Are countries like India and South Africa still committed to coal extraction? What plans are afoot to make a just transition to renewable power? Ashley Dawson describes and evaluates struggles against extractivism and for publicly owned and democratically managed renewable energy. (Encore presentation.)

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet Haymarket Books, 2024

The post Fossil Fuel Fights appeared first on KPFA.

Our food system, as well as our ecosystems, is clearly in crisis. Should we look to technological fixes and lab-grown meat to provide food for our future? Or, as writer Taras Grescoe suggests, should we look backwards instead to the lost foods of our past? Grescoe argues that a sustainable future necessitates cultivating food and plant diversity, while reclaiming collective practices, including those drawn from contemporary indigenous peoples. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Taras Grescoe, The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past Greystone Books, 2023

Taras Grescoe’s Blog: lostsupper.blog

The post In Search of Lost Foods appeared first on KPFA.

In a California women’s prison, domestic violence survivors who killed their abusers in self-defense came together to practice a politics of mutual care, solidarity, and resistance. Rachel Leah Klein details the origins, efforts, and achievements of Convicted Women Against Abuse, situating their activities within the charged political context of the tough-on-crime 1990s.

Rachel Leah Klein, “Surviving domestic and state violence: Women’s prison organising and the gendered politics of solidarity” Gender & History (open-access through August 2024)

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Medicines – we’re told by the pharmaceuticals industry – are expensive by necessity owing to the high costs of research and development. Yet, as with the vaccines for Covid, much research is publicly-funded, and much comes out of universities. And, as Nick Dearden argues, only 3% of new drugs even represent actual breakthroughs. Instead most are “evergreened” drugs that Big Pharma tweaks in order to prolong its intellectual property rights. He discusses why the business of pharmaceuticals companies is not public health, but private profit. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Nick Dearden, Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health Verso, 2023

The post The Price of Big Pharma appeared first on KPFA.

Automation, its advocates contend, will usher in a new era of leisure and abundance. Is that true, and what kind of thing is automation, anyway? Salem Elzway emphasizes the political dimensions of automation, including how it’s been used against workers and how the discourse of automation has been deployed by elites.

Salem Elzway and Jason Resnikoff, “Whence Automation? The History (and Possible Futures) of a Concept” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History

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It’s the most important program combating food insecurity in the United States – and it originates from aid to the agricultural and food processing industries, not poverty alleviation. Christopher Bosso argues that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP — formerly known as food stamps — has survived for almost sixty years, against those would would eliminate it, precisely because of this connection to agricultural interests. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Christopher John Bosso, Why SNAP Works: A Political History — and Defense — of the Food Stamp Program UC Press, 2023

The post Food Aid to the Poor, Aid to Agriculture appeared first on KPFA.

The dramatic expansion of police power in the U.S. has been fueled by sexual policing—the targeting and legal control of people’s bodies and their presumed sexual activities. So argues Anne Gray Fischer, who describes the historical trajectory of sexual policing and traces the profoundly consequential shift in its targets from white women to Black women.

Anne Gray Fischer, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification University of North Carolina Press, 2022

The post Sex, Race, and Police Power appeared first on KPFA.

How does capitalism tap into our desires with the promise of objects to satisfy us? Yet when we possess them, the urge for something new reemerges. Geographer Jared Marguiles attempts to explain that paradox by looking at some of most endangered, and coveted, species in world: cacti. He examines the market for succulents and the collectors who drive it, including the strange illicit trade in legally available cacti. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Jared D. Margulies, The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade University of Minnesota Press, 2023

The post Looting Cacti appeared first on KPFA.

What was the modern Sanctuary Movement formed to do? What sorts of challenges has it faced, and how has the movement changed and evolved? Carl Lindskoog considers the history of the Sanctuary Movement, including its expansion into a far-reaching campaign for human rights, economic justice, and peace.

Maria Cristina Garcia & Maddalena Marinari, Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980 University of Illinois Press, 2023

The post A History of Sanctuary appeared first on KPFA.

Jewish opposition to Israel, so visible recently through the spectacular actions of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Marjorie Feld argues that what may seem like unprecedented criticism of Israel by U.S. Jews is part of a long tradition of dissent, which has been repressed by establishment Jewish organizations and frequently erased by historians.

Resources:

Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism NYU Press, 2024

Photo credit: Marcy Winograd

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