Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Last month, twenty-one people were arrested engaging in peaceful civil disobedience in protest of a proposed tar sands mine in northeastern Utah, which would threaten local land and water, as well as contributing to the global climate crisis. As the wheel of justice turn, national environmental organizations expressed their solidarity with the protesters who stood for our freedom from dirty fossil fuels and devastating climate impacts.
A former leader of American Jewish Congress has strongly condemned Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, saying “the Zionist dream is based on slaughter of innocents.” Henry Siegman, now President of the US/Middle East Project, spoke recently on Democracy Now on the need to end the occupation and grant sovereignty to the Palestinian People to end this conflict.
To achieve justice and peace in Israel, its popular portrayal as the victim of Palestinian aggression must be replaced with the state accepting responsibility in its role as a colonial power with all the attendant political, military, and financial hegemony. As an occupying power, they must protect the civilian population, and their actions must be proportional and measured towards perceived injustice, granting rights and self determination to the Palestinian people. Otherwise, war, death, hatred, and instability will continue. Essay by Ajamu Baraka with two films by John Pilger.
Buckminster Fuller, architect, engineer, geometrician, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, put forth an original form of sustainable living for humanity. He posited that systems thinking helps us understand our connectedness and dependence on our local biome. Watch the 1974 film “The World of R. Buckminster Fuller.”
Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom. Scientists fear changing ocean chemistry will drive the collapse of Alaska’s iconic crab fishery. Watch the video from PBS NewsHour and the Seattle Times.
During the dry season in Sumatra, and hundreds of thousands of hectares of Indonesian peatland fires burn for months, releasing its massive storehouse of organic carbon. Those fires are a direct result of decades of forest and peatland destruction, which must be protected writes Loren Bell, saving ecosystems, air quality, and the global climate.
Reviled by ranchers and hunters, managed through “harvesting” by state wildlife agencies, with ardent conservationists its last hope, the gray wolf has cut a controversial wake in the North American landscape ever since it was reintroduced from Canada in 1995. Watch the film on Earth Focus.
‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’, features adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, and an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk.
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