Feature Archives

Each year on April 20th, at 4:20pm, people celebrate and smoke cannabis together. One of the biggest gathering spots in California, perhaps the biggest, is Porter Meadow at UC Santa Cruz. It's a large event for the whole community - a place where thousands of people can have a picnic, play with musical instruments, frisbees, kites and just have fun. It's in a safe and relatively secluded location and problems are rare.

Will & Darwin write: Our intention... is to generate a greater level of critical reflection and discussion concerning the dominant role of the politics of “greening”... that characterize campus-based environmental organizations.... We can think of few more timely priorities for those who would use university campuses as organizing bases [than] to challenge the system of authoritarian power that is in the process of destroying the ecological basis for the existence of life on earth.

Thursday, April 23rd is opening night for the 11 day Reel Work Film Festival, taking place in the counties of Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Clara. Reel Work presents cultural events, bringing together award-winning documentary film producers, workers, activists, students, and the public with the goal of increasing community awareness of the central role of work in our lives, to discuss economic and global justice issues, and to bring alive the history and culture of the labor movement in the US and abroad.

Wednesday, April 1st was the second week in a row that fences were not erected in parking lot #4 next to the Santa Cruz Community Farmer's Market. For the past six months, mesh fencing has been used to deter people from gathering and drumming below the magnolia trees. Brent, a longtime and well-known drummer, reports that an experimental agreement has been reached between himself and Santa Cruz Police Department Sergeant Mike Harms.

There will be a meeting on Tuesday, April 7th at UCSC to discuss the defense of the Community Studies department. A post on the SC-IMC calendar states, "Proposed budget cuts at UCSC to come into effect July 2009 'disband the administration' at Community Studies, 'laying off' lecturers and cutting the Field Study program. This program benefits not only students, but various community organizations in Santa Cruz, all over the state, nation and the world."

The March 29th episode of the Third Paradigm radio program examines the revenue-raising "solutions" of the California Tax Reform conference that was held on March 19th at Cabrillo College with Bill Monning and Fred Keeley. It also projects the logical outcome of Obama's stimulus package, which takes on more debt to "free up" credit. But it first presents a hypothetical scenario of the year 2020 with employment security, cheap healthcare, housing work exchange, worry-free retirement, and as much free education as you want.

Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson, professors of Geography at Kansas University, received funding from the Foreign Military Studies Office, located at the Fort Leavenworth U.S. Army base in Leavenworth, Kansas, to map communally held indigenous land in the states of San Luis Potosi, and in Oaxaca, Mexico. The project, named the Bowman Expeditions or México Indígena, began mapping in 2005 in an indigenous region known as La Husteca, which is partially located in the state of San Luis Potosi, and then moved their operation to the state of Oaxaca amidst the statewide popular uprising of the Oaxacan Peoples’ Popular Assembly (APPO) in 2006.