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Food and Global Warming

Submitted by jhodgdon on 4 June 2008 - 10:52am

World leaders are finally realizing that we're facing a food crisis: they're currently having a meeting in Rome to discuss it, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon recently stated that we need to grow 50% more food by 2030 to satisfy needs (I believe this is a conservative estimate). This is not much of a surprise to me -- I mentioned the upcoming food crisis in my earlier article on biofuels, and it's also related to the energy situation I discussed before that .

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Economic Growth

Submitted by jhodgdon on 1 May 2008 - 11:39am

I have been thinking a lot lately about economic growth. It seems like the news media, and practically everyone else, assumes that if the economy is growing, it's a good thing, and if it isn't, something terrible is occurring. This assumption has been bothering me for a while, and I recently read a book that put my vague uneasiness into words: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. In this book, McKibben makes the following points:

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Refugees and Immigrants

Submitted by jhodgdon on 19 April 2008 - 9:31am

I recently read a book called The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher. In it, Ms. Pipher shares stories of refugees who were settled in Lincoln, Nebraska over the past 10-20 years.

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A Trip to Olympia, or How I Became a Lobbyist

Submitted by jhodgdon on 21 February 2008 - 5:44pm

On February 11th, 2008, over 1000 people from over 70 countries, all of whom now live in the state of Washington, visited Olympia (our state capitol) for the second annual Refugee and Immigrant Legislative Day. I decided to take a day off work and attend. Here are some observations from the day:

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Housing and Schools

Submitted by jhodgdon on 12 February 2008 - 7:36pm

The city that I live in (Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle) closed two elementary schools this year, and the city of Seattle has also been talking about closing schools, in both cases because the number of children enrolled in school has declined. Yet the population of both Seattle and Shoreline must be increasing, as houses are replaced by condo buildings and apartments, so I had been somewhat confused about this...

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Health Care in the U.S.

Submitted by jhodgdon on 17 December 2007 - 11:38am

I finally saw Michael Moore's film Sicko. It's very scary. The main point of the film is that in the U.S., even if you have "good" health insurance, you have no guarantee that you will get good health care. This is because hospitals and doctors make health care decisions based on what your insurance company will pay them, rather than what is good for you, and the insurance companies base their decisions on what is good for their stockholders, not what is good for you.

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Illegal Immigration in the U.S.

Submitted by jhodgdon on 20 November 2007 - 9:59am

In my volunteer work (teaching English to adult immigrants and Spanish-English interpreting), I come in contact with a lot of immigrants -- some are here legally, and some are not. Illegal immigration has also been in the news a lot lately, so I find myself thinking about the subject frequently. When I hear what our so-called leaders are saying about illegal immigration, I get frustrated, because I don't think they're thinking constructively. So, I decided I'd better get my own thoughts together.

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Why Biofuels Don't Make Sense

Submitted by jhodgdon on 27 October 2007 - 8:14am

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of politicians promoting biofuels, mainly biodiesel and bioethanol. They seem to believe that biofuels are going to play a major role in solving our upcoming energy crisis, but logic and science do not support that idea. I gave a few reasons in my earlier article on the coming energy crisis, and an article I just read in Science News adds even more. Here are some thoughts:

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Sweatshop Alternatives

Submitted by jhodgdon on 3 September 2007 - 10:08am

In my last article, I wrote about poverty, especially among people who have jobs. Many of the workers living in poverty around the world are working in the clothing industry; most of the clothing available for sale in the US is produced in sweatshops (which we can define as places where basic worker rights are lacking or where the workers do not earn a wage that allows them to support themselves and their families). But there are alternatives.

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More about Poverty and the Economy

Submitted by jhodgdon on 27 August 2007 - 12:22pm

I have some more thoughts as a follow-up to my previous post about poverty and the economy -- about solutions to the problem of poverty. First, the basics. Since poverty occurs when there is an imbalance between earnings and the cost of living, to move an individual out of poverty, either the person's earnings must be increased, or his/her cost of living reduced. There are several ways we could consider doing that for the working poor segment of the population (whether here or overseas).

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