Breaking Out of the Empire Box
Three days after the 2008 presidential election, no matter which political party takes the White House, a convention will be held in
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Alaska Natives Watch Traditions Melting Away
Hunting walrus is an age-old tradition for the Inupiat Eskimo Native people of King Island, a tiny rugged piece of land jutting out of the Bering Sea off Alaska. The walrus provides meat for the long, dark, frigid winters, and its tusks, skin, blubber, intestines and other body parts serve other crucial functions, including making watertight parkas and "pokes" to store berries. Watching the sky and sea for signs of the coming walrus migration is an art still passed on from elders to the young generation. Now, indigenous people across the Arctic region say, due to the effects of climate change, they can no longer predict important climactic changes and events like they used to, leading some to freeze to death caught in storms or stranded on ice; or face privation as their traditional hunts are interrupted.Bobby Koezuna Holds Tusks
Beyond Voting: Guerrilla Gardeners, Outlaw Bicyclists & Pirate Programmers
This US election year an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, "aren't waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old."
The Global Battle Against Noise Pollution
Until a few decades ago noise was seen as no more than a nuisance of modern urban life. Then research began to show that loud, but not uncommon, noise could damage hearing. And numerous studies indicated that many widespread sources of sound near schools impaired children's ability to learn. More recently the World Health Organization (WHO), using data from pioneer studies done in several European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, has demonstrated that noise can be a major killer. Plane Over London Neighborhood
Commercializing Childhood: The Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives
Source: Multinational Monitor
Susan Linn is associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also co-founder and director of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). She is the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008) and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004).
Multinational Monitor: How much advertising and marketing is directed at kids in the United States? How has this changed over the last 20 years?