Badlands Journal

 People who take seriously the information that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is cvurrently at 390 ppm when science has stated that the tipping point (where catastrophic sea-level rise begins) is at 350 ppm, observe the current debate about oil – from academic institutional and state and national environmental groups’ divestment of holdings in fossil fuel firms to California’s governor, the Great Reflector’s jitterbugging on fracking the Monterey Shale Formation – and could notice that political hypocrisy is also a petroleum by-product.

Badlands Journal editorial board

THE BADLANDS JOURNAL

EDITORIAL BOARD WISHES

WILLIE NELSON THE

HAPPIEST 80TH BIRTHDAY

EVER CELEBRATED!!

--BLJ

 One member of the Badlands Journal editorial board, from Brooklyn and old enough to have seen Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers and to have seen the Dodgers leave for LA, in short a man who had experienced the highs and lows of life before entering high school, wished to inform the rest of the board recently that he saw absolutely no resemblance between Robinson and President Obama. 

"Obama like Jackie Robinson? Ferget it!" he said..

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3-8-13
Democracy Now!
Vandana Shiva on Int’l Women’s Day: "Capitalist Patriarchy Has Aggravated Violence Against Women"
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/8/vandana_shiva_on_intl_womens_day

AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation on this International Women’s Day with world-renowned feminist, activist, thinker from India, Dr. Vandana Shiva. India witnessed nationwide protests earlier this year following the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi in December. The rape brought attention to other instances of sexual violence in India, where one woman is raped every 20 minutes, according to the national crime registry there. The conviction rates in the rape cases in India have decreased from 46 percent in 1971 to 26 percent in 2012.

To talk more about the significance of International Women’s Day, we go to Los Angeles to speak with Vandana Shiva, where she’s on tour right now. She’s the author of many books, including Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Her most recent book is Making Peace with the Earth.

Vandana, welcome to Democracy Now! As you travel in the United States from India right now—you’re an environmental leader, you’re a feminist, you’re a scientist—what is your message on this International Women’s Day?

A brilliant article on UC's genetic engineering patents and its legal shenanigans. -- BLJ

2-26-13
Pueblo Lands
UC: A University, or a Biotech Company?
Vernon Bowman
http://darwinbondgraham.wordpress.com/

Last month the University of California intervened in a high stakes U.S. Supreme Court case on the side of the agribusiness giant Monsanto Company by filing an amicus brief stating that the university would be harmed materially if Monsanto doesn’t prevail. On the receiving end of UC’s legal argument is Vernon Bowman, a 75 year-old grain farmer from southern Indiana who has been battling Monsanto in court for several years now. It was already a David v. Goliath kind of fight, pitting an elderly guy in overalls against a global corporation with a bottomless pocket for legal expenses; the entry of UC into the court’s deliberations makes that two Goliaths.

Yet, according to a large consensus of government and private sources, by far the largest oil shale formation, the Monterey, is largely located in the south San Joaquin Valley. So, suddenly who owns subsurface rights to public as well as private lands becomes a major issue for people not eager to have their already record-breaking bad air quality get worse, have their groundwater polluted with chemicals the very names of which are proprietary to the companies that inject them thousands of feet into the ground, and there is a minor seismic issue, which we will take up later. -- BLJ