What do you get if you cross an apple tree with a littleleaf linden? The Guerrilla Grafters—a renegade urban gardening group in San Francisco—hope the result is a metropolitan food forest. The volunteer activists splice branches from fruit trees onto the non–fruit bearing trees that line their city streets in an effort to grow cherries, Asian pears, and other fresh produce for local residents, free of charge.
In the wake of World War II, the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The document was intended to prevent the kind of atrocities the world had just witnessed from reoccurring in the future.
More than 60 years later, as the Utne Reader’s January-February 2012 human rights package illustrates (“Tortured,” “The CIA in Somalia,” “Jihad Against Islam”), the world continues to struggle to meet the principles put forward in the text.
Several groups continue to fight for the ideals that were set forth, however. And they need your help. Get acquainted with some of them …
Tim DeChristopher knew exactly what he was doing when he slipped into a federal auction in Utah in 2008 and bid $1.8 million on oil and gas drilling leases that he didn’t have the money to pay for: He was, in Western parlance, risking his own hide in order to take a stand against fossil fuels and environmental destruction. DeChristopher ended up being sentenced to two years in prison for his brave, bold act, and in the process he became a folk hero to many fellow environmentalists.
Tim DeChristopher was chosen as an Utne Reader visionary in 2011. Each year Utne Reader puts forward its selection of world visionaries—people who don’t just concoct great ideas but also act on them.
It’s been an uplifting several days for anyone who’s opposed to the massive Keystone XL oil pipeline, which had seemed to be rapidly steamrolling toward presidential approval.
First, on Sunday, an impressively large crowd of 10,000 to 12,000 protesters showed up to encircle the White House and pressure President Obama to give the pipeline a thumbs down. On the same day, the Los Angeles Times reported that the administration may now put off the Keystone XL decision until after the election. On Monday, Think Progress reported that the State Department’s office of the Inspector General would conduct a review the pipeline approval process, which has been dogged by accusations of inadequate environmental review and potential conflicts of interest.
All in all, it’s a remarkable turnaround of Keystone XL’s prospects, offering some hope—remember that word?—to environmentally conscious Americans who might have started to think that green activism is no more effective than video-game playing in changing the world.
There may be more than a little political calculus in Obama’s move to delay a pipeline decision until after the election.
This is a story about one of the newest forms of communication—social media—and one of the oldest—poetry—and how the two joined forces for social change.
On April 20, 2010, nine students chained themselves to the Arizona state capitol building to protest Arizona’s new anti-immigrant legislation, SB 1070. Their slogan: “We are chained to the capitol just like our community is chained by this legislation.” While others chanted and gave speeches, the nine students sat silently and with dignity as police officers cut the chains and arrested them. Of course their protest was posted on YouTube, and when a friend sent the link to Francisco X. Alarcón, a prize-winning poet and professor at the University of California–Davis, Alarcón responded as poets have for millennia when they witness acts of courage in the face of oppression: He wrote a poem.
Alarcón posted “For the Capitol Nine” to his Facebook page, addressing the young people directly: “you … / chain yourselves / to the doors / of the State Capitol / so that terror / will not leak out / to our streets… / your courage / can’t be taken / away from us / and put in jail / you are nine / young warriors / like nine sky stars.”
So many “friends” and “friends of friends” responded to the poem that Alarcón decided to create a Facebook group and invite other poets to post poems on the subject.
The word went out over Facebook and Twitter and poet to poet, so that by August 2011 “Poets Responding to SB 1070” included more than 1,200 poems by prominent and emerging poets from all over the country and around the world. Eight volunteer moderators now manage the site, keeping up with submissions and choosing poems for a weekly feature on La Bloga, the Latino literary blog. They also are preparing a hard-copy anthology.
Keep reading … (Image by Tim Gough)
These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage—that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive—the police occupation of the Wall Street area.
Tim DeChristopher is the only person to have been named an Utne Reader visionary while in prison: He’s serving a two-year sentence for disrupting a federal oil and gas lease auction in Utah in an act of environmental protest.
One reason we nominated DeChristopher as a visionary is because he became a hugely inspirational figure to other environmentalists as he wrote and spoke about his principled act of civil disobedience right up until he was led to his cell. But make no mistake: He is in prison mainly because he dared to continue speaking out.
— Tom Engelhardt on Occupy Wall Street. Keep reading …
Utne Reader associate editor Margret Aldrich recaps the Minneapolis SlutWalk, which happened over this past Saturday. She writes: “Most powerful were the signs carried by the survivors of sexual violence—some just kids when they were assaulted—and the fierce, unified support of their fellow walkers.”
If you’ve ever supported an animal welfare or environmental organization, you too may be a suspected terrorist: That’s the chilling take-away from Green Is the New Red, a thoughtfully alarming examination of the U.S. government’s post-9/11 domestic terror probes, which have inordinately targeted progressive-leaning activist groups.
Not right, not left, but forward thinking, Utne Reader combs the alternative, independent, and digital press for thoughtful journalism, artful storytelling, and emerging ideas.
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