Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
While activists in Los Angeles and across the US spoke out against the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, Dave Pruett writes on its threatened environmental triple-whammy, poorly documented in the latest State Department environmental report heading toward the President’s desk. Protests are planned March 1-2 in Washington DC as part of “XL Dissent” and March 1 in Los Angeles with the Great March for Climate Action.
In the isolated region of La Mosquitia, Honduras, narco-traffickers act as shock troops in the assault on native Miskitu, Tawahka, and Pech homelands, ruthlessly dispossessing residents and rapaciously converting forest commons to private pasture primed for sale to multinational corporations.
The latest target of the unconventional oil craze is California hydraulic fracturing (fracking) the Monterey Shale in the central and southern parts of the state. With wildly optimistic predictions of an economic bonanza, the oil is carbon-intensive, requires massive amounts of fresh water, creates industrial pollution and seismic risk, and is impossible to regulate effectively because of significant scientific unknowns.
In 2012, Nick Olson and Lilah Horwitz quit their jobs for a time to build a West Virginia mountain hideaway cabin, a tiny summer house made with recycled windows. This is the result.
Jorge Luis Borges forged into the realm of literary magic, he led his readers down through the Garden of Forking Paths, wandering the red and tranquil labyrinths in Elegy, growing old in so many mirrors, seeking in vain the marble gaze of statues, compiling regrets of a fantastic nature. Watch the BBC profile on him as an elder of strange destiny who had seen nothing, or almost nothing, but the face of a girl from Buenos Aires, a face that does not want you to remember it.
On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of which ends up in US kitchens. Watch the documentary film, “The Price of Sugar.”
The time for climate action is now! On Saturday, March 1, the SoCal Climate Action Coalition 350 and its regional partners will rally in the shadow of a Port of Los Angeles oil refinery, sending marchers off on a 17.5-mile trek through the streets until they reach downtown Los Angeles. Hundreds of marchers will then continue their journey for 3,000 miles towards Washington D.C., reaching out to everyday citizens along the way on how they can fight climate change in their daily lives.
‘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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