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Author Spotlight
Sam Davis is a staff scientist at the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), a nonprofit that uses science, litigation, policy analysis, and strategic communications to promote policies that protect climate, ecosystems, and people.
Katherine Dolan is a writer, editor, and researcher at the Independent Media Institute from Dunedin, New Zealand. She has held previous posts as a senior writer for Fairfax Media Custom Publishing in New Zealand and Lifestyle Magazine in Moscow, and as a copy editor for the U.S. news site NSFWCORP.
Teresa Coady is an award-winning architect, sustainability expert, and Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Aric Sleeper is an independent journalist whose work covers topics including labor, housing, food, and more.
Ginger Fedak is a lifelong animal welfare advocate and horse professional, having spent decades teaching about and advocating for domestic and wild horses.
Guides
Our financial system originated in Mesopotamia, where it was designed to ensure economic stability for a community. Over time it has transformed into something much more predatory.
Conscious consumption, or conscious consumerism, can be accomplished in a variety of ways, such as shopping for food products that avoid harm to nonhuman animals, using green cleaning products, drinking shade-grown, fair-trade coffee and organic wine free of harmful pesticides, driving small electric vehicles over instead of gas-guzzling SUVs, and boycotting fast-fashion brands and businesses that treat workers unfairly.
This guide will help you make buying decisions that are healthier for you, your family, nonhuman animals, and the planet.
With new anthropological, biological and scientific findings, we are increasingly able to trace the outlines and fill in the blanks of our human evolutionary story. This can help us better understand the social and cultural processes that produced the world we live in now. This guide to Human Bridges explores the work of experts from the fields of human biology, human origins, and anthropology who want to contribute their individual expertise to a wider accessible body of information, and enlist in the cause to make this material a staple of education at all stages of life.
Environmental health is crucial for public well-being as it directly impacts human health. Pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction can lead to respiratory diseases, waterborne illnesses, and other health issues. Maintaining clean air, water, and land reduces the risk of disease transmission and promotes overall health. Additionally, preserving ecosystems supports biodiversity, which contributes to food security and medicine discovery. Sustainable practices safeguard public health for current and future generations, emphasizing the vital connection between environmental and public health.
Industrial agriculture, with its heavy reliance on chemical inputs, monoculture cropping, and intensive farming practices, poses a significant threat to the environment and wildlife. The negative impacts of industrial agriculture include wildlife habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water pollution, antibiotic resistance, major greenhouse gas emissions, and animal cruelty on a massive scale. Sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture, such as organic farming, small-scale farming, regenerative farming, and veganic farming—offer a better way forward. These sustainable farming practices not only offer a way to produce food while minimizing harm, ensuring a more resilient and sustainable food system for future generations, but can also solve existential problems like climate change.
New Additions
Sankofa Village Arkansas is building an “intentional community centering Black healing, liberation, and regeneration.”
By Damon Orion
Anthropologists have recognized the characteristic patterns of butchery on human remains in archaeological sites from around the world, across huge swathes of time.
Untreated windows can be deadly for wild birds—hummingbirds are particularly at risk.
By Jim Cubie
This Petersburgh, New York, organization fights racial injustice in the food system.
By Damon Orion
Fears of the nuclear threat may have subsided with the end of the Cold War, but the danger did not.
Classics
The famous novel about government and business corruption in the early 20th century by muckraker author Upton Sinclair.
From Wikisource:
- “The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by author and socialist journalist Upton Sinclair. It was written about the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century. The novel depicts in harsh tones the poverty, absence of social programs, unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness prevalent among the ‘have-nots,’ which is contrasted with the deeply rooted corruption on the part of the ‘haves.’”
“The Shame of the Cities is a book written by American author Lincoln Steffens. Published in 1904, it is a collection of articles which Steffens had written for McClure’s Magazine. It reports on the workings of corrupt political machines in several major cities in the United States, along with a few efforts to combat them. It is considered one of several early major pieces of muckraking journalism, but Steffens later claimed that the work made him ‘the first muckraker.’” (Source: Wikipedia)
From Wikipedia:
- “A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South is the first book by American author, educator, and activist Anna J. Cooper. First published in 1892, the book is widely viewed as one of the first articulations of Black feminism. The book is divided into two parts, ‘Soprano Obligato’ and ‘Tutti Ad Libitum.’ Each section contains four individual essays. This book led to the term ‘Cooperian’ being coined when speaking about Anna J. Cooper. It is considered one of the first, full-length Black feminist texts.”
- Overview
- “A Voice from the South compiles a series of essays that touched on a variety of topics, such as race and racism, gender, the socioeconomic realities of Black families, and the administration of the Episcopal Church.”
- “The book advanced a vision of self-determination through education and social uplift for African-American women. Its central thesis was that the educational, moral, and spiritual progress of Black women would improve the general standing of the entire African-American community. She says that the violent natures of men often run counter to the goals of higher education, so it is important to foster more female intellectuals because they will bring more elegance to education. She noted Black women whose accomplishments could rival those of men, including Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Edmonia Lewis. Cooper advanced the view that it was the duty of educated and successful Black women to support their underprivileged peers in achieving their goals. Through this view Cooper’s style was deemed ‘Cooperian,’ as a direct comparison to other male canonical theorists. …”
- “A Voice from the South was published during a period that saw a burst of intellectual publications by Black women. Cooper’s book was published the same year as Lucy Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light; or, Struggles for Freedom, Ida B. Wells’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted.”
This article on the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (associated with the movement of German idealism) appeared in the Philosophical Review, Volume 16, pp. 488-505, in 1907.
Ellen Bliss Talbot was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College from 1898 to 1932. From Wikisource:
“According to Dorothy Rogers and Therese B. Dykeman… ‘[Talbot] had a successful academic career, chairing Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department for thirty-two years and teaching part-time for several years after retirement. She published just three books, all on Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1898, 1899, 1906), in addition to her considerable number of articles in the Philosophical Review, Mind, and the American Journal of Psychology. Her commitment to women’s education at Mount Holyoke was unwavering, helping to ensure that the philosophy curriculum met the expectations of her fellow academicians as philosophy established itself as a profession.’ From ‘Introduction: Women in the American Philosophical Tradition 1800–1930,’ in Hypatia 19:2 (Spring 2004): viii-xxxiv.”
This is a speech by Frederick Douglass given on Monday, July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York. The oration was published as a pamphlet the same year. Annotations were provided by the Wikisource community.
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