Recent political discussions of marriage have revolved around who should be allowed to wed. But missing from most debates is the question of the unfair privileges conferred by the institution of marriage itself. Scholar Jaclyn Geller discusses the more than one thousand benefits accorded married people, at the expense of the non-married. Resources: Jaclyn Geller, Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, End Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History Cleis Press, 2023 The post The Unfair Benefits of Marriage appeared first on KPFA.

What are discarded materials from extractive activities like mining doing to life on the planet? According to Gabrielle Hecht, what’s happening in South Africa to and around mountainous piles of mining residues crystallizes a number of thorny environmental and sociopolitical issues faced by communities around the globe. Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures Duke University Press, 2023 (open access) The post Extraction’s Heavy Toll appeared first on KPFA.

For over half a century, Big Oil and the plastics industry, through their trade associations and front groups, have sold the public the false idea that plastics are recyclable. Recycling became the mantra of good ecological stewardship, promoted by the likes of city governments, school children, and environmental groups. Davis Allen lays out the mass-marketing of a deception. Resources: Center for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis February, 2024 The post The Plastics Recycling Deception appeared first on KPFA.

Reclaiming the commons sounds good in the abstract, but what’s being done on a practical level? Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma, the Hawai‘i-based co-founders of Eating in Public, describe projects like Free Gardens and Free Stores. Also: Wren Awry discusses the volume to which Chan and Sharma contributed an essay. Eating in Public Wren Awry, ed., Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid PM Press, 2023 The post Food & Freedom appeared first on KPFA.

In the United States, few things seem as wholesome as camping, letting us temporarily escape the daily grind and commune with nature and each other. But Phoebe Young argues that camping has a complicated history, which tell us a lot about Americans’ notions of nature and the nation. She discusses the various forms that camping has taken in this country, from recreational camping to the encampments of those without shelter to Occupy Wall Street. (Encore presentation.) Resources: Phoebe S.K. Young, Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement Oxford University Press, 2021 The post The Politics of Camping appeared first on KPFA.

A hallmark of our age is feeling we’re perpetually struggling with time—not having enough of it to accomplish seemingly endless tasks and obligations, while swimming in a sea of distractions. Can we cope if we learn, following the gurus of time management, to become ever more disciplined and productive? Or does that just feed into a capitalist logic that doesn’t benefit us? Journalist Oliver Burkeman discusses the perils of time management orthodoxy. The post Fund Drive Special: Mastering Time? appeared first on KPFA.

In “The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg,” Jerry Aronson paints a compelling portrait of the legendary writer, visionary, activist, and spiritual seeker. The post Fund Drive Special: Allen Ginsberg appeared first on KPFA.

Open any world history book and you’ll read that the Neolithic Revolution was a turning point for humanity, when hunter gatherers gave up roving in small egalitarian groups and settled down to farm. Out of that, civilization was born, with all the benefits and ills connected to it: the rise of cities, the emergence of the state, inequality, and class society. But, according to anthropologist David Graeber, that tale is not based on fact. The post Fund Drive Special: Where We Came From, Where We’re Going appeared first on KPFA.

Zoologist, filmmaker, and bestselling author Lucy Cooke upends received wisdom about female passivity in the animal kingdom. The post Fund Drive Special: Forceful Females appeared first on KPFA.

We are living through the 6th great extinction of species and governments are almost nothing to curb it. Scientist Douglas Tallamy, however, proposes a blueprint for a grassroots effort to restore habitat in a meaningful way, seeing nature not as something to be preserved in parks and reserves far from us, but all around us in our cities and suburbs, farmlands and ranches. The post Fund Drive Special: Rebuilding Habitats in Our Yard appeared first on KPFA.