Events

High-tech solutions to climate chaos and the resulting famines are all the rage. But do they make any sense? Vertical "farming", algae and yeast production, globalized production and distribution chains all depend on high-tech management and endless energy supplies, not to mention distribution mechanisms that can withstand tornadoes and other weather disruption. In other words, more of what we already have that is proven not to work.

There are options, though they are dismissed by the proponents of disutoptian technology as simply "arcadian fantasies". Apparently only continuing on the road we currently travel is realistic, however awful the outcome. These options involve reducing our footprint on the world. Reducing energy use, eating seasonally, learning to grow food in smaller plots (from tiny urban balcony gardens or rooftops on up), reducing our dependence on globally supplied staple crops, and saving our farmland and water for food growing instead of housing/highways/golf courses.

But these options demand a paradigm shift towards keeping food, housing and water out of the profit economy. The resulting loss of profit for the few keeps the idea from being discussed at all. But we have to. Please read on, and please keep this discussion going.

What would it mean if housing were considered a human right? If taxes pay for infrastructure which facilitates our needs, shouldn’t shelter be one of those basic needs that our taxes provide for everyone? We pay for clean water, roads, hospitals, but we don’t include food and shelter, or heat for that matter. A universal basic income is often touted as the solution to lack of housing. It's an individualist solution however, doing nothing to address the commodification of basic needs. All it does is place the responsibility for acquiring basic needs back on the individual, while allowing profiteering on...

what's behind the rise, really? Is the war in Ukraine behind inflation in Canada? From Forbes business magazine – a conservative business voice, hardly given to criticism of the economic system: “(after 2019)...the average CEO to worker pay ratio was 324 to 1, up 23% from 2019, or nearly twice the rate of inflation. CEO earnings grew 18%, 4 times the rate of wage growth. S&P 500 profits rose by 17.6% in 2021. Profit margins crested at 15.5% in 2022, the most profitable year since 1950, while corporations issued more than $300 billion in stock buybacks to institutional shareholders like...

We'll be closed July 1, 2022. We will, as always, be taking time to think about Canada's history as a colonizer, a refuge, a country proud of its diversity yet intolerant in so many ways. Our willingness to face our history, be accountable and strive to do better is what makes us happy to live here. Our unwillingness to make real, grounded, paradigm-shifting change is what drives us crazy.  We are very thankful to be allowed to stay here in Secwepemculew, and we intend to uphold that trust by continuing to cherish this land and work to protect it.

We in the west seem to have been taken by surprise by Russia’s terrible invasion of the Ukraine - but we shouldn’t have been.  For one thing, we’ve been underserved by media who have been obsessed by Covid and who have elevated local acts of selfishness to news, to the exclusion of everything else happening in the world. For another, we have once again ignored history. In the short term, we’ve forgotten that Trump spent four years emotionally propping up Putin as a leader, while sending increasing military aid to Ukraine, in a transparent effort to create conflict. We have...