Juggling Dynamite

Danielle was a guest today with Kerry Lutz on The Financial Survival Network, talking about recent developments in the world economy and markets.  You can listen to an audio link of the segment here.

This speech reminds about the progress and evolution that thinking people should aspire to everyday. Not just in areas of systemic bias like racism and sexism, but also in areas like new energy, transportation and food systems that better serve life on earth.  The status quo must be continually opened for review.  When the will is weak, we should imagine how we can explain to children today and in the future, why we personally, chose not to help.

The city of New Orleans has elected to pull down Confederate monuments from its public spaces. With the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee this week, that task is complete. The proposal brought near endless debate, and vitriolic outcry from the monuments’ defenders. But in a remarkable speech shortly before Lee’s statue was removed, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared with astonishing moral and historical clarity that these were not monuments to some bygone way of southern life implied by believers in the Lost Cause. They were symbols of white supremacy, and of the systemic oppression of human beings.  See:  New Orelans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s remarkable speech about removing confederate monuments.

Here is a direct video link.

This month the World Health Assembly elects the next Director-General of the World Health Organization(WHO) and over 200 experts in health, medicine, biology, policy and climate research have signed a letter urging the WHO to acknowledge that factory farming of animals is a major impediment to the health of not just the animals and our planet, but global human health.   The letter (which you can read in full here) includes a series of policy recommendations:

• • • Ban the use of growth-promoting antibiotics in animal farming and provide incentives to meat producers to dispose of antibiotics and animal waste in ways that prevent environmental contamination.
    • Stop subsidizing factory farming.
    • Adopt nutrition standards and implement education campaigns that warn of the health risks of meat consumption.
    • Finance research into plant-based alternatives to meat.

  See: 200 Health and science experts have powerful message about factory farming.

• The most powerful thing individuals can do to be part of the solution?  Stop buying the products that come from animal factory farming.  In general that means avoiding fast, big box, mass produced food.  It’s pretty simple.