Category: Less of What We Don’t Need

On Saturday, Aug. 24, members of neighboring tribes and environmental groups gathered near the Grand Canyon to demonstrate against the reopening of the nearby Pinyon Plain uranium mine. An estimated 250 protestors attended. The people driving up to the Canyon from Flagstaff or Williams through piñon pines and junipers in the wide solitude of the…

The Oil Kills uprising is highlighting that the problem of aviation is part of a bigger story of injustice — it is in fact a pillar helping to hold up a system of injustice. The air travel industry is contrary to the need to eliminate fossil fuel use; it is tied to the military-industrial complex;…

Data centers are massive, boxy, windowless buildings filled with computer servers that process data and handle internet traffic. Those servers generate extreme amounts of heat, the removal of which requires powerful water-chilling equipment. That includes arrays of large fans that, in turn, generate a thunderous wall of noise.

Recently, Congress has made three decisions that bear directly on uranium mining on the Navajo Nation: it banned the purchase of Russian uranium processed for nuclear power-plant use, except when no other suitable uranium is available; it discontinued the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA); and it approved $2.7 billion for development of the domestic uranium…

“Our society tends to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again.” My family and I spent 25 years in Washington DC. They were good years, and every morning I began with coffee and The Washington Post. The newspaper was a wonderful companion—and reliably…

Climate change is a huge, complicated problem. Therefore, many people have an understandable tendency to mentally simplify it by focusing on just one cause (carbon emissions) and just one solution (alternative energy). Sustainability scholar Jan Konietzko has called this “carbon tunnel vision.” Oversimplifying the problem this way leads to techno-fixes that actually fix nothing. Despite…

It’s not entirely your fault that the intended final handful of chips was not, indeed, your last for that snacking session. Many common snack foods have been expertly engineered to keep us addicted and almost constantly craving more of whatever falsely satisfying manufactured treat is in front of us.

The year 1991 was significant as the new Government in India brought a series of policy reforms that liberalized the economy, moving away from self-reliance to market and consumption oriented. Neo colonialism is one of the basic causes of grotesque inequality. Countries of the Global South that are encouraged to imitate the development of the…