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Globalization and free-market economics made great promises to create a better life for everyone.  Instead they have produced an economy that is increasingly unjust and unsustainable.  Indeed, they have produced twin catastrophes — the economic crisis and the climate crisis.  And far from being on the mend, each is getting rapidly worse.
“Labor, Sustainability, and Justice” [...]

By Joe Uehlein

This Labor Day, as union membership falls to a mere seven percent of private sector workers and bargaining and political clout shrink to match, two roads diverge for American labor.  One is to attempt to find a niche within an economic-political system that is ever more shaped by short-term greed and is therefore ever more unsustainable economically, socially, and environmentally. (more…)

by Joe Uehlein

Sometimes a decision forces you to think deeply about what you believe in and how you act on those beliefs.  It was like that when the climate protection leader Bill McKibben asked me to sign a letter calling for civil disobedience to block the building of a pipeline designed to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico.  Opposing the pipeline might strain ties (more…)

[by Brendan Smith, Original posted by Grist Magazine]

Stroll by any Whole Foods seafood counter and you will see color-coded fish: Green for fully sustainable, yellow for partially sustainable, and red for fish threatened by overfishing or grown on polluting fish farms. Buy a “green” fish and you eat guilt free, confident that you are doing your part to save the ocean and its inhabitants.

Put down your fork — Whole Foods is not telling you the whole story. The dirty little secret of their seafood rating system is that it ignores the largest and most imminent threat to our oceans: greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if every human on the planet miraculously decided to buy only seafood stamped with the Whole Foods seal of “sustainablity,” marine species will still be doomed.

This is not a secret threat: Just last month, the International Program on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) — a consortium of 27 of the top ocean experts in the world (more…)