Wangari Maathai: What role does spirituality play in our work to heal the earth? YES! Magazine Editor’s Note: Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and 2004 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, passed away on September 25. In this essay from her book Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, she describes what [...]

South Africa is a society where the actions of political leaders in the state machinery are threatening to reverse the popular struggles for liberation. Seventeen years ago, the formal shackles of apartheid were rattled. But the structural basis of apartheid was never dismantled. When Nelson Mandela became the head of state in 1994 there had [...]

by Tristan McConnell in Mwingi October 22, 2009 “The last time I had a good harvest was 2003 – there has been nothing at all for the last three years,” said Mutindi Maithya, 36, a widow who lives with her six children on a four- acre plot of sun-baked land. Sitting beneath a thorny acacia tree, she picks [...]

Wangari Maathai saw trees being chopped down in her backyard in Kenya and dedicated her life to saving Africa’s rainforests. Now it’s time for the rest of the world to face some hard truths, the Nobel laureate tells Johann Hari by Johann Hari September 28, 2009 When does planting a tree become a revolutionary act – and unleash [...]

by Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck September 2, 2009 More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left [...]

Nota del editor: Sin sustento, no hay libertad, no hay vida, no hay forma de resistir las injusticias diarias que vienen a oprimirlo a uno cada vez más. No hay libertad. El hambre es una de las injusticias más grandes de nuestros tiempos porque el alimento es un derecho humano que se le esta negando [...]

by Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola July 2, 2009 Manifest Destiny In 1845, an American columnist, John O’Sullivan, writing about the proposed annexation of Texas, claimed that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent.” Later in the same year, referring to the ongoing dispute with Great Britain over Oregon, he wrote that the United States had [...]