Feature Archives

On July 24th, ForestEthics was joined by local environmental activists and 'Candace the Caribou' in San Francisco at a lively protest to highlight the devastating effects that catalogs sent by companies such as Crate & Barrel have on Endangered Forests and global warming. This was the fourth in a series of visits Candace is making this summer to U.S. cities, where she has exposed other companies such as J. Crew, Eddie Bauer, JC Penney, and Sears/Lands' End.

Danny Jordan, the chief negotiator for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, issued a public statement today charging that H.R. 24, a bill to restore the San Joaquin River, will drain funds from the Trinity River restoration project.

During the week of August 8th-14th, social justice and environmental activists will come together for regional North American Convergences for Climate Action. Organizers plan to "fight the fossil fuel empire and create truly sustainable, bio-regionally appropriate and community-based responses to climate change." On the west coast, they will gather near the mouth of the Columbia River for 6 days of low impact living and high impact action against the fossil fuel industry. On Thursday, July 26th, the West Coast Climate Convergence will hold a film screening and discussions at Station 40 in San Francisco as a "plug-IN" event" in preparation for the Convergence.

Corbin Harney, Spiritual Leader of the Western Shoshone Nation, crossed over at 11:00 a.m. in the morning of July 10th, in a house on a sacred mountain near Santa Rosa, California (Turtle Island). He dedicated his life to ending nuclear testing and dumping. That battle claimed his life through cancer.

The Renaissance Garden Project started when UC Santa Cruz students responded to a call for help that Renaissance High School students sent out about the lack of nutrition they were receiving at school; students felt unhealthy. Students from the Education for Sustainable Living Program at UCSC came to the rescue. A garden was constructed to provide nutritional food and health education.

For those of us living in our modern cities land is a foreign concept. Stories of land conjure romantic images of countrysides far from our crowded neighborhoods, images that seem irrelevant to our lives. Even though we inhabit a landscape smothered with buildings and concrete, the struggles for land fought by rural people hold many important lessons for us as we strive for control over our lives and communities. When we consider the landless state of most poor people the world round and how most of us own no land, we realize we are all perpetually inhabiting someone else’s space. Our lives and communities as well as our food supply are controlled by people in far away places whose main motivation is profit. When we start to reclaim some of this space we begin to take back our lives.

UC Santa Cruz is preparing to cut down approximately 150 acres of trees on upper-campus to make room for all the new buildings that are part of the much-criticized expansion plan. This would be one of the most serious logging operations on UCSC's campus in decades, meaning the loss of well over 1,000 trees — mostly 2nd generation redwoods and mixed evergreens.