ENVIRONMENT These are articles previously published by Toward Freedom related to this category.
The most recent tally of the cost of war by the non-profit National Priorities Project (NPP) puts total military-related expenditures (through September, 2010) at a mind-numbing $1.09 trillion. That’s ‘Trillion’- with a ‘T’ -- $749.9 billion for Iraq and $337.8 billion for Afghanistan since 2001.
With their 1994 battle cry, “Ya basta!” ("Enough already!") Mexico’s Zapatista uprising became the spearhead of two convergent movements: Mexico’s movement for indigenous rights and the international movement against corporate globalization.
Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging 16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His goal, he said, was to ‘‘walk the Army out of my system.’’ He was the first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail.
It was not surprising that, only weeks after the Vermont legislature voted to close the state’s 40 years old nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, Vermont’s largest utilities announced that they were in negotiation with the utility giant Hydro Quebec over a new long-term power contract.
James Hansen could have quietly enjoyed his reputation as one of the leading authorities in the world on global warming and its consequences. Instead, he set out to prevent the transition to that hostile planet on which his grandchildren would someday live. His efforts ranged from providing testimony before Congress and speaking before other powerful political groups, through condemnation of the Kyoto Protocol and the cap-and-trade, to facing a year in prison for civil disobedience while protesting mountain-top coal mining. James Hansen
In her new book, Green Gone Wrong, Heather Rogers interrogates the efficacy of what is offered to consumers by the Green Marketplace: organic and fair-trade foods, eco-architecture, bio-fuels, hybrid automobiles, and carbon offsets. Going beyond the soundbytes and slogans of corporate greenwashing and inconvenient half-truths, Green Gone Wrong paints a vivid and disturbing reality of environmentalism in the 21st Century.
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