Month: August 2008

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Alaska Natives Watch Traditions Melting Away

Kari Lydersen August 29, 2008 Kari Lydersen

Bobby Koezuna Holds Tusks
Hunting walrus is an age-old tradition for the Inupiat Eskimo Native people of King Island, a tiny rugged piece of land jutting out of the Bering Sea off Alaska. The walrus provides meat for the long, dark, frigid winters, and its tusks, skin, blubber, intestines and other body parts serve other crucial functions, including making watertight parkas and "pokes" to store berries. Watching the sky and sea for signs of the coming walrus migration is an art still passed on from elders to the young generation. Now, indigenous people across the Arctic region say, due to the effects of climate change, they can no longer predict important climactic changes and events like they used to, leading some to freeze to death caught in storms or stranded on ice; or face privation as their traditional hunts are interrupted.

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Beyond Voting: Guerrilla Gardeners, Outlaw Bicyclists & Pirate Programmers

Benjamin Dangl August 26, 2008 Benjamin Dangl

This US election year an unprecedented number of voters will likely head to the polls to cast their ballots in an exercise that should take just a few minutes to complete. But what about the rest of the minutes left in the year? Author and activist Chris Carlsson has some suggestions for social change beyond voting in Nowtopia, a new book about modern day rebels who, in his words, "aren't waiting for an institutional change from on-high but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old."

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The Global Battle Against Noise Pollution

Al Huebner August 26, 2008 Al Huebner

Plane Over London Neighborhood
Until a few decades ago noise was seen as no more than a nuisance of modern urban life. Then research began to show that loud, but not uncommon, noise could damage hearing. And numerous studies indicated that many widespread sources of sound near schools impaired children's ability to learn. More recently the World Health Organization (WHO), using data from pioneer studies done in several European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, has demonstrated that noise can be a major killer.

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Commercializing Childhood: The Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives

Susan Linn August 25, 2008 Susan Linn

Source: Multinational Monitor

Susan Linn is associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also co-founder and director of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). She is the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008) and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004).

Multinational Monitor: How much advertising and marketing is directed at kids in the United States? How has this changed over the last 20 years? read more

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Remembering Mahmoud Darwish

Various Media August 20, 2008 Various Media

Video by Al Jazeera

Free Speech Radio News: Internationally acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on August 10th after complications from heart surgery. Considered one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, Darwish’s work was regarded as the quintessential voice of Palestinian exile – and his death has come as a shock to Palestinians in the occupied territories and abroad.

CLICK HERE to listen to Darwish himself, reading "In Jerusalem", voiceover by Saed Bannoura, music by Marcel Khalife. read more