Environment

An encampment of protesters in Louisiana is resisting the crude oil industry, whose environmental disasters disproportionately affect the poor and people of color.

Almost twenty years ago I made an eleven-day canoe journey down one of North America’s grandest rivers, the Grand River in Labrador, Canada. Our guides were four indigenous elders who had grown up traveling the river. We listened to their stories. We ate porcupine and goose and salmon. The trip ended at Muskrat Falls, where we hauled our canoes up a trail that had been used for generations by the region’s indigenous people. Today, Muskrat Falls is the site of a 12-billion-dollar mega hydroelectric project; the falls no longer exist.

“Local activists are being murdered as governments and businesses value quick profit over human life. Many of the products emerging from this bloodshed are on the shelves of our supermarkets,” said Ben Leather, a Senior Campaigner at Global Witness.

How ConocoPhillips is trying to manipulate locals in San Martín César, Colombia into accepting fracking.

The duty to save seeds and defend seed freedom is an ethical and ecological imperative. Seeds are the first link in the food chain and the repository of life’s future evolution. As such, it is our inherent duty and responsibility to protect them and to pass them on to future generations. The growing of seeds and their free exchange among farmers is the basis of maintaining biodiversity and food security.

At current rates, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.