Pretty Places And Conflict Resolution

In honor of Earth Day, I’m going to post a little news story about Afghanistan’s first national park and the concept of peace parks.
Weird Connotation, Cool Concept
Doesn’t the name “peace park” just bring all sorts of images of granola eating vegan hippies singing about free love? It does to me! Luckily, it is [...]

Ecological Debt Worse than Financial

Hooray, I found another article comparing ecological crises to the current financial crisis! This one is fairly creative in using the idea of debt to communicate just what’s going on.
Basically, the article says that our demands on natural resources are beyond what the Earth can sustain. More than three quarters of the world’s population are [...]

Aid and Afghanistan

Hooray! Another (self described) “crazy conservative” has responded to my blog! And its a good one. The response was to a previous post, “Human Security Over Military Security in Afghanistan?”.
Doesn’t the military presence there help a little with some of that security stuff? So shouldn’t it be we’re spending $107M a day on human security [...]

Human Security over Military Security in Afghanistan?

We are living in such a globalized world that even the most unrelated of issues impact each dramatically. Today I am talking about the war in Afghanistan, the food crisis, and the 2008 US presidential election.
According to a BBC News article, Children in the Bamiyan province are suffering from severe malnutrition and the resources to [...]

Financial Crisis Not An Excuse to Withold Aid

This relates to what I posted on yesterday with the world food crisis. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Pope both came out to declare that the food crisis (which is much the same as the crisis of global poverty) is just as serious as the financial one, and linked to long-term human [...]

Interdependent Crises: Food and Finance

As we read and hear about the current financial crisis, lets remember that people all over the world are afflicted by poverty. But we are not powerless to help them while also helping ourselves.
A survey conducted by BBC Global has revealed that the higher cost of food has hit developing countries hard.
This situation was most [...]

Loss of Biodiversity = Financial Armageddon

I saw this article on the BBC late last night, and I was super psyched by it. Its all about how the greatest long term threat to the global economy is environmental decline. I think it may make too light of the current credit crisis in order to convince everyone that the environment is just [...]

Weapon of Massive Consumption

“Life’s about film stars and less about mothers/ It’s all about fast cars and passing each other/ But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic/ And that’s what makes my life so fucking fantastic/ And I am a weapon of massive consumption/ Its not my fault, its how I’m programmed to function.”
Lily Allen in [...]

When corrupt regimes invest in natural disasters

Some of you may be up on your “nature destroys some far away corner of Asia” news and know that a cyclone hit an already fragile Burma earlier this month. Since then, international aid has been pouring into the country but not distributed to its people. Meaning, somebody dun gone and hid all da monies [...]

Srsly, we gotta start talking development

Its Spring Break and what am I doing with my down time? Working on my personal pet projects. I’m from THE spring break destination, Miami, so I don’t have a whole lot of motivation to go back for my vacation. Plus, I’m a college student, and I’m too broke to go anywhere for spring break [...]