Environment

California Readies Expansive New Delta Water Plan

Sunday 01 November 2009 |

 

An area of land known simply in California as "the Delta" has undergone a rapid decline and this long-term tragedy has spurred state legislators and the governor to take significant measures to save the largest estuary on the Pacific Coast.

     California's Delta is circumscribed by the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers system. It contains more than 500,000 acres of agriculture, provides habitat for 700 native plant and animal species and supplies water to more than 25 million Californians and 3 million acres of agriculture. »

Labor

Massive Defense Spending Leads to Job Loss

Monday 09 November 2009 | There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law.

 

    In fact, standard economic models do show that measures designed to reduce GHG by raising energy prices will lead to some cost in terms of slower economic growth.

»

 

Women's Issues

The "New" Population Control Craze: Retro, Racist, Wrong Way to Go

Tuesday 17 November 2009 | It’s back to the bad old days of the population bomb. That was the title of an alarmist book by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich that appeared in 1968. He suggested that world catastrophe would ensue unless women in poor parts of the world were prevented from having too many children. This fall’s junk mail carried an alarmist appeal from Population Connection, using its former name of Zero Population Growth (ZPG). According to ZPG, you can blame just about everything on population growth, from traffic congestion, overcrowded schools and childhood asthma to poverty, famine and global warming. »

 

Health

Anna Deavere Smith

Saturday 14 November 2009 | While the health care reform debate continues throughout the country, America's indigenous peoples suffer from some of the worse conditions imaginable. Comprising only 1.6 percent of the general population, American Indians and Native Alaskans have not, do not, and more than likely will not receive adequate, if any, health care by the time the Democrats and Republicans are finished. According to the Office of Minority Health, the Indian Health Service (IHS) provides services to only 1.9 million individuals out of 4.9 million who qualify.

 

»

 

Education

"Training Citizens Who Are Well-Informed About Scientific Choices"

Thursday 08 October 2009 | An astonishing convergence: A great number of countries, from China to India by way of Europe, worried by the decrease in scientific vocations, have undertaken an overhaul of their teaching of the sciences. With a change in perspective, however. The primary reason invoked to justify these reforms is no longer economic competitiveness, but the necessity of recreating a sort of democratic contract between citizens and scientific development.

 

    Initiating children from the earliest ages in order that - when they have become adults - they may make "well-informed choices" as General Inspector for Physics Florence Robine puts it. She coordinated an issue of the Revue internationale d'éducation (International Review of Education) devoted to "a revival in the teaching of the sciences."

»

 

Voter Rights

2010 Census Faces Challenges on Immigrants, Undercounted Groups

Friday 16 October 2009 | Lawmakers and community advocates continue to work to ensure accuracy in the rapidly approaching 2010 Census. The count will play an important role in determining the amount of dollars flowing to communities across the nation and in the South over the next decade, as well as political representation. But the Census continues to face challenges on several fronts. »