British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer.  Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one.  For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years […]

Social critics, from Ida B. Wells to Noam Chomsky, recognize that the elite press can serve as the best tool against the elite.  Today’s business magazines have no problem “naming the system,” and they write with clarity and frankness on the inner workings of capitalism and imperialism.  My good friend and correspondent Skip recently sent […]

Veterans, community groups, and campus activists organized an action of solidarity to make the University of Oregon the second school in the nation to visually represent the Iraq death toll.  Two hundred volunteers placed 112,000 white flags around school property, with each flag representing 6 Iraqi lives destroyed during the US occupation.  3,000 red flags […]

In a recent Monthly Review article, Richard York and Brett Clark offer a historical analysis of how “ruling-class ideology gets smuggled into the damnedest places, including interpretations of the natural world.”1  The authors describe how ideology has shaped foundational concepts of natural history, enabling scholars to elaborate the theory of evolution in a way that […]

Industrial salmon farming corporations have learned an important lesson from their corporate cousins about what to do with their tarnished images of ecological and social injustice: simply pour money into a public relations campaign and overwhelm dissent.  After years of bad publicity, the salmon farming industry is adopting a damage control PR campaign. A recent […]

The farmed salmon industry has recently been dealt yet another blow as the world learns about the contaminated product it offers for the public’s dinner plates.  In June, 2005, a multi-national aquaculture company, Stolt Sea Farms, confirmed that nearly 320,000 of its farmed salmon from British Columbia were contaminated with the illegal fungicide “malachite green” […]