Ten years ago this Sunday, May 29, one of the weirdest and most controversial disasters of the 2000s struck a densely populated area just outside the city of Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia. At 5:00 that morning, a slurry of dark gray mud burst from the soil and began oozing slowly across the landscape. Since that day, the flow of mud has never stopped or even paused.
Now, a decade into the eruption, an area of almost three square miles has been buried in mud up to sixty feet deep. At... Read more
GST Original Articles
By Stan Cox and Paul Cox / 27 May 2016
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By Don Fitz / 27 May 2016
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But Will It Last?
Historic Preservation Wins Big in U City
by Don Fitz
An April 2016 victory in University City MO saw all three progressive councilpersons winning as well as over 69% voting “Yes” on an unusual amendment to the city charter. Proposition H would require the city to obtain voter approval before disposing of historic buildings. The effort started out as an attempt to block a developer. Then it expanded to protect multiple “heritage sites.” It expanded again into... Read more
By Stan Cox / 11 May 2016
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Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary in the early to mid-1970s was Earl Butz, a man best known for advising the nation's farmers to “get big or get out.” And rural America has been following that advice ever since. Across most of the country, farms continue to grow in acreage and dwindle in number. Every state in the vast agricultural region stretching from Michigan to Kansas and Ohio to North Dakota has seen more than a doubling of average farm size since 1982.
Meanwhile, U.S. Department of... Read more
By Don Fitz / 12 April 2016
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healthcare.jpg
A review of John M. Kirk's Health Care without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism.
When the Ebola virus began to spread through western Africa in fall 2014, much of the world panicked. Soon, over 20,000 people were infected, more than 8,000 had died, and worries mounted that the death toll could reach into hundreds of thousands. The United States provided military support; other countries promised money. Cuba was the... Read more
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More Reading Recommended by GST
By Ellen Brown / 05 July 2018
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There is serious consideration of establishing a State Bank in California--the fifth largest economy in the world--to enable the state bank to both serve their population and add income to the state's budget. Interestingly, this is being advocated by leading politicians in the state, people who have serious popular support.
By Chris Wright / 05 July 2018
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I often have occasion to think that, as an “intellectual,” I’m very lucky to be alive at this time in history, at the end of the long evolution from Herodotus and the pre-Socratic philosophers to Chomsky and modern science. One reason for my gratitude is simply that, as I wrote long ago in a moment of youthful idealism, “the past is a kaleidoscope of cultural achievements, or rather a cornucopian... Read more
By Ned Rozell / 04 July 2018
Thawing permafrost is a slow-motion disaster happening now in most of northern Alaska. Unlike a hurricane or a flood, the loss of permafrost is silent, rarely dramatic, and never fatal.
By Nathanael Johnson / 04 July 2018
The low boreal forest that spans the border between Alaska and Canada is the home of the Gwich’in people. There are some 6,000 Gwich’in, hunting and raising their children in villages at the edge of the Arctic Circle. They’ve been there for thousands of years, following the caribou, which provide a majority of their diet, even today.
Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in... Read more
By Robert Hunziker / 02 July 2018
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Stuart Scott of Climate Matters.TV recently interviewed Dr. Peter Wadhams, emeritus professor, Polar Ocean Physics, Cambridge University and author of the acclaimed highly recommended: A Farewell To Ice (Oxford University Press, 2017).
In response to the question “what’s your assessment of the state of the climate,” Dr. Wadhams replied: “Well, first of all, what I see is an acceleration of... Read more
By Emeline Posner / 02 July 2018
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Looks at new movement by people of color to build communities based on sustainable agriculture; features an interactive map of projects in a number of countries, and looks like it will be expanding
By Daisy Dunne / 01 July 2018
The rate of sea level rise resulting from the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has tripled over the past five years, according to new research from a global team of scientists.
The study, published in Nature, finds that ice loss from Antarctica has caused sea levels to rise by 7.6mm from 1992-2017, with two fifths of this increase occurring since 2012.