Western Lifestyles Plundering Tropics at Record Rate, WWF Report Shows

Living Planet report shows planet's resources are being used at 1.5 times the rate nature can replace them

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Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?

Freshwater is fundamental for maintaining human health, agricultural production, economic activity, and critical ecosystem functions. But as populations and economies grow, new constraints on water resources are appearing, raising questions about ultimate limits to water availability. Such resource questions are not new. The specter of "peak oil" -- a peaking and then decline in oil production -- has long been predicted and debated. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [1] I wrote with a colleague, Meena Palaniappan, offers three concepts of "peak water:" peak renewable water, peak nonrenewable water, and peak ecological water. And it looks like the U.S. has passed all three points.

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George Monbiot: It Goes Against Our Nature, but the Left Has to Start Asserting Its Own Values

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare [1], and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

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Robert Scheer: Invasion of the Robot Home Snatchers

The Titanic that is the U.S. housing market has just sprung its biggest leak, and even some of the largest banks responsible for this mess, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are now imposing a temporary moratorium on foreclosures. They have done so very reluctantly and only after courts throughout the nation, and the attorneys general of 40 states, questioned the legality of a securitized system of homeownership that has impoverished tens of millions.

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Are We Giving Our Soldiers Drugs That May Make Them Kill Themselves?

In 2009 there were 160 active duty suicides, 239 suicides within the total Army including the Reserves, 146 active duty deaths from drug overdoses and high risk behavior and 1,713 suicide attempts. In addition to suicide, other out-of-character behavior like domestic violence is known to erupt from the drugs.

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Robert Jensen: Soils and Souls: The Promise of the Land

With the rain providing an intermittent backbeat on the barn roof throughout a Saturday in late September, the 2010 Prairie Festival began with three talks -- by poet/novelist Wendell Berry, economist Josh Farley, and biologist Sandra Steingraber -- that were insightful on their own, but even more intriguing as an intellectual mash-up. The three were telling the story of how sin brought us to this place, how we must redefine success if we are to atone, and how essential that change is for our own safety. I had come expecting those kinds of insights and analyses, but surprisingly I left the barn that day with one revelation burning in my brain: While evil lurks in many places, it is most concentrated in fossil fuels.

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Michael Hudson: Why the U.S. Has Launched a New Financial World War -- and How the Rest of the World Will Fight Back

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.

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Industry Front Group Gets Taxpayer Money to Convince You to Eat Pesticide-Laden Food

by Jill Richardson, AlterNet Posted on October 7, 2010 Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.

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When it comes to health knowledge, doctors are surprisingly ignorant

(NaturalNews) America is a nation of widespread health and nutritional illiteracy. And I'm not just talking about the knowledge gaps of health consumers, either. It's the doctors and health "experts" who have astonishing gaps in knowledge that should be considered basic health information in any first-world nation.

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Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. History

In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."

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