Everything I ever needed to know about the meaning of liberty, I learned from a flower-selling hippy on a Fort Worth street corner. Travelin’ Terry was an unabashed champion of liberal values in an intensely conservative town. His long reddish hair and full beard interrupted the wild patterns of his […]
Analysis
Eco Realism: What Your Newspaper Should Look Like
Last night a friend and fellow committed lover of the earth our home invited me to sit on a committee for a local environmental advocacy organization. Why not? I’m an advocate of stopping the rapid dismantling of the planet’s life-support systems, of arresting the extinction crisis, reining in climate change, […]
Beyond Climate: Anthropocene Demands Action on Spiking Global Inequalities
Beware of plutocrats speaking of Spaceship Earth — Eddie Yuen LAWRENCE, Kansas — The “great acceleration” of our global environmental crisis — one so often condensed into the language of climate change and prescribed a restorative diet of local organic food, shuttering of polluting coal plants, and minor personal austerities […]
Bat Attack! Why Saving Humanity Means Saving Mexican Free-Tailed Bats
“By [2050], it is extremely likely that Earth’s life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future” – Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems […]
Texas Greyhound Failing Bicyclists: My Open Letter
To improve the air quality of our cities and fight climate change at home, we could use some help from the folks at Greyhound. Despite policies that allow for the transport of bicycles on their buses, Greyhound employees are not prepared to make it happen. Bike boxes are not stocked, […]
Placenta Shampoos, BPA, and Monsanto’s Genetic Empire
DON’T FORGET TO MARCH AGAINST MONSANTO IN SAN ANTO AND AROUND THE WORLD MAY 25! — We are experimental people. By that, I don’t mean we like to tinker. Though tinker we certainly do. We’re experimental people in the way that white-coated Wistar rats are experimental rats. After hundreds of thousands […]
‘Clean’ Coal Sticks Its Snout Under San Antonio’s Tent
In the slow-motion planetary train wreck that is fossil-fuel-derived climate disruption — whether you call it global warming, global ‘weirding,’ or a worldwide conspiracy of the labcoat class — no one factor ranks higher in the blame game than coal. Once burned, the dark rock we level mountains for releases […]
Endangered Species Act Has Kept the Water Flowing in South Texas
Imagine you’re flying 20,000 feet above a tempestuous sea, fiddling with a stalling engine. As you walk the wing and hunch over the engine, you’re dropping tools and tossing out obstinate nuts and bolts that twinkle briefly in the sun as they fall below and out of sight. As perhaps […]