Friday, September 23, 2011

Not Just Climate Change: 3 Other Challenges

I love how the Wildlife Conservation Society goes beyond the glaring challenge of climate change to look at three other challenges to the trio of environment, animals, and humans. According to them, WCS:
focus[es] on four global challenges: Emerging wildlife diseases, climate change, the increasing harvest of natural resources by local communities, and the expansion of extractive industries. As part of our mission to save wildlife and wild places, we support local human interests by fostering sustainable livelihoods—a balance that is essential to the success of long-term conservation.
For example, the WCS fosters an organic "conservation cotton" clothing initiative in Zambia in those very regions with the highest biodiversity.
Read more here

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Good News! Heal Main Street, Tax Wall Street


You know, it's all good news these days. California nurses recently got together on a SF street and gave out free food to the hungry--whom they, as nurses, have been seeing a lot more of these days. More people are flooding into hospitals as basic government services are cut. As nurses, they're trained to heal people. So, they say, shouldn't we be getting in on healing the good 'ol US of A?

Here's their plan: pass a Financial Transaction Tax. The tax will help finance public services to prevent the cutting of the safety net that keeps the moderately-okay folks from slipping out to become the poor folks.

The National Nurses Union proposes a “Main Street Contract for the American People” that would raise $350 billion dollars by charging “a tiny tax on Wall Street trading of 0.5% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency bets and derivatives.”

I know, you're thinking, how could this be good news, this tax hasn't been passed yet!
Yet: We are transformed in acts of the imagination. Right now, the imagination of nurses across the United States has me reeling...for the better. Thanks, nurses, for beginning the healing.

Read more here