[Thanks to T Millions who wrote to us asking for more commentary on vermicomposting, particularly as applied to humanure and local “health security”]
It might be the ultimate kapu. After all, everything from child molestation to necrophilia to bestiality to gang rape is now routine fare in online porn, and anyone who’s genuinely upset by […]

Over at IA Stan has posted link to a video about abuses in the US meat industry. Here’s a thread to discuss it…

Open thread for discussion (if any) of Insurgent American article.
Something to be Enthusiastic About: thinking about Demand Reduction

(From a diary at European Tribune:) We may have to pack light to make it through the next century, or indeed the next millennium. If we have to pack light, what do we really need to preserve that essential ability to feel enthusiasm, a genuine pleasure in life? Most of what I own I don’t really need or am not truly attached to; this is something you find out not only when packing for a journey, but when packing to move (which I’m doing now, and that’s another story). Is it worth packing and paying for the larger size of truck and toting the heavy boxes? Maybe not. Maybe I can live just fine without it. I suspect that the same applies to us (affluent Westerners) as a culture; much of what we have isn’t really all that wonderful — not worth throwing away a perfectly good planet or killing people for, anyway — and we could be quite happy with a lot less material cruft and a much lower energy budget.

So I’m proposing the question — to myself and to us all: suppose you’re packing light for a long journey; suppose you don’t have infinite energy to haul heavy baggage around; suppose you don’t have infinite suitcases to pack tons of junk into; what would you stuff into the backpack and take on the train, and what would you leave behind and hardly miss as soon as the journey started?

…is the opening section of the third chapter of Maria Mies’ canonical Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale - Women in the International Divison of Labor (Zed Books, 1986, 1998). It is a theoretical treatment of the whole business of the male-conquest theme, and how that theme maps onto the “civilized-backward” episteme that […]

By YIFAT SUSSKIND
Indigenous activists are putting up a fight ­ against violence. At the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, activists are focused on passing a declaration that recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to their lands, territories, and resources. This organizing drive is seeking international legal protection from the violence done to Indigenous Peoples, […]

We’d like to see anything of interest, when and how people can, that examines the inter-phenomenal dynamics of environmental degradation — starting with the Mediterranean deforestation, military expansionism, and the political consolidations of so-called “barbarians,” during the fall of the Roman Empire. Anything on the entry of “barbarians” into Roman military service is also interesting.
Thanks.

Bush is not responsible for the war in Iraq. Al Gore said during his campaign against Bush II that Bush I should have finished the job; and we never tire of pretending these days that the Clinton-Gore government was not attacking Iraq…. they were, regularly and lethally. War is inherent to civilization; and […]

The net energy value of biodiesel and ethanol is very hotly debated. There are many net energy studies of biofuels, particularly ethanol, which give a wide range of values. The main problem is that net energy studies are easily influenced by biases. The researcher must choose the energy inputs and outputs and the values to […]

A talk I gave last month at a Marxist workshop at NYU hosted by Professor Bertell Ollman, that I think intersects with the points you are raising.
This talk would be focused differently if I was giving it to a “community” group, or even an anarchist group. Here, I too am especially concerned with the praxis […]