stillness is a lie, my dear
One of my favourite sites for commentary on African news, culture, and history is ‘Africa is a Country.’ The name is tongue-in-cheek, a joke, but it also comes with a hard edge; a not insignificant people do in fact think that Africa is a country. Among others, people think of Africa as a nebulous entity […]
Genetically modified crops will save the world, we’re often told. They provide improved nutrition, better resistance to pests, and the ability to spray indiscriminately to keep back weeds, fungal infections, and insects because they’ve been bred to resist the chemicals involved. They’ve been heavily marketed by the West to the Global South, with a pushy insistence […]
Living in a border state like California, you experience an inevitable amount of cultural bleedthrough. It’s not just that we have a large immigrant population, or that businesses with signs in Spanish and services aimed at Mexican and other Latin American communities exist. Nor is it just that our English is spattered with Spanish terms, […]
While the BBC might think that a factual statement about rising temperatures should be redacted from a programme because it’s ‘controversial,’ most of us here in the real world are aware of the fact that the climate is changing, and it’s taking place at a faster rate than would occur naturally. This would seem to […]
Over the course of last December and into this January, media around the world were captivated by the story of a horrific gang rape and beating in Delhi which left the victim dead after struggling for survival in the hospital. The nature of the reporting on this incident was highly sensationalised, and it carried heavy […]
The last thirty years have been marked by a worldwide increase in awareness of environmental issues and the critical need for conservation. This includes conservation of resources critically needed by human societies, as well as natural wonders that should be preserved for their inherent beauty and contribution to biodiversity. One result of this has been […]