The High School Where Learning to Farm Is a Graduation Requirement

A group of teens gathers quietly in the predawn darkness. Dressed in warm clothing, they meet before breakfast to help capture and pack broiler chickens to be taken to a slaughterhouse. They fed, watered, and watched the birds grow; now they prepare them for their final trip. Eventually, the birds will return as meat and be cooked for the teens to eat.

Founded in 1837 to serve the children of Quaker
 families, Olney Friends School has always had
farm program and students have been involved in
its operation to varying degrees.

High school students at Olney Friends School, located on 350 acres near Barnesville, Ohio, witness the cycle of birth and death time and again during their four years on campus. Founded in 1837 to serve the children of Quaker families, Olney has always had a farm program and students have been involved in its operation to varying degrees.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by Mary Ann Lieser - “The High School Where Learning to Farm Is a Graduation Requirement.”

Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate

There’s something rather unsettling about eerie pictures of flooded airport runways, and it’s not just the submerged jet bridges. Such photos capture the type of disruptive scenes that could become more common in the future, as the effects of climate change continue to ramp up.

Flying into a changing climate.

New attention to the issue shows that airports and airlines around the world will be affected by climate change in various ways. Consider this past summer’s spate of heat-related groundings in Phoenix, when 120 degree-air temperatures spurred a single carrier to cancel more than 40 flights out of the city. A recent study by scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, at Columbia University, anticipates more troubles along those lines in coming years).

“There are a number of potential climate change impacts on aviation operations,” said Perry Flint, a spokesperson for the International Air Transport Association (IATA). Impacts range from “reducing the take-off performance of aircraft, to increased storminess – meaning flights have to route around weather more frequently,” he said.

Read the Yale Climate Connections story by Daisy Simmons - “Piloting aviation industry through a changing climate.”

'Labouratory' by George Monbiot

We are still living in the long 20th Century. We are stuck with its redundant technologies: the internal combustion engine; thermal power plants; factory farms. We are stuck with its redundant politics: unfair electoral systems; their capture by funders and lobbyists; the failure to temper representation with real participation.

George Monbiot - we're still living in the 20th Century.

And we are stuck with its redundant economics: neoliberalism, and the Keynesianism still proposed by its opponents. While the latter system worked very well for 30 years or more, it is hard to see how it can take us through this century, not least because the growth it seeks to sustain smacks headlong into the environmental crisis.

Sustained economic growth on a planet that is not growing means crashing through environmental limits: this is what we are witnessing, worldwide, today. A recent paper in Nature puts our current chances of keeping global heating to less than 1.5°C of at just 1%, and less than 2° at only 5%. Why? Because while the carbon intensity of economic activity is expected to decline by 1.9% a year, global per capita GDP is expected to grow by 1.8%. Almost all investment in renewables and efficiency is cancelled out. GDP, the index that was supposed to measure our prosperity, instead measures our progress towards ruin.

Read the piece by Guardian columnist George Monbiot - “Labouratory.”