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Exit

Then boom, boom, boom, the stores fell like dominoes. Without the Gas-n-Go to anchor the town, and with the grocery store and the bank gone, the rest couldn’t hold. The pharmacy shut one day and never reopened. Armored trucks were seen emptying it.

Sunbeams

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

Khalil Gibran

The House Painters Of Southern California

There is a movement afoot in Congress, and along our southern borders among civilians dressed in fatigues, to keep illegals out. There is a desire to empty the job sites of workers; to shoo away the craftsmen who build and decorate these mansions; to punish them for their late-night crossings. I am a house painter, not a politician. If this were to happen, I see fifty years of painting experience out the door. And that is just within our group.

Bridging The Green Divide

Van Jones On Jobs, Jails, And Environmental Justice

“Eco-apartheid” is a situation in which you have ecological haves and have-nots. In other words, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you visit Marin County, you’ll find hybrid vehicles, solar panels, organic food, organic everything. If you then get in your car and drive twenty minutes, you’ll be in west Oakland, where people are literally choking on the fumes of the last century’s pollution-based technologies. That’s eco-apartheid, and it’s morally wrong, because we should deliver clean jobs and health benefits not just to the wealthy, but also to the people who need them most. Eco-apartheid doesn’t work on a practical level either, because you can’t have a sustainable economy when only 20 percent of the people can afford to pay for hybrids, solar panels, and organic cuisine, while the other 80 percent are still driving pollution-based vehicles to the same pollution-based jobs and struggling to make purchases at Wal-Mart.

Sunbeams

I got my first full-time job, but it’s weird. I could swear I was making more money in college, working for my parents as their daughter.

Melanie Reno

Field Notes

When they set out to document the lives of Mexican migrant workers in Hartville, author David Hassler and photographer Gary Harwood expected to find examples of injustice, deprivation, and misery. Instead they found a functioning seasonal community, rich in culture, to which entire families return each year. The work is hard and dirty, and the workers struggle to support themselves and their dependents.

Nine To Five

A Brussels-sprouts cannery, the Kinsey Institute, singing telegrams

The Death Of Environmentalism

Over the last fifteen years, environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.