The pea, radish, lettuce, and quinoa sprouts have emerged in my new backyard garden, outracing the chervil, cilantro, carrot, and chard seeds—and Wayde Lawler, my new-found Hyperlocavore buddy, is responsible for all this.

Wayde and I found each other via Hyperlocavore, a website that matches landless gardeners with land hosts. Wayde is a horticulture student at Merritt College in Oakland, CA; I'm a hobby gardener. For the past two years, I've ceded my small backyard to the resident deer, and settled for a 15-gallon tub on the deck with a pair of cherry tomatoes and some climbing green beans.

My inspiration for signing up with Hyperlocavore came from a February 21, 2010 presentation put on by Transition Albany, a local group trying to make Albany, Ca. more self-sufficient. The presentation included the movie HomeGrown, which documents a family in Pasadena, Ca. that–incredibly—grows three tons of food annually on 1/5th of an acre of urban land. Afterward, Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, spoke about her garden on squatted land in Oakland, Ca. where her neighbors are welcome to come pick what they need. I don't intend to raise a ton of food on my not quite 1/10th of an acre parcel, but if someone else were to take the lead, I thought we might have some fun installing a garden together.

The serendipity gods were surely hovering when I posted my Hyperlocavore request. Wayde Lawler was the only person looking for a North Berkeley site on that day; the following Sunday we met in my weedy backyard to look at the available space and my incomplete effort at a deer-proof fence. On Thursday, Wayde arrived with a borrowed pick-up and a cubic yard of planting soil. He whacked my weeds and planned the beds and we both schlepped buckets. By the end of the day, we had garden beds topped with partly-decomposed straw mulch occupying a 12 by 14 foot space.

8 Ways to Join the Local Food Movement

I like Wayde. In the month since, we've strengthened and completed the bamboo-lattice deer fence, begun planting, and begun to know each other. Aside from his ability to envision an idea, figure out a way to accomplish it, and follow through, I like his Midwestern low-key politeness. I liked meeting his wife, Taryn, and sharing returned Peace Corps volunteer reminiscences on the day that we sowed “goosefoot” (that is, plants like spinach, chard, and beet from the Chenopodiaceae family) seeds. I enjoyed having Wayde as our waiter when my housemate and I visited the restaurant where he worked, and I appreciate his stop-in for a first time experience at my community acupuncture clinic.

Although we haven't any formal agreement for sharing either the garden or its produce, I am not worried. So far, it has evolved that I provide land, water, and some labor—and Wayde provides expertise, labor, and inspiration. He brings his own tools although he is welcome to use mine, and he has paid for soil, plants, and seeds while I've bought a couple lunches. From what I can tell, we both feel we are gaining more than we are giving.

My Hyperlocavore experience to date has been entirely positive. But I can imagine scenarios where, as with any human interaction, it could have been sour. I'm glad that I had the courage to try something new. I'm glad to know Wayde and Taryn. And I'm looking forward to a summer of gardening—while shrinking my carbon footprint.

Pamela O'Malley Chang wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Pamela is co-founder of Sarana Community Acupuncture in Albany, California and a YES! Magazine contributing editor. This is part of a series of blog posts about the efforts of Transition Albany.

Interested?
More from Transition Albany.

Towns Rush to Make Low-Carbon Transition
More and more neighborhoods are making the transition to a climate-friendly community. Has yours?

Growing Power in an Urban Food Desert
Healthy food is the foundation of social justice, says Will Allen. And he knows, because he grows a lot of both.

Each year, political and business leaders travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss “improving the state of the world.” The Yes Men (the prankster duo that has been re-writing corporate history since the '90s) and the filmmakers behind The End of Poverty? felt those leaders weren't taking that mandate seriously—for if they were, they'd surely be saying very different things. 

"We felt that the world leaders should be doing something more drastic to end poverty than just giving lip service to the issue," says Beth Portello, the producer of the film.

So the pranksters decided to help them do more. Beginning with real videos, the filmmakers—with the help, says Portello, of "the magic of editing software" and some "crafty scripters"—dubbed in alternative messages in which Nicholas Sarkozy of France, agribusiness giant Arthur Daniels Midland CEO Patricia Woertz, Queen Elizabeth II, and others own up to wrongdoings or promise to behave better in the future. The cadence may be a bit unusual, but it looks like the queen is admitting that the source of Britain's wealth "was the financial plundering of the Southern Hemisphere."

In another video, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has allowed development of the Athabasca tar sands, promises: "We're going to tone back our weak subservience to dirty oil."

The videos are part of a website that closely mimics that of the real World Economic Forum (the site address is off by one character). At first glance, the navigation tabs on both sites are the same, but they differ dramatically in details.

For example, while the real WEF website includes an initiative called "Agriculture and Food Security," the other site links to one called "Food Sovereignty." On the real site, visitors can "watch Patricia Woertz from ADM speak about the New Vision for Agriculture," while visitors to the ersatz version are invited to watch Woertz discussing "some of the problems with global agribusiness, and her company in particular." (In fact, they no longer can—ADM made a copyright claim, which forced YouTube to remove the dubbed video, in which Woertz appeared to call her company an "insidious agricultural syndicate.") The prank site proposes land redistribution and a worldwide subsidy for organic agriculture.

In fact, all of the WEF's initiatives have been replaced with links to real organizations taking what the pranksters consider to be more productive approaches to improving the world—in the agricultural example, visitors are directed to La Via Campesina and Movimento Sem Terra, peasant movements for land reform. Organizations working toward debt relief, taxes on financial speculation, the closing of tax havens, and local governance of natural resources are also highlighted. 

 "All the crises we're facing are rooted in massive inequality and poverty," says Philippe Diaz, the director of The End of Poverty?. "If these leaders really wanted to make a difference, they would work toward ending poverty, however uncomfortable that might be for business."

But, says Potrello, “it’s easier to remove funny videos from YouTube."

Patricia Woertz, CEO, Arthur Daniels Midland

Queen Elizabeth II

 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Brooke is YES! Magazine's Web editor.

Interested?
The Yes Men have been impersonating executives and spokespeople for major corporations since the mid-1990s. For information about former pranks, see their film, the WTO prank, Vivoleum, and "We're Screwed!"

The End of Poverty? is directed by Philippe Diaz and produced by Cinema Libre Studio.

On Sunday, the website WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of classified intelligence reports from military operations in Afghanistan.

This set of documents is unquestionably the most important history so far of key parts of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. These are reports from troops and commanders in the field to other military officials—this is where they tell the truth, to themselves. It is significant that the Obama administration has not tried to claim the reports are not accurate. What they are trying to do is to have it both ways: claiming that disclosure of the reports somehow endangers U.S. troops, but at the same time disparaging the documents as showing nothing we didn't already know. 

These reports, of events already past, are hardly likely to endanger the troops in Afghanistan—the people and insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan don't need Pentagon documents to know what U.S./NATO forces are actually doing in their countries.

The documents probably will have a significant impact on the U.S./NATO war though—just not what the White House is warning of. These reports will likely stoke even greater global anger around the world, as evidence filters out to those far from Afghanistan and Pakistan who didn't already know what the U.S./NATO occupation looks like. That will certainly mean rising anger towards U.S. policies and, unfortunately, towards Americans as a whole ... but more importantly it will spur enormous anti-war activity in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. And that means greater pressure on those governments still providing troops for Washington's war in Afghanistan. And most important of all, they will mean greater pressure than ever on the Obama administration to end the war and on Congress to vote NO on the current supplemental war funding bill.

There is no evidence yet of a new smoking gun among the individual documents. But taken as a whole, the documents provide a collective arsenal of evidence of a brutal war that never did have a chance to "succeed"—and evidence of what a government, through two administrations, were determined to keep secret from its own people and the rest of the world.

The documents chronicle escalating Special Forces' operations, drone attacks, and more. They describe activities like those of Task Force 373, a death squad that goes after named individuals on a kill-or-capture list. No trial, of course. Who knows how much of the intelligence that lands someone on that list is rooted in a neighborhood feud or tribal or political power struggle?  

General McChrystal's—and now General Petraeus's—"nation-building" efforts are failing. In places like Marja, last spring's poster-city of a new U.S.-backed "government-in-a-box," the hand-picked mayor-in-a-box, who spent most of the last 15 years living in Germany, is so unpopular that he has to be ferried into town on U.S. military helicopters for occasional meetings, and then quickly whisked away. The much-heralded spring 2010 offensive in Kandahar is on apparently permanent delay.  

I haven't yet read even a fraction of the 92,000 reports covering 250,000 pages. But the overviews provided by the international journalists to whom the reports were first made available are certainly consistent with the view that the "counter-insurgency" approach is already giving way to an old-fashioned Bush-style counter-terrorism war. That would mean that claims that protecting Afghan civilians is most important fade in favor of acknowledging that the military's role is simply to kill whoever they decide are the bad guys. So if the war becomes more of an air war, and drones are called in to do more of the dirty work so that U.S. troops are not at risk, and more Afghan or Pakistani civilians are killed as a result, well that's just part of the cost of war.

     An End to Constant War:
Seven reasons we're always at war...
and seven ways to quit.

The documents include evidence of far more civilian deaths than were ever reported in the press. Many of them were probably never even mentioned—or asked about—in the virtually non-existent Congressional oversight of these years. They detail massive levels of corruption, extortion, and constant violence inflicted on Afghan civilians by the U.S.-backed, U.S.-trained and U.S.-funded militias known as the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police.

And they demonstrate, again, the continuing links between Pakistan's top military intelligence agency, the ISI, and the top leadership of the Taliban—despite claims by Secretary of State Clinton and others in the Obama administration that Pakistan is a reliable U.S. ally that just needs to work a little harder on going after terrorists. The Obama administration's answer to the documents simply repeats their efforts to blur the very distinct organizations known as the Afghan Taliban (mostly based in Pakistan but operating in Afghanistan) and the Pakistani Taliban (who target the Pakistani government, and against whom that government has indeed acted) into a generic presence in Pakistan known as "the terrorists" or "the Taliban." Pointing to Islamabad's actions against the Pakistani Taliban says nothing about their officials' ties with and apparent support for the Afghan Taliban.

The Wikileaks Papers provide a treasure trove of new evidence of what we already knew: this war has already failed. Every death, of Afghan civilian or of U.S. or NATO soldiers\, is needless. Every dollar spent on military actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan is wasted. The cost of this occupation and this war—in Afghan blood, in U.S. and NATO military blood, in the billions of dollars needed for jobs at home and real reconstruction in Afghanistan and elsewhere—is too high. We need to stop the funding for escalation now, bring the troops and contractors home, support Afghan and regional/UN diplomacy, and begin the long effort of making good on our huge debt to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Congress is voting on $33 billion to pay for Obama's already-underway escalation in Afghanistan—enough to pay for 500,000 good green union jobs at home and still have billions left to start paying down our debt to Afghanistan for real reconstruction and diplomacy.

Maybe, just maybe, this 21st century Pentagon Papers—the 2.0 version: Afghanistan—will provide the spark of anti-war outrage to make that happen.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

Interested?

• Should We Stay or Should We Go?:
  The time has come for a U.S. exit strategy in Afghanistan. But is "Out Now" a valid response? David Wildman, Sunita Viswanath, and Lorelei Kelly discuss how can we best support Afghan national stability.
• Raiding the War Chest:
  It's called "defense" spending, but how much of it is actually about defense? Here's how we could save billions, and still have billions left to make the U.S. and the world more secure.
  

I’ve had a hard time wrenching my eyes away from the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon began spewing poison just over 100 days ago. Google Maps tells me that Grand Isle, Louisiana is 2,316 miles away from my office here in Oakland, CA and yet it feels like that oil is washing right up on my doorstep.

What makes the devastation in the Gulf feel so personal?

For me, it’s the stories of families that have lost everything, shrimpers and fisherman whose livelihoods may never recover. It’s the photos of oil-drenched pelicans, the same birds I remember seeing down in Florida as a kid. It’s watching our political system unable to muster the proper response to the crisis: a full out clean energy mobilization that could finally break our addiction to fossil fuels.

I’ve wanted to know what makes the Gulf disaster tear up our hearts because there are other environmental fights out there that need to feel just as personal.

For the last two months, I’ve been emailing and Skype-ing with Cynthia Ong, one of the leaders of Green SURF, a coalition of organizations in the Malaysian state of Sabah on the island of Borneo. Cynthia and her allies are working to stop a coal fired power plant that could have a devastating effect on the environment and community of the island.

The people of Borneo need the support of the international community to stop the plant. With most of the paperwork already approved and construction ready to begin this August, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, is one of the few people left with enough power to still pull the plug.

If Najib feels enough international pressure, there’s a good chance he will scrap the plant. But without a global response, the project will undoubtedly move forward.

Borneo is over 8,000 miles away from Oakland, yet this coal plant needs to start feeling just as close as Grand Isle and the Gulf coast.

Because if we can’t stop a coal plant in a famous place like Borneo, how will we ever stop the hundreds more being planned for less iconic places across the planet? And how will we begin to take on the even more difficult problem of the climate crisis—which is already hammering vulnerable communities but still feels distant and invisible for many of us?

The Internet has provided us with a powerful tool in this struggle. Not so long ago, we’d be reaching for an encyclopedia to look up where exactly Borneo is. Now it’s just a click away.

Images of the pristine beaches that will be ravaged by the coal plant or video of the coastal communities that may be forced off their land can be beamed directly to our laptops. Studies about how Borneo could generate its electricity needs from clean and renewable sources are freely available.

Perhaps most importantly, though, politicians like Prime Minister Najib can hear our voices—even if they’re 8,000 miles away. Green SURF is encouraging people to write on Najib’s Facebook page or send him an online postcard expressing opposition to the plant.

The global response to the coal plant generated by Cynthia and many others (she’ll be the first to credit the incredible work of many activists and community groups on the ground) is already beginning to have an effect.

Time to Get Unreasonable
Shrimper Diane Wilson might be going to jail for her high-profile protests against BP.

Earlier this month, The Star, a leading English-language paper in Malaysia, ran a story about the global pressure building on Najib. Just last week, Roz Savage, international activist and distance rower, was in Borneo to shine a spotlight on the issue with some creative actions that got the attention of the press. And throughout the summer, Green SURF and their allies have worked to submit hundreds upon hundreds of public comments criticizing the Detailed Environmental Impact Assessment (DEIA) of the coal plant, a key hurdle it must clear in order to be built.

 They seem to have been heard: On July 29, Free Malaysia Today reported that the DEIA was “laced with fraud, incompetence or plain negligence.”

Now, it’s crucial to continue to build opposition to the plant. At this point, spreading the story, photos, and videos of what’s happening in Borneo is the most important step that citizens around the world can take. Petitions, like the one up now at Change.org, are also circulating. Joining the SOS Borneo Facebook group can help you stay up to date with the latest developments.

Personally, I look forward to the day when we can look up and see solutions instead of disasters, whether they’re just around the corner or halfway around the world (showing those solutions is one of the goals of 350.org’s 10/10/10 Global Work Party this October).

For now, though, it’s important to look directly at the challenges we face, take a deep breath, and try once again to make a difference. 

Jamie Henn wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jamie is a co-coordinator of 350.org. In 2007, he co-organized Step It Up, a campaign that pulled together over 2,000 climate rallies across the United States to push for strong climate action at the federal level.

Interested?

• The BP Oil Spill: Ideas and actions for responding to the Gulf disaster.

• Bonn Climate Talks, Beyond BP: We must keep up pressure for a fair, ambitious climate treaty.
• 2010 a Tipping Point for Renewable Energy: 100 days into the BP disaster, it's time to quit claiming that an economy based on fossil fuels is our only option.
  

• For all the harm that housing bubbles and layoffs have done to the balance sheets of American families, it’s often missing or insufficient health insurance that sends them over the edge. One study found that bankruptcy filers had an average out-of-pocket medical debt of $12,000; another noted that every 30 seconds, an American files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health issue. Universal coverage would not only help prevent these bankruptcies, it would, in the words of the economists’ petition, “give lower and middle-income Americans greater financial security—and the ability to pay their mortgages, start small businesses, save for college, pursue new job opportunities, and make other choices that will benefit our economy.” In other words, helping families stay solvent is as least a good a definition for “economic stimulus” as roads and bridges.
• One of the hidden costs of our health care problem is that it constrains those who would like to change jobs or start new businesses. A new report by MIT’s Jonathan Gruber found that at least 1.6 million small business workers suffer “job lock,” meaning they can’t leave their job for fear of losing benefits.
• Health care costs keep small businesses from offering the jobs, and the wages, that they otherwise could. A 2006 study showed that pay levels decline 2.3 percent with every 10 percent increase in health premiums; the Small Business Majority found that, over the next 10 years, health care reform would save $29.2 billion in small businesses’ profits, $309 billion in their workers’ wages, and 128,000 small business jobs that would otherwise be lost. A study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that wages suffer when health costs grow, stressed that “workers and households pay for health insurance through lower wages and higher prices.”
• Big businesses suffer, too. Take a look at U.S. auto manufacturers, laboring under the high costs of medical care for workers while trying to compete with manufacturers from countries with universal health care. It’s one major reason production gets outsourced.
• A streamlined system would slash administrative costs. Ask any doctor (or any medical receptionist): Today’s insurance payment systems are incredibly complex. A University of California, San Francisco study found that, by switching to a single payer system like Canada’s, the U.S. could save $161 billion every year on paperwork alone—as Holly Dressel pointed out in this YES! Magazine article about Canada’s system, “these billions of dollars are not abstract amounts deducted from government budgets; they come directly out of the pockets of people who are sick.”
• In these days of picketing CEOs’ houses, let’s not forget the price of profit when health is a purely private industry. CEOs in the insurance industry make their millions, too, and pharmaceutical companies keep a full 17 percent of what we pay for medicine as profit (compared to a 3 percent profit margin for other businesses). Another 30 percent goes toward marketing and administration, leaving research and development only a 12% slice (see these and more thought-provoking numbers here). In a public system, that money could be redirected to, well, health care.
• And finally, with costs spiraling out of control (health care spending is expected to be 20 percent of GDP by 2016—compared to 9.7 percent in Canada), things will only get worse without a robust public option to offer what Jacob Hacker called the three Bs: “We need a national public plan that is available on similar terms in all parts of the nation as a backup. This plan has to have the ability to improve the quality and efficiency of care to act as a benchmark for private insurance. And it has to be able to challenge provider consolidation that has driven up prices to serve as a cost-control backstop” (emphasis added).

A public plan gets the support of 76 percent of Americans and it’s good for the economy? The only argument left against the public option appears to be that it would be too popular – that Americans would vote with their feet and choose the public option when offered a choice.

Political cover for opposing the public option is getting harder and harder to find.

Correction: The original version of this piece said that the Small Business Majority supported the 'public option.' In fact, the SMB favors a reformed system "based on shared responsibility among individuals, business, government and the healthcare industry," which would include tax credits for small businesses and a sliding-scale pay-or-play system.

The question Leonard asks is, “Is cap-and-trade good for the planet, or is it bad?” This is an extremely timely and important question, given that the Senate is currently considering a House-passed cap-and-trade bill, and that the stakes include trillions of dollars, not to mention the fate of the planet.

Leonard gives a sophisticated—and in my view, correct—answer to this question. Whether cap-and-trade is good or bad depends on how it’s structured.

She starts by separating the two parts of the policy, the ‘cap’ and the ‘trade.’ The cap sets descending limits on actual emissions; the trading (if done wrong) allows those limits to be exceeded. The cap, Leonard says, “is great.” It’s the trading that worries her.

And with good reason. There are two sorts of securities that could be traded under the pending legislation: emission permits (sometimes called allowances) and carbon offsets. The two are often confused but are very different in their implications.

Emission permits—rights to pollute within the U.S.—would be issued by the government. Absent carbon offsets, every emitter would need to own a permit in order to emit a ton of carbon. The quantity of permits would decline from year to year, thereby reducing total pollution. Polluters could trade the declining number of permits among themselves without increasing total pollution. So far so good.

But here’s where carbon offsets come in. Carbon offsets are privately issued securities whose quantity is intended to increase from year to year. Their purpose is to let large polluters continue polluting by buying cheaper pollution abatement somewhere else. For example, a utility in the U.S. could pay a landowner in Indonesia not to cut down carbon-absorbing trees; the utility could then burn coal without an emission permit. So much for the domestic emissions cap.

Whether the distant abaters permanently change their behaviors in ways they wouldn’t have without offsets is almost always hard to know and often dubious. Even when offset payees do change their behavior (for example, by not cutting trees), there’s no guarantee that actual emission reductions occur (other trees might be harvested instead).

Leonard demonstrates all this (and more) using simple and effective graphics. She concludes that cap-and-trade with offsets would not only fail to halt climate change, it would distract us from other approaches that could.

Leonard’s cap-and-trade-friendly critics (see, for example, David Roberts and Eric de Place) fault her for rhetorical overshoots and oversimplification (hey, this stuff is complicated, and Leonard is trying to simplify). But their core argument is that Leonard is politically naïve. “Cap-and-trade isn’t the problem; the power of the fossil fuel lobby is,” Roberts writes. In other words, cap-and-trade is the best we’re going to get, so shut up and genuflect. Get over the notion that “if cap-and-trade is destroyed, a herd of ponies will thunder in to replace it. There are no ponies.”

Here’s my two cents. I think Leonard’s critics are wrong, both morally and politically. Morally, I don’t believe activists should prematurely yield to power. Yes, defenders of the status quo, almost by definition, have more power than those who seek change. The job of those who seek change is to speak truth to those who wield power. In the end, the politicians will cut deals, but that’s their job, not ours.

The truth that must be spoken here is that the United States is way behind the curve in responding to climate change. We need to catch up, not fall further behind. The House-passed cap-and-trade bill—though its backers purport otherwise—would lock in a loophole-ridden system that won’t do nearly enough to spur a clean energy transition. And if the world’s largest economy doesn’t act in a manner commensurate with the actual climate threat, why should anyone else?

That said, we do need to pass climate legislation in 2010, so politics can’t be ignored. Yet here, too, Leonard’s critics are mistaken. The way to get the strongest possible climate bill through Congress isn’t to accept a defective House bill and add more defects in the Senate, as the cap-and-trade crowd claims. Rather, it’s to support a simple and effective alternative that has broad political appeal.

Fortunately, though there aren’t a herd of such alternatives, there is at least one: the CLEAR Act recently introduced by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). The Cantwell-Collins bill is essentially a carbon cap without offsets or giveaways. Its political appeal lies in the fact that it would auction (rather than give to companies for free) all emission permits, and then return 75% of the auction revenue to all Americans via equal monthly dividends, thereby shielding middle class families from rising carbon prices. On top of that, it would use the remaining 25% of auction revenue for transition assistance and public investments aimed at speeding America’s conversion to clean energy. It would also use some of the revenue to purchase emission abatements abroad—abatements that would add to, not subtract from, emission reductions here at home.

Cantwell-Collins isn’t flawless, but it has far fewer flaws than cap-and-trade with offsets, giveaways, and tons of favors for fossil fuels. What’s more, if strongly supported, it could pass. The real question isn’t why Annie Leonard questions cap-and-trade; it’s why all environmentalists don’t support Cantwell-Collins.

Peter Barnes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Peter is a writer, senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, and former president of Working Assets Long Distance.

Interested? Claim Your Piece of the Sky—It's Going Fast: There's a right way and a wrong way to do "cap and trade." You'll feel the difference in the air—and in your wallet.

How can we support the right kind of aid, the kind that builds local self-resilience, strengthens the local economy, and fosters local leadership?

Here are some of the groups that have a track record of offering the right kind of support:

Partners in Health. Paul Farmer, founder, has been offering medical care to the poor in Haiti since 1983. The PIH team has sent an urgent request for help. 

Oxfam's Latin America emergency response team is headquartered in Haiti, so they are well positioned to respond quickly. And they have a strong track record of supporting local rebuilding rather than funneling money to outside contractors.

Grassroots International has set up an emergency fund to assist their Haitian partners—local organizations that have been working for years for a sustainable future for Haiti.

Action Aid, which is working around the world to end poverty, works in Haiti and is looking for help for both short term response and long-term rebuilding.

Doctors Without Borders, which already had medical teams in Haiti, has begun treating earthquake victims. According to a staff member, most medical facilities in Port-au-Prince are not functioning. 

Any of these groups will use your donations effectively. Please spread the word. Comments are welcome on these and other opportunities to help.

This piece was written by Sarah van Gelder for YES! Magazine, a national media organization that combines powerful ideas and practical action towards a more just and sustainable world.

Little wonder. Global warming could be one of the toughest issues the world has ever faced, less because of the technical challenges than the politics. That's why the growing climate movement that has assembled alongside the official delegations in Copenhagen is so important to watch—its success could determine if world leaders feel enough heat to take action.

What makes the politics of this moment so challenging? Unlike other critical issues, combating climate change requires that we take action based on science, before we see much damage. If we wait until the effects of long-term pollution are fully felt, climate scientists tell us, we will have passed critical thresholds that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to turn down the global thermostat. Already, we can see the beginnings of the effects of greenhouse gas pollution, but all the models tells us that these will accelerate with more flooding, rising seas, crop failures, food shortages and drought conditions like those of the dust bowl era.

Although many of these changes are happening faster than expected, it's not too late. Climate scientists say we can yet avert the direst consequences if we halt the increase in pollution by 2015, then bring it down sharply. That means taking action now.

Yet, politicians worldwide have short-term reasons to pass this hot-potato issue off to future generations. After all, "cheap" coal-fired electricity concentrates high profits in the hands of a few companies—who hire high-powered lobbyists and make big campaign contribution – while the costs of climate damage is distributed to all the rest of us.

And dealing with the crisis requires massive investments in a transition to clean energy. While such investments will benefit economies in the long run, in the short term they will cost taxpayers money. And entrenched, powerful interests—from the oil and gas industry to mega-banks and agribusiness—use their money and connections to make sure they're at the front of the line for government handouts and bailouts. Some are even funding the think tanks and AstroTurf front groups that foster confusion and doubt about climate science.

In poorer countries, citizens demand the right to move out of poverty. If the wealthier countries that have grown rich from years of polluting use of fossil fuels won't step up, they won't allow their governments to make tough sacrifices either.

Although every community, every nation and every family stands to lose without action on global warming, the political leaders gathered in Copenhagen to negotiate a climate treaty haven't felt heat from their own citizens—at least not yet.

The good news is that around the world there are climate heroes, those doing what they can—putting up solar panels, standing in the way of tar sands development, promoting green jobs, cutting their own household carbon footprints and promoting wind power instead of mountaintop removal. And they are applying pressure for broader action.

Young people, for instance, are mobilizing themselves into a powerful force for change, calling themselves a "survival" movement. Don't underestimate these youths. Their energy and hard work helped elect our country's first African-American president.

But it isn't only the youth who are stepping up. People in all sectors of society are coming to see that action is needed. Four thousand citizens in 38 countries around the world gathered recently to consider in depth all sides of the climate issue and what should be done about it. At the end, nine out of ten urged urgent action out of the Copenhagen talks.

Elected officials can't get the job done unless they feel the heat at home. That puts a special responsibility on Americans to see through the spin, inform ourselves, and take action. The world is waiting for leadership from the United States, the country with one of the highest rates of greenhouse gas pollution. The future of our planet may hinge on whether "we the sovereign people" of the United States insist that our leaders step up to this global threat and partner with the rest of the world to arrive at an agreement that keeps the disruption of our climate within safe limits.

Mahany, now an artist and stonemason living in Michigan, says he fasted for twenty-nine days in 1970 in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Below is the letter he sent to President Obama:

Dear Mr. President,

In May of 1970 I spent 29 days in Lafayette Square fasting for Peace in Viet Nam. I now feel that [it] is time to act once again. Accordingly, as of 0600 Hours, Nov 11, Veterans Day 2009, I have taken my last material sustenance other than water until specific action is taken by your Administration and our Military to stem the tragic and ever-increasing rise in the incidence of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which is rapidly approaching epidemic proportions among our Fighting Men and Women.

I served in Viet Nam and I also lost a brother-in law to suicide caused by PTSD. He had two young sons. I have seen firsthand what this can do to a family.

In taking my action, I hope to elicit for you, from the peace loving people of this nation, moral support sufficient to spiritually bolster you as you make your decision concerning our military presence in Afghanistan.

Mr. President, please end this needless, incessant warmaking. We have long ago surpassed humanely reasonable demand exacted upon the fruit of our middle class as well as wrought excessive death and destruction on unwitting civilians in foreign lands. Let us now tone
down the hatred and stop the violence that has engulfed our society.

I beg you in the words of Abraham Lincoln; please do not yield to the "peculiar and powerful interests.... With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,...let us strive on to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.... The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart ... will yet swell the chorus ... when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Sir, I pray you find the strength to make the honorable choice and the courage to implement it.

Withdraw our military men and women from the Middle East now. Take them away from the ordeal of continually dealing with the relentless and senseless mortality which surrounds them. Deal with the cause, not just the effect.

Again, I am resolved to partake of no food until some concrete positive action on your part has come to pass. During this time I shall, if allowed, keep myself available to the public in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

Respectfully,

Thomas E. Mahany

Van Jones was the keynote speaker at the Netroots Nation Conference in Las Vegas, sharing ways to "put Americans back to work and pull America back together."

YES! Magazine's audience development director, Rod Arakaki, was in the audience and described the speech as, "fantastic—hopeful, sobering, and funny."

Van Jones is a former contributing editor to YES! Magazine and the founder of Green for All, a national organization working to build a green economy and pull people out of poverty.

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The Center for Biological Diversity and 350.org today petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to set national limits for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution under the Clean Air Act. The petition seeks to have greenhouse gases designated as “criteria” air pollutants and atmospheric CO2 capped at 350 parts per million (ppm), the level leading scientists say is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

“It’s time to use our strongest existing tool for reducing greenhouse gas pollution—the Clean Air Act. The Act’s provisions should cap carbon pollution at no more than 350 parts per million,” said Kassie Siegel, an author of the petition and director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “For four decades, this law has protected the air we breathe—and it’s done that through a proven, successful system of pollution control that saves lives and creates economic benefits vastly exceeding its costs.”

Last week, in advance of the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen, the Obama administration proposed emissions reduction targets of just 3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, far below the cuts of approximately 45 percent necessary to get back to 350 ppm. The current atmospheric CO2 level is approximately 385 ppm.

The administration argues that its hands are tied by the weak cap-and-trade bills passed by the House of Representatives and under consideration by the Senate. Today’s Clean Air Act petition, however, demonstrates that the Obama administration already possesses the legal tools to achieve deep and rapid greenhouse emissions reductions from major polluters consistent with what science demands.

The U.N.'s top climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endorsed reducing carbon in our atmosphere to no more than 350 ppm. NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen has long advocated the need to reach 350.

“The science, unfortunately, is all too clear—350 ppm is the most CO2 we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet ‘similar to the one on which civilization developed,’" said Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. Around the world people have rallied around that number, in what CNN called 'the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history;' 92 national governments have endorsed it as a target. Now it's time for the nation that invented environmentalism to use its most progressive set of laws in the same effort."

While the Obama administration is moving forward to reduce greenhouse pollution from automobiles and smokestacks under the Clean Air Act, two laudable and critically important steps, the administration to date has failed to implement other important and legally required provisions of the Act.

Today’s petition seeks a national pollution cap for CO2 and other greenhouse pollutants through a central provision of the Clean Air Act requiring EPA to designate “criteria” air pollutants, set national pollution limits for these pollutants to protect the public health and welfare, and then assist the states in carrying out plans to reduce emissions from major sources to attain or maintain the national standards.

To date, EPA has designated six criteria pollutants: particle pollution (PM), ground-level ozone (O3), carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur oxides (SOx), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and lead. The petition seeks the addition of seven greenhouse gases to the list, including CO2 with a cap of no more than 350 ppm, as well as designation and caps for methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O); hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs); perfluorocarbons (PFCs); sulfur hexafluoride (SF6); and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3).

350 Day of Action :: Photo Essay
In countries around the world, people took a stand for what Bill McKibben calls "the most important number in the world."

Setting science-based national pollution caps for these greenhouse gases would mark a critical step in the fight against global warming and add more tools to the Clean Air Act programs the Obama administration is beginning to implement. A national pollution cap for greenhouse gases would also activate and coordinate the efforts of all 50 states, all of which currently implement plans for the reduction of the existing criteria air pollutants, and 38 of which are already drafting or implementing climate action plans.

“The Clean Air Act is a bipartisan bill signed by a Republican president. Leading scientists at NASA and around the world say we need to get to 350 ppm. This petition simply asks EPA to do its job as science, the law, and common sense require,” said McKibben.

“Rather than perpetually wait for flawed and inadequate new climate legislation before taking meaningful action, the Obama administration can and must use the existing authorities under the Clean Air Act to set a target of 350 parts per million to protect the climate and our future,” said Siegel.

The climate bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as legislation currently pending in the Senate, would eliminate EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act to designate greenhouse gases as criteria air pollutants and to set a cap on such emissions as requested in today’s petition.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 240,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

350.org organized the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history on October 24, 2009 when people in 181 countries at more than 5,200 events gathered to call for action on the climate crisis.

Click here to read the petition.

In the verdant mountains of Niyamgiri, India, a movement led by the Dongria Kondh people is gathering speed. The tribe, whose members have called Niyamgiri’s mountains their home and gods for thousands of years, has been fighting an ongoing battle for the right to remain on their ancestral lands, protect their sacred home, and forge their own future.

Abundant deposits of bauxite lie beneath the mountains where the Dongria live, and London-based mining company Vedanta Resources plans to build an enormous mine in the heart of their land. 

The Dongria Kondh, who number just over 8,000, fear that this would mean the destruction of the forests and rivers on which they depend—and the end of life as they know it. “We are mountain people,” explained Rajendra Vadaka, a member of the tribe. “If we go somewhere else, we will die.”

Vedanta’s efforts to placate the Dongria with offers of money and development projects have not weakened the tribe’s spirit of resistance. They have seen, first-hand, the impact of Vedanta’s nearby refinery on other Kondh groups who were displaced in its path. Some now live in fenced-in concrete homes without land to farm; they depend on hand-outs or back-breaking jobs with Vedanta to survive.

Nor have aggressive intimidation tactics silenced the tribe. This week, according to local reports, two leaders of the Dongria’s resistance were abducted at gunpoint and have not been in communication with the tribe since. Unidentified people have blocked roads to prevent journalists from speaking to the Dongria, and mystery surrounds the death of a local activist in Niyamgiri last month.

The tribe has retaliated by using human roadblocks to bar Vedanta machinery from entering Niyamgiri. They also burned a Vedanta jeep when it was driven onto the mountain’s sacred plateau—the seat of the Dongria’s greatest god, Niyam Dongar.

Now, the Dongria Kondh are attracting support for their struggle from powerful sources far from India. Over the past three years, major Vedanta shareholders have been lining up to withdraw their investments from the company. Most recently, Dutch pensions giant PGGM withdrew investments worth $16 million. Earlier this year, the Church of England sold its shares, stating that Vedanta had failed to show “the level of respect for human rights and local communities that we expect.” In 2007, the Norwegian government divested its shares in Vedanta, advised by the country’s Council of Ethics that the investment posed an “unacceptable risk of complicity in current and future severe environmental damage and systematic human rights violations.” Scottish investment company Martin Currie followed in 2008.

Photos courtesy of Survival International.

Not long ago, the Dongria Kondh were little known beyond Niyamgiri. But supporters from Bianca Jagger, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Palin to Survival International and Amnesty have worked to share their story with the world. Even members of James Cameron’s Na’vi tribe showed up in London two weeks ago to express their solidarity with the Dongria Kondh during a protest outside Vedanta’s annual meeting.

Pressure is also coming from within the Indian establishment. An investigation published by the Indian government in March concluded that the mine “may lead to the destruction of the Dongria Kondh [as a people]” and Vedanta is currently undergoing investigation from India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Odisha state government.

Around the world, people have been moved by the resistance of this small tribe in the face of Vedanta’s bulldozers. But India’s Supreme Court has approved the project in principle, and work on the mine could begin in a few months. The movement is building momentum and Vedanta is feeling its force—but still more international pressure must be brought to bear on the company if the Dongria Kondh are to survive.

Tess Thackara wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Tess is the U.S. coordinator of Survival International.

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Speaking from the grass-covered rooftop of a parking garage, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp, announced that the university would stop using coal by the end of the decade. Universities, Thorp said in his May 4 address, “must lead the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy.”

North Carolina schools are, in fact, leading the way. Only eight miles down the road, Duke University reported in 2009 that it had reduced its coal consumption by 70 percent.

As part of the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal Campaign,” UNC Chapel Hill committed itself to carry out this plan and switch to other alternative energy sources.

Coal, one of the dirtiest energy sources, powers 50 percent of electricity generation in the U.S. Coal is also responsible for nearly 20 percent of all global greenhouse gases [1].

Recognizing the dangers of continued reliance on coal, the UNC chancellor organized an energy task force to research and propose energy alternatives. It includes students, faculty, community members, and the state director of the Sierra Club. Tim Toben, task force chairman, who spoke during the address, described the nine month process during which the group determined that 60 percent of campus emissions come from the nearby coal-fired cogeneration plant. Although Carolina’s cogeneration plant is one of the cleanest burning in the country, it still burns coal and “unless you set a deadline for ending coal usage, you’re not going to get to it,” Toben remarked.

Despite the plant's efficiency, a new alternative energy source, biomass, will be introduced into the boilers. Biomass consists of plant material or animal waste. There are two main sources, either growing plants specifically for energy use or plant waste. Biomass resources burn cleaner than coal, but raising corn or fast-growing forests still involves intensive agriculture.

The university will take its first steps beginning later this spring, adding dried wood pellets to the coal and gradually increasing the amount of woody biomass until coal is completely phased out. No later than 2015, and perhaps as early as 2012 the university plans to replace 20 percent of its coal with biomass [2].

Still to be determined is where the university will get its biomass. One difficulty with biomass is the transportation. Shipping raw biomass typically is not cost-effective over 50 miles [3]. Acknowledging both supply difficulties and the question of whether biomass will work in the existing boilers, Thorp said, “we can achieve our goal in ten years, by using the same kind of creativity and ingenuity that our great energy services staff has used in the past.”

Student representatives of UNC's "Beyond Coal Campaign" pose during Earth Action Day on April 10, 2010. Actions taken by students to rid the school of its coal use encouraged the university to pursue alternative energy sources.

Photo by E.M. Fields

The university is already receiving high marks for its efforts to become more sustainable. According to the College Sustainability Report Card, a service that scores colleges nationwide in categories such as green building, transportation, food and recycling, and endowment transparency, UNC Chapel Hill received an overall grade of A-.  Those universities receiving an A- or better earn the highest award of “College Sustainability Leader” given by the report card. Only 25 other institutions are recipients of the award.

Student activism on campus is largely responsible for both the high grade and recent efforts conducted by the university. Concerned students felt the university was not doing enough to achieve its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050 and lobbied for the administration to do more.

The commitment of the university to reduce its coal use has attracted national attention, including the support of James Hansen, climate change expert at NASA. 

Hansen sent a message to be read at the announcement of the 2020 goal, which promoted UNC Chapel Hill as “a model for how students and a university can work together with a civil constructive approach to ending our national addiction to coal.” Citing UNC’s “rational approach to problem solving,” Hansen said this model could be used to “somehow overcome the uncivil discourse that has infected current national politics.”

Kaitlin Bailey wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Kaitlin is an online editorial intern at YES!

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• Want to know how your school ranks? Try the College Sustainability Report Card.

SOURCES:

1. http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/coalfacts.cfm

2. http://uncnews.unc.edu/content/view/3603/1/

3. http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/technology_and_impacts/energy_technologies/how-biomass-energy-works.html

In 1969, as I tried to grasp the root causes of hunger, I struggled to absorb the shocking picture my simple research was uncovering: While world food experts cried “scarcity,” in truth we bright humans were—and still are—creating hunger out of plenty. We’d turned our food system into a scarcity-creating machine, and were undermining the Earth’s food-producing potential, too.

I’ll make a one-page handout, I thought. I’ll pin it up here and there and we’ll all catch on, won’t we? For no one would do such a crazy thing, if they only knew.

My handout became a book, Diet for a Small Planet, which showed how our newly emerging diet—based on grain-fed meat produced with chemical inputs—reflects neither our bodies’ needs, nor what the Earth can sustain.

That was then.

Today, hunger’s toll breaks all records, and we’re now facing another huge downside to our reductive, extractive approach to farming: a warming climate. My daughter, Anna Lappé, has just released Diet for a Hot Planet, which continues the conversation I helped to start. She shows how much our global food system now drives the climate crisis—even more than transportation.

I’m beyond proud. It’s a fabulous book (moms have a right to say what we think), shocking and empowering at once. And in June the U.N. Environment Programme released a report backing up her message, calling out industrial agriculture, particularly large-scale livestock production, as among the world’s most energy-intensive and environmentally destructive industries. Among the UNEP’s recommendations? We individuals adopt plant-centered diets to lower our own carbon “foodprints.”

The report also highlights how agriculture itself can be part of the solution: Ecological farming actually binds carbon in the soil, and its abundant crop varieties can boost biodiversity. So it’s not agriculture per se, but a certain kind of agriculture, that threatens our planet (and our health).

I could never have imagined, writing my little handout 40 years ago, that today I’d be living in a world in which earth-friendly, hunger-ending farming is proving its potential from Ethiopia to Brazil to India to the U.S.—but where citizens still go along with policies spreading hunger and the destructive, corporate-controlled industrial farming that helps to cause it.

Clearly, we have to dig much deeper.

So, while I celebrate the UNEP’s call-to-diet-action, I wish the report had framed the problem more precisely. It names population and economic growth, which increase consumption of animal products, as culprits. Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, is quoted in press coverage saying, "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products.”

I wish the UNEP had emphasized that population growth and our kind of economic growth (producing vast waste) are themselves symptoms of deeper problems.

Almost all population growth in the next 30 years is predicted to be in poor countries, in large measure reflecting the lack of power many women have over their fertility and the dearth of economic opportunities available to them.

And the destructive planet-heating food production and distribution we now experience are themselves consequences of a particular kind of growth—centralizing control of farmland, processing and distribution by national elites and global mega-corporations; power that both reflects and strengthens their political influence. The deepening, gross inequities that result do in fact spur consumption of animal food by the better off—animal products produced using environmentally egregious practices.

But might the UNEP’s frame emphasizing “growth” itself as the problem further distract us from the root problem, deepening worldwide power inequities?

Everybody Eats: How a Community Food System Works

If, by contrast, we were as societies redressing power inequities and reclaiming our democracy from private interests, and if our world’s poor majorities were gaining access to land and agroecological knowledge, enabling more local food distribution, too, then it’s possible we’d see the meat question differently. We’d see that those without access to animal food could produce and consume modest increases, integrating livestock into healthy farming—and reducing our collective climate impacts.

Of course, as author of Diet for a Small Planet, I also know that for the world’s minority who now consume much more protein than our bodies can even use, eating less animal food is great for our health and useful in sending countless messages through the market for saner use of resources.

But that’s a very different proposition than suggesting that overconsumption causes the crisis, and that less is the primary cure.

So I applaud all who are now embracing planet-friendly diets. Hurrah for us! But let such a diet serve as a daily reminder—a string around our fingers that we notice at least three times a day, reminding us of the root of our ecological and hunger crisis: the concentration of corporate power. From there, all that good plant food in our bellies can not only enhance our health, but also bulk up our courage to name this deeper challenge and take it on.

Frances Moore Lappé wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit news organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Frances is the author of many books including Diet for a Small Planet and Getting a Grip 2. She is co-founder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute, and is a YES! contributing editor.

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In recognition of progress toward creating a safer world, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists turned back its famed Doomsday Clock by one minute. The clock now is set at 6 minutes to midnight.

That’s still dangerously close to midnight, the group’s longstanding image for the end of civilization—either through nuclear war or, more recently, a climate catastrophe so great as to put large populations at risk. The scientists say the new time reflects the continued urgency of the threats as well as signs that the world may be reaching a turning point in its efforts to come together to solve them.

The group’s leadership pointed to cooperation by major powers on nuclear arms reduction as well as international pledges to limit greenhouse gas emissions. “These unprecedented steps are signs of a growing political will to tackle the two gravest threats to civilization—the terror of nuclear weapons and runaway climate change,” the board of the Bulletin said.

In 1951, when the U.S. conducted this atomic test at the Nevada Test Site, the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had recently begun and the Doomsday Clock was set at three minutes to midnight.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Bulletin’s modest move seemed appropriate to nuclear expert and disarmament advocate Peter Kuznick, an associate professor at American University and director of the university’s Nuclear Studies Institute. Kuznick saw the decision as similar to Obama's receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, which “was more a sign of optimism and potential” than of concrete progress.

In their statement, the scientists also framed the change as representing an "opportunity" for progress, calling for "citizens everywhere to raise their voices and compel public action for a safer world now and for future generations."

The group also called on world leaders to take action, noting that "a key to the new era of cooperation is a change in the U.S. government's orientation toward international affairs brought about in part by the election of Obama."

Kuznick agreed that Obama has made significant steps, including his speech in Prague envisioning an end to nuclear weapons, cooperation with Russia on continuing to reduce nuclear arms, and active leadership on nuclear non-proliferation discussions. But, pointing to the recent support of former Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz for abolishing nuclear weapons, Kuznick called Obama’s Prague speech “positive but not exactly revolutionary.”

He also pointed out that not all of Obama's actions have been positive—for example, discussions of maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons until everyone else has abolished their stockpiles, or the continued high state of alert for nuclear weapons. Similarly, the Bulletin’s announcement listed a host of steps necessary to keep progress moving, including actions by the U.S. and other major powers to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, to complete arms reduction talks, and to maintain tighter controls on their nuclear weapons.

No Nuclear Weapons
Sarah van Gelder interviews former Secretary of State George Shultz.

Lawrence Krauss, co-chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors and a professor at Arizona State University, noted that many people wrongly believe the United States has pledged not to make first use of nuclear weapons. Moreover, neither the U.S. nor the eight other nuclear powers have ever ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, a member of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, said part of the credit for the one minute gain (the smallest in the clock’s history) goes to citizens of countries around the world who reject nuclear weapons.

For citizens and activists, making use of the positive potential the Bulletin sees will mean talking, writing, learning about nuclear issues, and marching, said Kuznick. To turn potential into progress, “We have to use everything."

Joe Copeland wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Joe is an associate editor for the Seattle-based Crosscut.com. Last summer, he was a visiting researcher at Hiroshima Peace Institute on a Fulbright grant.