Environmental for Food Justice

Moderator’s Note: Both Oregon and Colorado are voting on citizen-initiated referendums that would require the labeling of GMO foods. Colorado’s electorate is voting on Prop 105, which I endorsed and addressed in an October 10 editorial. Oregon voters are deciding the outcome with a vote on Measure 92 . Both laws are reasonable and sensible first stepa toward insuring the right to know and the ability for consumers to make educated choices about the foods they eat.  Numerous editorials have come out in support of Oregon’s Measure 92 but Eecole Copen of Portland, Oregon, a registered dietician, has written the most compelling of these missives. Copen emphasizes the need for us to “look at the bigger picture” and this includes clearly addressing concerns about the effectiveness of the proposed law and the opponents’ unsubstantiated claims that labeling will increase the cost of food. Copen also provides an insightful analysis of the strategies being used by biotechnology corporation...

Indigenous protest, Quito, March 2012, after a 15-day march demanding an end to open pit mining and new oil concessions. Photo credit: Links Journal      Moderator’s Note: Over the years I have covered local and global struggles against extractive industries because these represent one of the most destructive forces of environmental violence on the planet. This violence is the result of colluding forces involving corrupt neoliberal states and their brutally efficient corporate partners. On occasion our coverage of indigenous struggles against extractive colonialism invites a thoughtful theoretical intervention and so I present the work of Manuela Picq, a Latin Americanist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who presents a compelling argument for the privileging of Indigeneity as a category for the articulation of human and ecosystem rights. Her principal argument is that indigenous resistance is a threat to the established Westphalian order that is the basi...