grljduplisea's blog

On Saturday I'm doing a three-mile walk to benefit the National Alliance for Mental Illness, and I'm trying to collect $100 in donations. It's funny how people have money for booze, snacks, and pedicures, but can't spare me a dollar because they don't get paid until Friday.  Read More »

In case you were unaware, Americans are possibly the most responsible for climate change. We emit more carbon dioxide than any other country in the world (nearly twice as much as China, second on this list), and are only behind Kuwait in emissions per capita. Still, the per capita results are staggering. One average U. S. citizen emits the same amount carbon dioxide as  Read More »

Polar Bears happen to be Bowdoin's mascot, so a few clever people here have taken up the plight of the polar bear as a cause to raise awareness about climate change.  Read More »

I don't read a lot of blogs; in fact, as you can see, I don't blog often myself, either. The blogosphere has nevertheless become an active and influential part of communication in our society. Anyone worth reading (and some not so much worth reading) can express themselves to any number of readers. An opportunity, right? Wrong.  Read More »

I tagged a lot of categories for this, but I feel that it applies to quite a few.  Inspired by such organizations as Make Trade Fair and my local Clean Clothes Campaign, I thought of starting a website collecting links and information on fair trade/anti-sweatshop businesses.  Do sites like this exist?  I'd like it to be simple:  no databases, no scripts, just links.  I vaguely remember finding a fair trade site once that was impossible to navigate.  The information is out there, but it's difficult to find in one place.  Read More »

Today I picked up a copy of the magazine The Internationalist in the art library and read it in the afternoon (which involved me missing something I had to do for class, but that's another story).  I must say, this magazine is one of the best I've read in awhile.  It fuses current issues and up-to-date information with a little bit of humor and pop culture.  For example, the last page is a fake MySpace profile for Iranian "president" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  It's brief, too--in 64 pages, it covers a lot of issues:  the environment, nuclear war, books, AIDS, activism, and an "Ask God" column.   Read More »

It's pretty ridiculous how we can't handle ourselves and are destroying the environment at an alarming rate, according to BBC News.  What I found most interesting about this article was the quote about materialism being the new religion, which is entirely true, and that the US's ecological footprint is over its biocapacity, but Canada's is the reverse.  Once again, Canada gets it right.  As long as we in the US have a population apathetic about the planet's future and a government unwilling to wake up, to realize what we're doing to the environment, then we're going to keep getting it wrong.  Read More »

UN Envoy Prepares to Leave Sudan, BBC News

So that's probably bad.

This is a mistake on Sudan's part.  The UN is doing what it can (though not everything it can...) to alleviate the situation and the civil war in Sudan.  The government needs to stop resisting UN peacekeepers:  they worked on Cyprus, so let's see what they could do here.  Two hundred thousand people have died:  shouldn't it take some risks in order to make change?  Sudan shouldn't be kicking the envoy out just because their morale is low and they're getting cranky, to put it lightly.  Read More »