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I think it would be great to start a campaign for our campus to go conflict free. This would spread awareness about the funding of war in DRCongo through large electronic compainies' purchasing of conflict minerals. The purchasing of tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold is funding this. These minerals can all be found elsewhere.

On Tuesday, our ENVS 490 class (Culture and Environmental Conflict) will be touring Bonneville Dam, site of a major conflict over how to remove federally listed California sea lions, who have found the site a handy spot to dine on the endangered spring Chinook run (and others). The use of lethal force was approved, then court-retracted; what will happen to these pinnipeds come this spring?

Our ENVS 490 class this semester has examined a number of environmental conflicts in Oregon, many in its rural areas. This article discusses how serious the economic situation has become in these areas -- many of which were dependent on natural resource industries -- and includes an animated graphic to suggest that things have only been getting worse in the last few years.

Farm Together Now in its most elemental form is a book about American farmers in the 21st century. In particular, this book addresses the other side of American agriculture: innovations moving towards sustainable farming practices. This is achieved through 20 interviews with farmers and activists across the nation along with 60 beautiful photos of their lives.  Although honing all 20 of the interviews down into one specific argument is difficult, the purpose of this book is to see the unity in all of their individual and sometimes philosophically contradictory approaches to sustainable agriculture. The authors argue that a shift in the dominant agricultural paradigm will not occur unless farmers and citizens are united in resisting it and are invested in working together to forge a more sustainable agricultural system.  What this book lacks is a deeper discussion of conflicting views in sustainable agriculture. The three issues that Franceschini and Tucker identified are provocative and would make a very interesting follow-up book.  Despite the author's insistence that we "Farm together now", they do not explore how sustainable farmers can reconcile their differences to do just that.  Although it's likely that urban, educated people are the main consumers of this book, I feel that it has value outside of those exclusive communities and would be beneficial for farmers, artists, and anyone looking for solutions to local problems. Personally, I would recommend this book to anyone because I feel that the authors made a sometimes-scary topic more approachable through this intimate portrayal of farmers. 

You've probably all heard about, and/or seen, KONY 2012; here's an NYT article about it, and see http://audelhi.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/kony2012/ for a critical commentary suggesting that, well, viewers should get situated, both in the context of Uganda and as Americans.

If you read any of the stuff I'm throwing on here, this one should be it. Pacifist Costa Rica is getting police up in arms because of a neighbor's infraction on their environmental systems. Armed defense of the environment sanctioned by a government? With harm to biodiversity being cited as a cause? Thats very interesting, and shows how far environmentalism has become a value in certain parts of the world.

Energy policy doesnt need to take environmental concerns into account because God will decide when the world will end. He cites these biblical excerpts as the infallible, perfect word of God. Yet let me also note that in his excerpts, God also declares that all inclinations of man's heart is evil from birth. Hmmm.... what, then, must this say about his motives? Obviously, I'm kidding, but I just wanted to share and highlight some of the absurdity I see. Yes, we can write this off as absurd and clearly not logical, so why prod so much at things that are clearly not worth our time? It's an important reality check to remember that this is happening in the world outside of LC's progressive bubble though, and despite how obviously absurd this seems, somehow it's still here, has power, and it is being taken seriously... by someone at least.

"There is a theological debate that this is a carbon starved planet." Like many, I'm tempted to simply poke fun at this guy and laugh at his obscenely ridiculous propositions (I'd wager to say that not too many priests or pastors would agree with the quote from Rep. Shimkus above), and to dismiss him as uneducated and spewing the same sort of tired "job-losing" rhetoric that seems to be the platform of conservatives in America these days. Yet -- he was elected. Maybe this is a flaw of our electoral process. Or maybe it truly does underscore how conflicted our country is ideologically. Somehow though, I don't buy the reliance on the Bible silliness that these guys spew out. It's really just another sentimental framework to hide their utmost faith in the actual religion of the 20th century -- the citadels of free-markets. An important reality check for sure.

Lengthy thoughts from me again, apologies: https://sites.google.com/site/economicresponse/a-thought-experiment

This article talks about how the metaphors, language, and terminology we use to describe phenomena (in this case poverty) actually impact how we act and perceive policies and reality. It calls back to ideas about knowledge being communicated via social constructions that give us one view, but may be just as accurate as a description that gives a different view or description of the same phenomena. The same language issue (particularly issues of "natural" being "good") finds its way into environmentalism. Of course, it is neither fun nor (at face value) practical to always be wary of the semantic and syntactic details of our language (coming to LC, I remember being frustrated and resistant to the insistence of some of my professors that I use "gender neutral language" in essays, rather than using "he" or "she" to refer to conceptual individuals or "mankind" to the human race) , but perhaps it matters a little more than we think. Ultimately it is hard to know exactly how our language influences the way we think and act, and the language-shaping-thinking versus thinking-shaping-language debate is alive and well. Regardless, when in a field that practices a lot of advocacy work and various forms of story telling (even the stories we tell about the history of environmentalism or certain environmental conflicts) it is something to at least consider.