New York- Within a few hours of departing Vermont I found myself photographing in front of a hospital on Wyckoff Ave in Brooklyn. Here was a place of struggle. The drying elderly, the stutter-stepping parents, and the children that smelled of diesel fumes and hot asphalt had arrived. They came out, not to defend a politician, not to uplift an audience, but to recognize one another in common need. Wyckoff Medical Center is the hospital where the Empire State Building looms in hazy distance between which lay thousands of boiling acres of brick, concrete, and dirty steel cable...

Last night in South Burlington a presentation was given in support of placing the F35 killer jets at the Burlington airport. It was a public forum and hundreds of people turned out to speak. The first five speakers were a great promotion for secession. They consisted of representatives for Leahy, Sanders, Welch, Shumlin, and the Pope himself who overwhelmingly supported the noisy, polluting, life destroying profit making machines of Lockheed Martin. Never has a more focused group of corporate shills ever been presented to the Vermont public. At times during the speeches of these Lockheed Martin cheerleaders I could hear the star spangled banner playing in my head and it was all I could do not to burst out in song.

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The following blog entry is by Sarah at the Healthy Home Economist.  Thanks, Sarah!

The vaccine industry went home with its tail between its legs after suffering an enormous and...

Europe may soon be choking on that plat du jour of government a la Hollandaise with the side of chopped Greek salad. The whole world, in fact, has got something like a giant hairball stuck in its craw. The hairball is composed of filaments of lies wound over a core of supernatural indebtedness. The lies are promises that the debt will be paid back.

For two months the financial markets have gone sideways on a cushion of the European Central Bank's Long term Financing Operations and the hot air of austerity chatter. The illusion of remaining airborne may dissolve now with the Hollandaise denunciation of Franco-German team...

MONTPELIER- A rainy Tuesday morning was not enough to deter the huddled masses yearning to breathe free as more than 500 people marched on the state Capitol to collectively demand that legislators “Put People First.”

Organized by the Vermont Workers’ Center, a coalition of organizations such as Migrant Justice, 350.org, the Vermont...

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise. -Aldo Leopold

Rachel Carson’s first book was titled, The Sea Around Us. In Silent Spring, published in 1962, she proclaimed that humanity now lived in a “sea of...

Replicating post-WW II occupations is planned for Afghanistant. Sixty-seven years after war's end, US troops still occupy Germany, Japan and Korea. They're part of America's growing empire of bases.

Status of forces (SOFA) agreements establish the framework under which US forces operate abroad. The Department of Defense Technical Information Center calls them agreements "that defines the legal position of a 'visiting' military force deployed in the territory of a friendly state." They delineate:

"the status of visiting military forces (and) may be bilateral or multilateral. Provisions...

Vermont's philosophical exemption to vaccines has been available to Vermonters since the childhood immunization act was put into place in 1979 and has its roots in the conscientious objections of the smallpox era.  This is because any medical procedure that carries with it known risk, requires the informed consent of the patient or the parent. Vaccinations are meant to induce artificial immunity, but we must hold fast to our natural-born rights to regulate our own immune systems without interference from pharmaceutical products.

It is an issue of grave concern to the future of...

A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago, hopped into a rent-a-car, and navigated my way on the tangle of interstate highways to the now mostly former industrial region in the northwest corner of Indiana just off lowest Lake Michigan between the towns of Whiting and Gary. The desolation of human endeavor lay across the land like nausea made visible, but more impressive was how rapid the rise and fall of it all had been.

Not much more than 150 years ago this was a region of marshes, dunes, swales, laurel slicks, and little backwater ponds of the huge lake. The forbidding flat emptiness of the terrain made it perfect for running...