Category Archives: Grist

May 4, 2006

An interview with jailed “eco-terrorist” Jeffrey Luers
04 May 2006

In 2000, 21-year-old Jeff Luers and an accomplice set fire to three pickup trucks at a dealership in Eugene, Ore., to bring attention to gas-guzzlers’ contribution to global warming. They were promptly arrested. Luers, who refused to plea bargain, was sentenced to 22 years, eight months in prison. It is the longest term ever handed down for environmentally motivated sabotage in America — and far longer than sentences given to arsonists in Oregon who have destroyed more property and endangered peoples’ lives.

But Luers’ sentence may be surpassed if any of the upcoming trials of 11 people arrested in January for eco-motivated arson and vandalism yield convictions. (more…)

14 Mar 2006

Robert Bullard says he was “drafted” into environmental justice while working as an environmental sociologist in Houston in the late 1970s. His work there on the siting of garbage dumps in black neighborhoods identified systematic patterns of injustice. The book that Bullard eventually wrote about that work, 1990’s Dumping in Dixie, is widely regarded as the first to fully articulate the concept of environmental justice.

Since then, Bullard, who is as much activist as academic, has been one of the leading voices of environmental-justice advocacy. He was one of the planners of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, at which the organizing principles of modern environmental justice were formulated. Bullard later helped the Clinton administration write the watershed executive order that required all federal agencies to consider environmental justice in their programs.

Read it on Grist…

January 5, 2006

In India, fair trade is changing a centuries-old industry
By Nina Luttinger and Gregory Dicum

The cool, misty highlands of the Western Ghats punctuate south India’s steaming tropical plains. Their forests shelter tigers and elephants, and protect the fragile watersheds of the flatlands below. They also harbor pieces of a colonial legacy: the tea industry.

Colonial authorities and entrepreneurs established the first tea estates in this country in the 19th century, marrying British management and capital with Indian land and labor. The estates were worlds unto themselves, remote colonies-within-a-colony with no nearby settlements. Plantation owners provided housing and provisions, and managers lived on-site, in picturesque bungalows overlooking impossibly rolling vistas covered with the profitable crop. They took tea and glasses of whiskey from silver trays proffered by white-uniformed Indian butlers.

Read it on Grist…