Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Hans Hollein, artist, designer, theoretician and Pritzker Prize-winning architect from Vienna, who breathed postmodernist life into everything from buildings to furniture to tableware, died recently. Julie Iovine writes on this multi-dimensional creative force, particularly known for his museum design, including Vienna’s Haas House (1990) and Frankfurt’s Museum of Modern Art.
The Wall Street Journal sings the praises of SASOL’s move to industrialize the Lousiana Bayou with fracked natural gas. But the proposed project by the apartheid-supporting state oil company from South Africa, using Nazi technology, may spell the end for a 224-year-old community founded by freed slaves.
The Nukak People of Colombia have been forced from their homes by illegal armed groups, in the latest attack against the country’s most recently-contacted tribe. Mining, palm oil, cattle ranching and coca threaten the majority of the country’s 102 indigenous communities.
OC’s toll roads have a new way to make money from their empty lanes crisscrossing the county: Hundreds of dollars charged in automated fines per missed toll payment, versus a measly single-time $6-per toll. Commuters beware.
In a nation that prides itself on democracy and equality, one finds many defenders of elitism and inequality among some conservatives, most libertarians, and especially objectivists. In a capitalist nation, one that often worships economic success above morality, one can find religious defenses of amorality going back pretty far. How did we get here?
Though the Rim Fire of 2013 was the third largest conflagration in California’s history, it improved the ecological health of the forest and the majority of the iconic landscapes of Yosemite National Park remained unscathed. A salvage logging plan approved by the US Forest Service put in danger the regenerating effects of the fire.
Honduras’ Garífuna people, with their rich culture and homeland spread across the Caribbean Coast of Central America recently asked an international court in Costa Rica to help them recover ancestral land, which they say has been lost to development. We present the dark and the light of this vibrant way, threatened by neoliberal development schemes, palm oil plantations, mega-tourism, and drug trafficking.
‘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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