another, droughts, wildfires, typhoons, mega-floods, with glaciers melting and methane escaping from deep under the permafrost. The UN IPCC said we have 12 more years to stabilize greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere to avoid runaway climate change. We need solutions to this problem to spark a climate revolution. Jessica Aldridge speaks with NASA climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus and Sam Berndt also a scientist and a coordinator of the Sunrise Movement Los Angeles.