What if Earth were furious with humanity? What if revolutionaries took their cues from an unruly planet? Anne Stewart examines depictions of terrestrial upheaval and grassroots rebellion in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and other works. Anne Stewart, Angry Planet: Decolonial Fiction and the American Third World University of Minnesota Press, 2022   The post Angry Planet appeared first on KPFA.

Hostility to unions, lax environmental regulations, and –- perhaps less obviously –- far flung rural communities: all of these helped give birth to our express-delivery, buy-on-credit economy. Environmental historian Bart Elmore considers the importance of the American South to the genesis, reach, and ecological damage of five outsized corporations: Walmart, Coca-Cola, FedEx, Bank of America, and Delta Airlines. Resources: Bart Elmore, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet University of North Carolina Press, 2023 The post Contemporary Capitalism’s Road Through the U.S. South appeared first on KPFA.

Are countries like India and South Africa still committed to coal extraction? What plans are afoot to make a just transition to renewable power? Ashley Dawson describes and evaluates struggles against extractivism and for publicly owned and democratically managed renewable energy. Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet Haymarket Books, 2024 The post Fossil Fuel Fights appeared first on KPFA.

The program DARE — in which police officers stepped into the role of teacher to warn 5th and 6th graders away from drugs — is an object of humor today. But historian Max Felker-Kantor argues that we should take DARE seriously. He posits that the program, which at its height brought police into 75% of U.S. school districts, was ultimately about burnishing the reputation of law enforcement in the midst of the abuses of the war on drugs, and it served to normalize having cops in schools. Resources: Max Felker-Kantor, DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools University of North Carolina Press, 2024 The post DARE: Promoting the Police appeared first on KPFA.

What was the modern Sanctuary Movement formed to do? What sorts of challenges has it faced, and how has the movement changed and evolved? Carl Lindskoog considers the history of the Sanctuary Movement, including its expansion into a far-reaching campaign for human rights, economic justice, and peace. Maria Cristina Garcia & Maddalena Marinari, Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980 University of Illinois Press, 2023 (Image on main page by Church World Service/New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia.) The post A History of Sanctuary appeared first on KPFA.

Our food system, as well as our ecosystems, is clearly in crisis. Should we look to technological fixes and lab-grown meat to provide food for our future? Or, as writer Taras Grescoe suggests, should we look backwards instead to the lost foods of our past? Grescoe argues that a sustainable future necessitates cultivating food and plant diversity, while reclaiming collective practices, including those drawn from contemporary indigenous peoples. (Full-length interview.) Resources: Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past Greystone Books, 2023 Taras Grescoe’s Blog: lostsupper.blog The post In Search of Lost Foods appeared first on KPFA.

How can people be moved from sympathy to solidarity with an oppressed group? Juliet Hooker considers how the legendary writer and activist Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs, whose slave narrative was the first authored by a woman in the U.S., balanced grief and grievance in an effort to mobilize white people to act to end Black suffering. (Encore presentation.) Juliet Hooker, Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss Princeton University Press, 2023 (Image on main page by kkfea.) The post Portraying Black Loss appeared first on KPFA.

Medicines – we’re told by the pharmaceuticals industry – are expensive by necessity owing to the high costs of research and development. Yet, as with the vaccines for Covid, much research is publicly-funded, and much comes out of universities. And, as Nick Dearden argues, only 3% of new drugs even represent actual breakthroughs. Instead most are “evergreened” drugs that Big Pharma tweaks in order to prolong its intellectual property rights. He discusses why the business of pharmaceuticals companies is not public health, but private profit. Resources: Nick Dearden, Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health Verso, 2023 The post The Price of Big Pharma 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.

We are living through the 6th great extinction of species — and governments are doing 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 Yards appeared first on KPFA.