A few years ago, while clearing dried broccoli stalks from the tired soil of our land at Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York, I received a cold call from Boston. On the other end was a Black woman, unknown to me, who wanted to share her story of trying to make it as a farmer.
After more than a century of decline, the number of Black farmers is on the rise.
Through tears, she explained the discrimination and obstacles she faced in a training program she’d joined, as well as in gaining access to land and credit. She wondered whether Black farming was destined for extinction. She said she wanted to hear the voice of another African-heritage farmer so that she could believe “it was possible” and sustain hope.
The challenges she encountered are not new. For decades, the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against Black farmers, excluding them from farm loans and assistance. Meanwhile, racist violence in the South targeted land-owning Black farmers, whose very existence threatened the sharecropping system. These factors led to the loss of about 14 million acres of Black-owned […]
Credit: jedmorey.com
In America’s never-ending pursuit to be number one in all things, it has achieved top billing in a number of troubling areas, including where overmedication is concerned. We are the most pill-popping country on earth, with an astounding 70 percent of us regularly taking one prescription drug and about half of us taking two. A quarter of us take five or more prescription medications, according to the Mayo Clinic—which for the record, is a lot. (emphasis added)
What goes into our bodies ultimately must come out, and that’s as true for meds as it is for anything else. Without getting into the elephant in the room (the question of what it means when a good portion of the population is taking enough drugs to kill said elephant?), let’s turn to another issue. That is, when some of those pharmaceuticals are excreted—meaning peed out by users—they generally end up in our toilet water. From there, they enter our waterways and recycled water supplies, the latter of which are used […]
Credit: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
Some of the sunniest states in the country are actively blocking rooftop-solar development through overtly lacking and destructive policy landscapes, according to a Center for Biological Diversity report released Tuesday.
The 10 states highlighted in Throwing Shade: 10 Sunny States Blocking Distributed Solar Development—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin—account for more than 35 percent of the total rooftop-solar technical potential in the contiguous U.S., but only 6 percent of total installed capacity.
“Thanks to weak and nonexistent policies, the distributed-solar markets in these states have never been given a chance to shine,” Greer Ryan, sustainability research associate with the Center for Biological Diversity and author of the report, said. “There’s room for improvement in solar policies across all 50 states, but it’s especially shameful to see the sunniest states fail to lead the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy.”
The report assigned a policy […]
North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory
Credit: Gerry Broome/AP
RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA — North Carolina law limiting protections to LGBT people violates federal civil rights protections and can’t be enforced, The U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday.
The Justice Department’s intervention puts the state in danger of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal school funding.
In a letter to Gov. Pat McCrory, the Justice Department put the state on notice that federal officials view the state law as violating federal Civil Rights Act protections barring workplace discrimination based on sex. Provisions of the state law directed at transgender state employees violate their anti-discrimination protections, the letter said.
McCrory has defended the state law, which limits legal protections to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. It also requires transgender people to use public bathrooms that conform to the sex on their birth certificate.
A new system called “video visitation” is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It’s inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
