News & commentary on sustainability, activism, urban planning, politics, and our world.
This summer Olympia, Washington will be home to the first ever Queer Rock Camp, a new music day camp for young people ages 12 – 21. The inclusive youth project was inspired by the hugely successful and internationally replicated Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls in Portland Oregon, which is now over a decade old, and hopes to foster the same kind of positive, empowering, creative atmosphere for queer kids.
Which would you rather eat, a dish made with lima beans or butter beans? Most people would agree that “butter bean” has a delicious ring to it, and that lima beans are notoriously yucky. In fact for many people lima beans conjure up images of pasty, horrible beans that were part of a frozen vegetable medley served in school cafeterias; or worse yet, something bland and tasteless that was just poured out of a can.
This wrenching image is of a young boy who works in one of India’s many coal mines near Ladrymbai, in the Jaintia Hills district in northeast India. In the Los Angeles Times Mark Magnier reported grim and disturbing details about the horrific child labor situation in the country’s coal mines:
“The young miners descend on rickety ladders made of branches into the makeshift coal mines dotting the Jaintia Hills in northeast India, scrambling sideways into ‘rat hole’ shafts so small that even kneeling becomes impossible. Lying horizontally, they hack away with picks and their bare hands: Human labor here is far cheaper than machines.”
Reverend Billy preaches on whittling all of those 700 issues in your inbox every morning down to just one vital thing: saving life itself.
“All the issues will be one issue when the ocean has risen to the point where we have got our chin above the brine and we are inhaling our last breath of life; at that point life is the one issue that we all share. But why can’t life be an issue now?”
