Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Haiti now faces an unmitigated human disaster from the destruction of Hurricane Matthew. With extreme reports of death tolls, Dady Cherry examines the misinformation common in mainstream media reports of the destruction that reinforce the gringo-savior mentality, backed by western governments and their compromised and ineffectual non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross. The failures from the 2010 earthquake loom large.
The Lakota phrase, Mni Wiconi, Water is Life, has inspired a Native Nations protest against the recent approval and ongoing construction of the Dakota Access Fracked Oil Pipeline, that threatens all communities and ecosystems downstream. After military-style assaults on Native Water Protectors, construction has almost reached the Missouri River.
Ecuadorian state capitalism has sacrificed significant tracts of one of the planet’s most important biosphere reserves, Yasuni National Park in the Amazonian region, to a massive new oil drilling project. It threatens multiple indigenous territories and the area’s biodiversity and ecosystem integrity.
Welcome to the Anthropocene age, where humans have transmogrified the planet, its oceans and atmosphere, caused mass extinctions and wholesale contamination that will remain for millennia. Beyond the politicians and scientists, the way forward remains in the hands of writers, artists, and designers taking inspiration from wild earth in a movement called Geo-Fauvism.
On May 14, thousands of people from across California came to Los Angeles to call for us to Break Free from Fossil Fuels. Jack Eidt argues the only way to do this is to reform our regulatory agencies recently captured by industry, in particular the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
On May 14, 2016 Californians will convene in Downtown L.A. for a mass action to stop oil and gas drilling in our neighborhoods. Los Angeles is home to the nation’s largest urban oil field in the United States—ground zero of California’s climate fight.
High School student Malia Street writes about her classmates from the Port of LA High School who traveled 200 miles to speak out at the hearing and rally against a plan by Phillips 66 to ship volatile and toxic tar sands crude via rail into California.