Welcome To Badlands Journal

Ralph Nader is not generally known for his insights into the San Joaquin Valley, but at this hour with the kind of corporate concentration we keep seeing more of in all aspects of agriculture and in all levels of politics, you’ll agree with us that he has a great deal to say about our local, regional and state public affairs, although he can speak as few others can about the nation itself.

--Badlands Journal editorial board

May 2019

Sun Magazine

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The Sun Interview

The Great Work

The United Nations reported this week that the Sixth Extinction is well on its way. Without strenuous, consistent and intelligent action taken on a global level, the predicted “iconic” event of the new Anthropocene epoch of man-made ecological catastrophe is upon us. And the velocity of the rate of extinction in this epoch eclipses the known geological record.

Until …

The world is facing its sixth extinction crisis, scientists are beginning to agree. 96-year-old Australian scientist Stephen Boyden’s comment on our hopes of preventing says what everyone involved in trying to save species feels:

“While there's a glimmer of hope, it's worth working to solve the problem. We have the scientific knowledge to do it but we don't have the political will,” Boyden said.

America’s  better angels, present and absent, are haunting us demanding that, just to start with, we remember, recall, bring important things to mind. Thorsten Veblen flies among our best angels, and Ann Jones, of Norwegian-American background like Veblen and like Veblen from the Upper Midwest, tells his story and shows his importance in the fewest and clearest words we’ve ever read. Nobody described American plutocracy – its origins and tendencies -- better and more fully than Veblen did in 1899, in his Theory of the Leisure Class.