Be the Climate Change You Wish to See #3

In the last couple days, I talked about ways that individuals and collectives can act to reduce the threat of climate change. This is not new information, and a lot of it is rather obvious when you think about it for a couple minutes. And yet, we go about our days changing very little. We


Be the Climate Change You Wish to See #2

In Part 1, I laid out some ways we can mitigate climate change by investing radically in local food production and especially in our soil. However, not all the changes we need to make are as easy as these. This is where we get serious and talk about making the hard choices… or not. Just


Be the Climate Change You Wish to See #1

Climate change is really happening. We’ve had “500 year” storms every couple months lately. People are having to relocate whole communities because of rising water and erosion. An old, radioactive military base is melting right out of the ice. Even mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone are talking about climate change. Sure, there are deniers, but the


On Poop and Politics

Our infrastructure, as Hillary Clinton pointed out recently in her economic plan, is old. We’re “living off the investments that were made by our parents and grandparents’ generations,” and many of those investments are starting to show their age. The functionality of municipal sewer systems is increasingly questionable: they’re falling apart because we don’t maintain


The Gift of the Migrant Workers

Our two main presidential candidates (and their political tribes) have very different visions for the future of immigration in the United States. Clinton favors a path to citizenship, while the more xenophobic Trump claims he’ll build a giant wall. Both sides fail to perceive why we have a schizophrenic situation where migrant workers are simultaneously




War is Over, If We Narrowly Define It

An article by Angus Hervey in Medium recently made the bold claim that war is on the decline throughout the globe. A ceasefire between the Colombian government and rebel groups meant that war is over in the Western hemisphere, leaving less than 1 in 6 global citizens in war-torn areas, mostly in an arc of


Minimum Wage and Walmart: A Match Made in Disgrace

While watching TV the other night, I saw a commercial featuring a man perched atop the front of a humble desk while donning a smart sweater, hands folded peacefully in front of him, backlit by soft lighting, with a smile that seemed desperate to proclaim, “let’s be friends.” It was somewhat reminiscent of an old