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Our Way of Life is the Public Health Crisis

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Years ago, when I taught science to junior high school students, I would sometimes make an offhand remark to the effect of “Animals like us….”   One or more students would respond, “Miss, we’re not animals!”   I doubt my adolescent students were alone in misunderstanding their place in the biological kingdom. The disconnect between humanity and the natural world, to which every living thing belongs, characterizes all industrialized nations. Our Western prioritization of artificial systems (economy) over natural systems (ecology) laid the groundwork for our perilous conditions. We were in crisis before this novel coronavirus pandemic, and we will continue to be in crisis after. It’s a classic tragedy, with our hubris and ignorance leading to the near-term extinction of our species, because our values and paradigms remain rooted in fantasy instead of reality. Ecological degradation for economic growth We should all find it ironic that the economic condition wh...
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Climate Crisis: Our Ecological Dysfunction Has a Marketing Problem (and it’s not Michael Moore)

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I think the big crisis of our times is that our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions. — Vandana Shiva Thousands of cars sit at The Port of Los Angeles I first heard of Jeff Gibbs’ contentious film Planet of the Humans (POH) sometime last year. Like millions of others, I viewed it just recently. Over the past week, the scathingly negative reviews I discovered disheartened but did not surprise me. While the film may present outdated statistics about so-called renewable energy technologies (which should have been revised to reflect current trends), while it may clumsily cobble together disparate aspects of the ecological effects of our species on the planet, and while it utilizes what may be characterized as calculating imagery to evoke emotional resonance (as all films do), the crux of Gibbs’ argument should not be discarded and deserves discussion: that we cannot achieve ecological sustainability without addressing the role of humanity’s overproduc...
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Progressives Owe Ralph Nader an Enormous Apology

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Much of the American public used Barack Obama as their mirror throughout the 2008 election cycle. They wanted an end to war, equality for minorities, universal “socialist” health care, tougher environmental regulations, corporate accountability. They looked at Obama and saw what they wanted, even though he never professed to espouse these values and never committed to any promises in these veins. Just like Bill Clinton in 1992, the disgruntled masses projected their hopes, fears, and aspirations onto the candidate for change, and he happily obliged by appealing to their needs with all rhetoric and little substance. Here was a bright, intelligent, attractive, somewhat self-deprecating and enormously charming man from a difficult background who no-doubt faced tremendous challenges on his path to power. Here was a man who could understand all of us who did not fit into that infamous “base” of George W. Bush’s. Here was the antithesis to the last eight years. How could we possibly elect th...
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