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A Big Arm
On October 29, 1979, on the 50th anniversary of the great stock market crash of 1929, I went with some friends to Washington, DC to demonstrate at the Department of Energy offices on LEnfant Plaza. Its an action that some of you young folksand even some of you old folksmight not have heard about. We were protesting the DoEs work on nuclear weapons, we assembled peacefully if stridently at the Department offices,…
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by: Chris Clarke – Autumn 2004
Post-election map
Since the election, I've seen a lot of so-called "progressives" saying incredibly insulting things about people in the "red states"... people who live in states that went to Bush in the Electoral College. I've read calls for secession, calls for cutting off federal funding to those states, calls for letting the people there drift into theocratic fascism on their own without the benefit of the enlightened folks in the cities. "They hate…
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by: Chris Clarke – Spring 2005
Bad news, good news
From the effects of the tsunami in December to the renewed Bush administration assault on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the world has been awash in very bad news these days. We should know. Our jobs here at Earth Island Journal involve paying close attention to that bad news and sifting through it, finding the worst to bring to your attention. Thus, we are especially sensitive to the effect bad news can…
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by: Chris Clarke – Summer 2005
From the editor
I told myself this issue's note from the editor wouldn't mention the US president. Even we at the Earth Island Journal do get tired of paying attention to bad news, after all: I planned to take one of the many small-scale victories that have happened over the last few months and draw it into a metaphor for the larger, hopeful trends that we like to emphasize where possible. But this weekend, just…
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by: Chris Clarke – Winter 2004
A Pervasive Presence
The last three months have seen a rather startling number of news stories about wildlife species showing up where they weren’t expected. In June, biologists announced a breeding pair of least Bell’s vireos had been spotted in California’s Central Valley, likely the first such pair there in 40 years. The Central Valley’s riparian forest habitat is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the US, with more than 90 percent of its…
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by: Chris Clarke – Autumn 2005
Greatness
One of the tough things about this job is that working with so many passionate, committed activists, and being charged with representing their work to our readership, it’s hard to avoid coming close to hagiography. This was certainly the case, and still is, with Earth Island’s founder, Dave Brower. With a resume like Dave’s – all those first ascents, remaking the oldest environmental organization into an activist group, saving Dinosaur, Point Reyes,…
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by: Chris Clarke – Spring 2006
Progress…
Peter D. Ward is one of maybe a dozen leading scholars of the Permian extinction. Despite being an able popularizer, always anathema to scientists who cannot write, he is a sober-sided and careful researcher, not to mention a meticulous theorist. His colleague Luann Becker hit the papers lately with claims that an asteroid collision was responsible for the Permian extinction, and Ward methodically pointed out the pesky evidence contrary to her impact…
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by: Chris Clarke – Winter 2005
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