The Commune
Our house, we believed, was a microcosm of that country. Every month, we’d gather at the kitchen table for our house meeting, where we, like politicians, unveiled our big plans for change. ...more
Posts Tagged: environmentalism
Saving Trees
For The Stranger, Rich Smith reviews Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the film about poet W.S. Merwin and his life as a conservationist in Hawaii:
...moreThe film glorifies Merwin as a giver of life, a distinction that invites an eye roll.
The Limbic System Roundup
A struggling human is often bent upon the little scratch of power he or she has. ...more
Strange Waters
And every life that moves, or dies, or multiplies will have an effect of some sort on the lives around it, a different effect than the one it had before. ...more
Help Bjork Save Iceland’s Headlands
In conjunction with the Heart of Iceland organization, Bjork is calling for an eleven-day global protest against international efforts to build power lines that would facilitate a plan to transport energy from Iceland’s volcanos to England. Read more about the issue via Consequence of Sound and watch a video of the artist explaining her position after the jump.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer discusses the environment, his childhood, and the conception and conclusion of his Southern Reach Trilogy. ...more
The Wide Open (And Increasingly Traveled) Road
For The Kenyon Review “Credo” series, Megan Mayhew Bergman offers some thoughts on “socially-conscious writing”:
...moreI’m not sure if it was becoming a mother, or publishing my first book—because these events happened in essentially the same year—but when it comes to my writing career, all I can tell myself is: make it matter.
Lil Wayne: Ecofeminist
Back in college, Chelsey Clammer proclaimed herself an ecofeminist with an outbreak of bumper stickers on the back of her car: “Tree Hugging Dirt Worshiper,” “‘The Only Bush I Trust is My Own (and underneath that I wrote ‘and my girlfriend’s’),” and “a slew of…rainbow Ani Difranco stickers.”
These days, she’s more partial to Lil Wayne than the Lilith Fair, but she hasn’t given up her ecofeminist ideals, as she explains in an academically rigorous essay for the Nervous Breakdown:
...more“My anaconda don’t want none unless you’ve got buns, hun.” Mix-A-Lot views (a part of) himself as a snake—perhaps as being one with nature.
The Rumpus Interview with Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben does not exactly look like the kind of stentorian figure you’d expect to be leading one of the most important grassroots movements in the history of civilization
...moreSunday Politics
A new documentary paints Italy as “a democracy of boobs (in all senses).”
How does one “explain the gay” in terms of evolution? (via The Daily Dish)
“That’s not what countries think of when they go to war.” Why no one ever cleans up the environmental mess they make after sending their citizens off to kill each other.
...morePlanning Out the End
“The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the problem of the destruction of the natural world… commits us to the assumption that our world ought to be governed and guided by technicians. It is part of the thinking that says, “If only the politicians would listen to what we scientists have to say!… The scientists will save us if only we’d listen to them, respect their authority, follow their instructions.”
They can maintain this while gloriously ignoring the fact that the world we presently inhabit was conceived by science, designed by engineers, and implemented by technicians.
...moreDirty Pictures
21-year-old student Jesse Graves started putting up graffiti to promote environmental awareness nearly two years ago, and has never been harassed or arrested. Many of his pieces remain intact on walls around the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.
A Titanic for these times
The June issue of the Atlantic has a look at the mind-blowing “Oasis of the Seas,” a gargantuan ocean liner forthcoming from cruise company Royal Caribbean International. Its unprecedented scale of apparent luxury surely required feats of engineering. But any awe that inspires would seem to wash away with apprehension of the massive ship’s untold economic and ecological hubris.
...moreWatch How We’ve Changed the World
This series of very short videos compiled from images posted on NASA’s Earth Observatory, are shocking, and a little terrifying. See an artificial archipelago shaped like a palm tree appear off the coast of Dubai; watch Lake Powell and the Aral Sea disappear; witness the Brazilian deforestation from above.
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