Consuming
Beware the Chocolate Monsters: Keep Slave Labor Out of Halloween
According to Global Exchange, such child slaves and laborers experience the hazards of using machetes and applying pesticides and insecticides with no protection. Enslaved children typically work over 12 hours a day harvesting cocoa beans and have no idea what chocolate tastes like.
A Green Lining to Economic Downturn
Besides, there may be a green lining to all of this economic turmoil. I can’t think of any more effective way to get most Americans to change their lives than lack of cash. So let’s try—amid foreclosures, job loss, the costly (on so many levels) war in Iraq, salary freezes, skyrocketing health care costs and grocery, gas, and heating bills—to look on and for the bright side of things.
Beyond Climate Change 101
As with all meaningful change, there is no simple fix for our climate change crisis. There is no pill, band aid, 12-step formula, or “expert’s” advice to heal Earth or its life forms. There is no “clean” nuclear power that will preserve our current luxuries without risking even more environmental disaster, no green product that will redeem generations of overconsumption, no fluorescent light bulb that will reverse the excess of our industrialized systems, no recycling process that can restore forests, no zoo or seed bank that can preserve our world’s biodiversity, no replacement planet we can relocate to. For worse and for better we are stuck here with our mess and our weakness, our solutions and our strength.
Declaration of Independence
Having come to the precipice of our own demise, we can if we so choose see before us the terrible chasm of the tyrant’s vast and awesome power. This is a call for us to stand together, defiant of our common oppressors.
Mystery Unclogged Part II
Peer down into the depths of one of your drains. You are looking at your future. Whatever goes down that drain is going to come back at you sooner or later in some way.
Mystery Unclogged Part I
Spoiler alert: If you have maintained any illusions that your drains are magical tubes that “disappear” inconveniences, I’m about to ruin them for you. Look away! Flush and run!
Hot and Bothered: Change for the Climate!
For those of you who don’t believe in climate change, you will. But for the ones who know it is real but vaguely think it will get taken care of somehow by others or that you will deal with it later when you are more “ready” or that you are too old to change or that there is nothing you can do anyway, listen up! There is NO TIME to waste.
Golden Statue
I found myself studying Oscar, muscular and somehow masculine but still sexless, his features mere creases and suggestions. He seemed like how you would become if you were locked in a television for generations.
Eight Potential Pitfalls of Parentthink (Home Turf Disadvantage II)
by Sarah at ProgressiveKid
In the course of fighting to keep artificial turf out of a local park, I have been witness to a number of thinking errors that parents seem to make, whether those parents are blue, red, green, or in between. It’s as if, by virtue of being parents, either through lack of sleep [...]
Fatal Attraction: Our Endless Affair with Plastic
If anything, plastic’s space-age indestructibility was a selling point. But now, half a century, billions of users, and trillions of products later, plastic is starting to collect. Imagine, if you dare, every piece of plastic ever made still out there, somewhere, in our ever-contracting world.
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