Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
The California Environmental Quality Act, protector of resources and communities through consideration of implications of proposed projects, is under attack. Representatives from industry and real estate development, and sometimes even Governor Jerry Brown, seek ways to weaken it, or to exempt their pet projects. While the law is far from perfect, it remains the gold standard of environmental protection in the US.
Sound, video, and fury presented on the passing of Richard Lyons, also known as Pastor Dick, co-founder of culture-jamming avant garde music collective Negativland, the third member to die in the last year.
The indigenous Rama people of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast speak out in a new documentary against an inter-oceanic canal which threatens their ancestral land, language, and traditional culture.
Ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, one of the most important plant explorers of the 20th century, served as a key inspiration in a recent film called “Embrace of the Serpent.” In December 1941, Schultes entered the Amazon to study how indigenous peoples used plants for medicinal, ritual, and practical purposes. After nearly a decade of fieldwork, he made significant discoveries about the sacred hallucinogen ayahuasca. In total, Schultes would collect more than 24,000 species of plants including some 300 species new to Western science.
On May 14, 2016 Californians will convene in Downtown L.A. for a mass action to stop oil and gas drilling in our neighborhoods. Los Angeles is home to the nation’s largest urban oil field in the United States—ground zero of California’s climate fight.