News & commentary on sustainability, activism, urban planning, politics, and our world.
Economist Dr. Vandana Shiva explains how the World Bank and the IMF are complicit in the food crises across the globe. Through the structure of their debt relief, these organizations pushed developing countries to stop growing staple foods, and to instead grow cash crops and commodities, like flowers and lettuce, for export to unstable international markets.
Forty years after Lake Erie became a national poster child for water pollution, and only two decades after it was declared restored, the troubled lake is serving as a warning sign for the nation’s waters this summer.
The shallowest of the Great Lakes, and ordinarily the most productive in fish, Erie has been plagued all summer by massive algae blooms reminiscent of those in the 1960s that led Life magazine to declare the lake dead.
Three former Evergreen State College students turned their respective diverse passions into a small food company that is helping to create positive change, and strengthening the local food system here in Washington. The idea for the business germinated while the entrepreneurs were still in college, initially as a fermented vegetable CSA. They then got lots of feedback and insight from teachers and others, who helped to shape and refine the company’s structure and priorities, which has now evolved into a successful small organic sauerkraut business based in Olympia.
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman’s column is particularly insightful this week. He provides a clear analysis of the unsustainable direction where our nation’s economy and infrastructure has been headed; it isn’t a pretty picture. Krugman explains how decades of anti-government rhetoric and massive tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of the populace have helped [...]
