Tag: Activism

Thank goodness for freegans, who have excelled at showing us how much food we waste every day. Freegans do for wasted food what the 100 Mile Diet has done for eating locally grown food. People who practice freeganism are also showing us how we can pinch pennies and save money in this recession.

Being an activist has a way of teaching you how to lose gracefully. Or, at least, how to lose. In my activist career I’ve worked in many different campaigns on a diverse array of issues, but virtually every single campaign I’ve been involved in has been a losing battle, with the particular problems we were fighting against becoming measurably worse despite our efforts. There has been one exception: the movement to build local, ecologically sound food systems.

The origins of Food Not Bombs are somewhat mysterious: some report that a bake sale to benefit the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament led activists to call for spending on food, rather than bombs; other stories mention a mock soup line being used as street theatre when demonstrators asked the First National Bank of Boston to stop investing in a nuclear power station.

The shift in people’s media habits away from top-down broadcast media like television towards more interactive network media opens up interesting possibilities for grassroots democracy and political organizing. Labour unions are increasingly taking notice, and beginning to adapt the technologies to their own uses.

There are no prepared documents. There’s no agenda. Your job, along with the other hundred front-line members of the Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee (OUWCC), is to set priorities for the sector for the next three years, to tackle obstacles to that work, and to look for concrete ways to build the group’s capacity.

Derrick Jensen joined a Regina, Saskatchewan, audience via videoconference for a wide-ranging conversation. As usual, he challenged the audience to focus on protecting life rather than lifestyle, and urged them to recognize the breadth of the changes necessary to protect life on earth.

The rise of neo-Nazism in Alberta and the Anti-Racist activists organizing against them.

In Canada’s current war in Afghanistan, however, most Canadians’ participation in the war is limited to the tax dollars they pay towards it. This makes it much more difficult for conscientious objectors to remain true to their convictions. A small but growing movement is seeking to change that.

Sometimes a term comes along that enables us to name—-to make visible—-our situation, to better understand the social and economic forces that shape our choices, and to connect various struggles within a broader tapestry of social change. Precarity is perhaps such a term.

STOP eating meat. STOP driving. STOP bush junior. No, I’m not trying to tell you what to do with your life. But somebody is.

Third-wave feminism has overlapped so much with “girl culture,” Do It Yourself aesthetics, indie-rock and burlesque that it’s hard to see where the actual movement is.

In spite of more than 30 years of intervention and education strategies designed to end violence against women by their male partners, such violence remains as prevalent as ever. It is high time we took stock of our strategies and our assumptions to determine what is and is not working—and what more can be done.

Clutching a mug of coffee, Gwenda Yuzicappi retreats from the cold outside. There’s a spark in her eyes. Her long brown hair is pulled back, and the pink sweater she wears complements the flush in her cheeks from the biting winter wind. Her younger sister sits beside her in the coffee shop and they speak animatedly. If you watched long enough you could find the grief that Yuzicappi carries, but in this moment she looks hopeful.

Book review of Sheila Wilmot’s Taking Responsibility, Taking Direction: white anti-racism in Canada