The movie El Norte has stayed with me a long time. Anyone who has seen it will likely remember one horrifying scene when the two Mayan peasants from Guatemala–a brother and sister–cross the U.S.-Mexico border through a sewer pipe. It’s 1984. California is the border battlefront. And Guatemala, torn asunder by a long civil war…Continue Reading…
There’s a good post up at Grist on the latent anti-immigrant sentiment within the larger environmental community. Anyone who is familiar with the green bigotry on this issue has probably bumped up against what the writer describes here: So after I began working in the environmental community, I was disturbed to find that when friends…Continue Reading…
Imagine the histrionics when Lou Dobbs figures out the climate change angle to one of his pet causes. In the meantime, with respect to yesterday’s big report, this is a reasonable take on domestic security issues, particularly those related to the border: As much as the United States will have its hands full dealing with…Continue Reading…
A few years ago, a ranger at Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument told me that this would be a historic trail in fifty years. In the meantime, the tragedy continues: Already this year, 79 of the dead have been recovered. The season of death, deep summer, has not even begun.
The allure of technology is so great as the Ultimate Answer that politicians, policymakers and engineers continually chase after it the way a drug addict chases after that first high. And so, speaking of drugs, we learn today that a squad in the Homeland Security Department is trying out all manner of hi-tech gimmickry to…Continue Reading…