When students took to the streets in Rome last November to demonstrate against proposed budget cuts to the university system, they introduced something new to the vocabulary of protest. To defend themselves from police truncheons they carried improvised shields made of polystyrene, painted, on the front, with the names of classic works of literature and [...]
The Working Class and Occupy Wall Street
Union membership doesn’t increase much due to patient organizing work, as sociologist Dan Clawson explained in “The Next Upsurge : Labor and the New Social Movements”, published in 2003. Instead, it shoots up during upsurges of strike activity, and then levels off. According to Clawson, in the 1980s and ’90s, unions had slowly developed new tactics, [...]
New Novel Explores Life on a 19th Century Plantation in Puerto Rico
History aficionados will find “Conquistadora” a fascinating text with detailed views of a Puerto Rican sugar cane plantation in the mid-19th century. By Rafael Ocasio Conducive March/April 2012 Esmeralda Santiago was born in the working-class neighborhood of Villa Palmeras, in Santurce, in the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1948. In 1961, when she was barely a [...]
What Can a City Farm Accomplish?
It is a testimonial to the power and potential of the sustainable food systems movement to transform not just the lives of the Whole Foods set, but of a diverse group of people. by Abbe Futterman Conducive March/April 2012 Part coffee table book, part documentary account, “Growing a Garden City” by journalist Jeremy N. Smith is a [...]
Beyond Disposable: A Paradigm Shift in Consumer Living
All day, everyday, we do it without really thinking about it. Pull that coffee filter full of spent grounds out of the machine after your morning cuppa, and toss it into the kitchen trash. Grab a paper towel from the office pantry to serve as a napkin for your lunch break, wipe your mouth and [...]
August/September 2011
Conducive Magazine‘s new issue is on the topic of land and farming. We look at the power of possessing land and the power of entities with not enough land to posses it. Why You Should Care About Land Grabs The recent phenomenon of aggressive land takeovers, also known as land grabs, has resulted in [...]
Why You Should Care About Land Grabs
How Do You Grab Land? The recent phenomenon of aggressive land takeovers, also known as land grabs, has resulted in the taking of enormous portions of land throughout Africa. In 2009 alone, nearly 60 million hectares of land was purchased or leased throughout the continent for the production and export of food, cut flowers, and [...]
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Think Tank
New Book Argues that Environmental Degradation is Slow Violence
A memorial for the victims of the Bhopal disaster. photo: Luca Frediani/Creative Commons Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press 2011) explores the slow, steady, and often ignored violence of socio-environmental degradation around the globe, and the writer-activists trying to bring it to light. By Christine Shearer August/September 2011 Conducive [...]
Sustenance
Liberalizing the Economy May Crush the Culture of One Small Island
The flight from Seoul to Jeju Island is only 45 minutes, but in Korea this is as far from mainland Korea you can get geographically and mentally. Jeju is a volcanic island located half way between the Korean mainland and the western tip of Japan. It is an island set apart from the rest of [...]
Table of Contents
June/July 2011
Misinformation about food and climate change is everywhere. This edition of Conducive Magazine helps readers decipher how environmental myths became environmental “truths”. Why People are Living in Denial Kari Marie Norgaard helps us understand how and why societies fail to act on climate change in Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, [...]
Think Tank
Why People are Living in Denial
Kari Marie Norgaard helps us understand how and why societies fail to act on climate change in Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2011) By Christine Shearer Conducive June/July 2011 Don’t be fooled by the title of Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial – this is not a book about people [...]
Think Tank
How Scientists Became “Merchants of Doubt”
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway uncover the history of a small group of Cold War scientists and advisers who battled anything, including scientific research, that might threaten their vision of American free enterprise in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, [...]
Sustenance
The Revolution is in the Dirt
In the first article in this series on reducing our reliance on consumerism as a way of life, I provided environmental, social, and economic evidence for why it is important that we start to make changes in our everyday lives. In this, the second in the series, I focus on food production at home as [...]
Beneficial People
A Big Step for Science, a Huge Step for Argentina
Conducive Magazine occasionally features profiles of public thinkers, policy researchers, practitioners, academics, or community workers doing worthy, but possibly unpublicized work. A brain drain, where the best scientists leave their home countries, is a problem for many Latin American, African and Asian countries. Claudio Fernández returned to Argentina in 2006 with a clear goal in [...]
Table of Contents
April/May 2011
Living in a nation synonymous with excess, it is difficult to avoid the allure of mass consumption. While notions of consumerism certainly drive the global economy, people are beginning to realize that increased consumption often creates more problems than solutions. In this issue of Conducive Magazine, our writers explore the theme of consumerism and how [...]
Space Style Dialogues
What To Do With Your Old Clothes?
Some of us are tired of staring at that once used ensemble from that one wedding 10 years ago. Others have absolutely no idea what to do with that prom dress under the bed next to our fluffy house slippers. Well, now there’s a great way to get rid of a one-time outfit while helping those [...]
Space Style Dialogues
A Car-Free Life
For many of us, a completely car-free lifestyle seems like a near impossibility. However, for residents of one German town, getting around without an automobile is their current reality. Vauban is a new experimental, one square mile, upscale suburban district near the French and Swiss borders. By Joanne O’Donnell April/May 2011 Conducive It was completed [...]
Sustenance
To Soy or Not To Soy… That is the Question
It seems the more I read about food, the less inclined I am to be waving any sort of banner in anyone’s face about what we should or should not be eating. Why? As hinted at in a previous article, I am coming around to the notion that what we choose to put in our [...]
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