Canada has been hit by a number of romaine lettuce recalls. We set out to the U.S., where the majority of our leafy greens come from, to dig up why E. coli outbreaks continue to plague our food supply. We meet one B.C. family whose lives have been forever changed by a contaminated salad.
Posted in Uncategorized
The latest selection for our “Now Read This” book club, Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland,” documents a growing phenomenon in the country — a “wandering tribe” of seasonal workers. It has inspired a new movie of the same name. The film was the big winner at the British Academy Film Awards, and has multiple Oscar nominations. Jeffrey Brown has the latest for our ongoing arts and culture series, CANVAS.
Posted in Uncategorized
Unions and labor advocates with high hopes that President Biden would help deliver on major priorities like raising wages and increasing worker power have few if any concrete victories to point to as Biden approaches 100 days in office.
A $15 minimum wage provision was jettisoned from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan; labor’s top legislative priority, the PRO Act, is once again stalled in the Senate; and a union organizing effort at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama was soundly defeated.
READ MORE: http://hill.cm/nmzV5Kh
Posted in Uncategorized
Our March/April book club book for Now Read This is Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland,” which chronicles the growing community of transient older Americans who have taken to the road in search of seasonal work. The nomads Bruder followed were usually workers who did not completely recover from the 2008 Recession. Without enough saved for retirement, and unable to pay off their mortgages, they moved their lives into RVs and trailers, congregating in camps stretching from North Dakota to California to Texas. “Nomadland” served as inspiration for the new film of the same name, directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Frances McDormand. On Thursday, April 15 at 7:00pm ET, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown will pose your questions about the book to Bruder.
Posted in Uncategorized
Congressmember Ro Khanna of California says hundreds of billions of dollars in annual defense spending could be better used on diplomacy, humanitarian aid, public health and other initiatives. He’s one of 50 House Democrats who signed a letter to President Joe Biden in March urging a “significantly reduced” Pentagon budget, which has grown to over $700 billion. “The Pentagon increases make no sense,” says Khanna. “If you’re ending the forever war in Afghanistan … then why are we increasing, at the same time, the defense budget?” Khanna also discusses the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed war in Yemen, a major U.S. arms deal with the United Arab Emirates and more.
Posted in Uncategorized
From the author of Losing Earth, a beautifully told exploration of our post-natural world that points the way to a new mode of ecological writing.
We live at a time in which scientists race to reanimate extinct beasts, our most essential ecosystems require monumental engineering projects to survive, chicken breasts grow in test tubes, and multinational corporations conspire to poison the blood of every living creature. No rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The old distinctions―between natural and artificial, dystopia and utopia, science fiction and science fact―have blurred, losing all meaning. We inhabit an uncanny landscape of our own creation.
In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories―obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported―point the way to a new kind of environmental literature, in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.
From Odds Against Tomorrow to Losing Earth to the film Dark Waters (adapted from the first chapter of this book), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, How do we return to the world that we’ve lost?It is, What world do we want to create in its place?
Reviews
“[Second Nature is] an unwavering look at our increasingly dystopian world . . . Rich presents humanity’s war against nature in vivid detail . . . Flowing and deeply researched prose paints scene after scene of the ubiquitous entropy that is gaining momentum . . . Rich manages to fluently and empathetically depict in a digestible way the predicament in which we now find ourselves.”
―Dahr Jamail, The New York Times Book Review
“Nathaniel Rich’s electric Second Nature . . . is a tour de force examining the influence humans exert on the world . . . The reading experience is by turns demoralizing and galvanizing, like most worthwhile things.”
―Vanity Fair
“Rich’s elegy to a planet he likens to a critical care patient is lyrical, erudite, and devastating…[His] investigation of “crimes against nature” and the people who are trying to stop them is alarming, enlightening, and necessary.”
―O Magazine
“The essays in Second Nature reveal important truths that gather power when they are read together.”
―Science
“One of the singular pleasures of reading Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth is his ability to find and bring to life on the page the women and men engaged in saving the planet. This skill is not surprising, given that Rich is also an acclaimed novelist, but it does help explain why he is so good at what he does, as amply demonstrated in his latest book of nonfiction, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade.”
―Air Mail Interview
“If Losing Earth was maddening (the only thing worse than staring down the barrel of endless scorching summers, soupy winters, and catastrophic wildfire seasons is knowing politicians could’ve done something about it and didn’t), Second Nature is unsettling.”
―Grist
“[A] vividly reported survey . . . Frightening but with an undercurrent of humor, Rich’s study is packed with moving insight.” ―Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Nathaniel Rich is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History, which received awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physicists and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; and the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. Rich lives in New Orleans.
Posted in Uncategorized
UN Secretary General António Guterres here gives a truly remarkable speech at Columbia University’s ‘The State of the Planet’ event. He spoke with such clarity, command of the facts, and compassion, that it is hard to listen to him without feeling in the depth of your heart that the time has come for us all, individually and collectively, to change how we live on Earth, and how we live with one another. We invite you to watch what the world’s top diplomat says about the mess we’ve made and the urgency that we both clean up our mess and learn to live within Nature, not at war with it. The facts and statistics he relates are just astounding. His conclusions range from obvious, to subtle and unexpected, up to the very end of his speech.
Posted in Uncategorized
In part 2 of the petition hearing at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Stuart Scott and Paul Blanch challenge the #CaptiveAgency to recognize its incredible lack of oversight and immoral relationship with the industry it is supposed to regulate. If you thought that catastrophe can’t happen at the now closed #SanOnofre nuclear plant on the Pacific Ocean, you must watch this testimony. Far from being safe, nuclear waste, stored 108 feet from the ocean, in a marine environment in cannisters subject to cracking, is a credible risk, contrary to NRC’s tacit indifference, and refusal to address
Posted in Uncategorized
Transition Studies 