Why would you send your children to another country—on a journey both you and your children knew to be dangerous, a journey that will cost most or all of what you have, with an outcome that’s uncertain? President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry seem to believe that parents…
Posts published by “Emily Lardner”
Governor Jay Inslee just announced his intention to increase the official estimate for how much fish we can safely eat in Washington, from 6.3 grams per day (about the size of a Ritz cracker) to 175 grams per day (about 6 ounces). This decision about how much fish we eat…
Notes on the Old Growth Poetry Collective’s Summer Lovin’ project “The way we live now is not poetic. We live prose, we breathe prose, and we drink, alas, prose. There is prose that does us no great harm… But to live continually in the natter of ill-written and ill-spoken prose…
My mom, a thoughtful educator and environmentalist, looked at me on Mother’s Day and sighed. “Can we do it? Do you think there’s any way we can get out of this mess?” We’d spent most of the weekend watching an owl fledge out of a nest box under the watchful…
Evergreen’s faculty union, the United Faculty of Evergreen (UFE), has begun bargaining with the administration for its next contract. The purpose of this letter is to describe one thing I hope the UFE will bargain for and one I hope it won’t. I’ll address the one I hope it won’t…
“Do we understand the path we are taking here, by defining two classes of water, for two different groups of population?” Dr Raul Gupta, head of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, West Virginia —Evan Osnos, “Chemical Valley,” The New Yorker, April 7, 2014 The chemical spill in West Virginia, in which…
Maybe next year… It’s hard not to feel discouraged. In December 2013, Washington State’s Climate Legislative and Executive Workgroup (CLEW), created by the 2013 Washington State Legislature to develop “a state program of actions and policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” presented their opposing sets of recommendations—and now that…
“Equality matters because human beings are creatures that thrive in societies where we are treated more as equals than as being greatly unequal…We work best, behave best, play best and think best when we are not laboring under the assumption that some of us are much better, more deserving and…
Education as a strategy for addressing poverty depends on not being poor in the first place The way we understand poverty determines what we do about it. That’s the argument Sasha Abramsky makes in his new book, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, published by…
In support of the use of power: The naïve hope of a democratic system is that elected officials work on behalf of those who elect them. We’ve devolved from that as Susan Clark and Woden Teachout suggest in their book Slow Democracy. They argue that the dominant conception of democracy—voting—is analogous…