Monsanto has yet another case pending in the court system, this time before the U.S. Supreme Court on the exclusivity of its genetically modified seed patents. Narrowly at issue is whether Monsanto retains patent rights on soybeans that have been replanted after showing up in generic stocks rather than being...

We have entered a critical era for the future of humanity on this planet, and the stakes are indeed as high as whether there will be anything left for those who come next. In the period of expansive consumer growth following World War II, and then again with another quantum...

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

Is the Earth in imminent danger from an asteroid collision? Some doomsday prophecies suggest as much, and scientists don't entirely disagree even as they remind us of the infrequency of such events (on the order of millennia) and the...

Dear Children,

I know that this world must often seem confusing to you. It's noisy, dirty and filled with adults scurrying about their busy lives without noticing you all that much sometimes. It's filled with rules and people telling you what to do, mostly without asking what you want to...

My eyes filled with tears as I heard the news of the mass shooting in Connecticut, where most of those killed were elementary school children. As a parent with children of similar ages, I can only imagine the grief of those who suddenly lost the most precious thing in their...

Whatever one's views about his alleged actions, you would need a pretty hard shell not to be moved by the case of Bradley Manning. Hero to some, traitor to others, this diminutive soldier has endured an unprecedented level of mistreatment, languishing in a largely incommunicado pretrial state for more than...

The media blitz is fully engaged around the latest Washington sex scandals, and with it come nascent cheers from some anti-war sectors over the public unraveling of the top brass who have helped to orchestrate the longest war in U.S. history. On email threads and in the blogosphere, one is...

Forty years ago David Bowie asked, "Is there life on Mars?" Bowie's song embodied an escapist sensibility, a longing for life elsewhere to break the doldrums and despair of living on Earth. Filled with vivid imagery, the song reflects humankind's eternal longing to be part of something larger...

The road ahead was clearly marked as "closed" and a "dead end," but the voice from the back seat insisted that we go forward anyway. "My phone says go straight ahead," counseled the voice, ignoring the driver's observation that the street was apparently closed. "The GPS in my phone is...

Once again, events conspire to remind us how fragile is our existence and how vulnerable we really are. A young man whose goal in life might have been "helping others" winds up hunting them instead, ruthlessly mowing them down in a bizarre public spectacle in which it is not life...

Among some beleaguered Arizona residents and outside observers, there's a tendency to look for a silver lining wherever possible. This is entirely understandable, given the overt repression and legislated bigotry prevalent in recent years. The reaction to the Supreme Court's decision regarding SB 1070 is a case in...

Drones are all the rage these days, and not in a good way. The increasing toll taken by these robotic executioners is beginning to register with the public, after many years of automated death from above in our adventurist wars. Still, the use of drones is expanding in many places,...

It seems like such an innocuous idea. What if there was a shared space set aside, as a matter of course, in private and/or quasi-public places such as airports, hotel lobbies, college campuses, etc.? It's not a radical concept by any means, suggesting simply that a small area be created...

Sometimes the news reads like a cross between a corporate promotional campaign gone haywire and a rejected science-fiction B-movie script. The announcement this week of an asteroid mining venture -- backed by Google executives, the Perot Group, and James Cameron, among others -- is precisely the sort of item that...

I'd like to share a story, a personal story, a common story, an American story. For nearly two decades, I have carried the burden of a crushing student loan debt, well over six figures and impossible for me to fathom paying off in this lifetime. While I have written before...

In just a few short months we have reached a point of near saturation in which the modifier "Occupy" has been applied to almost every sphere of our beleaguered political economy. Not every such application has been equally useful, but for the most part the intended meaning of the word...

Recent days have seen the increasing use of police violence against peaceful Occupy demonstrators around the country, including the gone-viral merciless pepper-spraying of students at UC Davis as well as that of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey in Seattle, and the critical wounding of Iraq war veteran

As the Occupy Movement gains strength and garners worldwide support, the predominant anti-OWS tactic of authority is becoming clear: decimate as many Occupy camps as possible, in the hope that this delivers a fatal blow to the movement's momentum. It is an outmoded, heavy-handed tack, one that starkly illuminates the...

Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that "the order is rapidly fading." For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly...

We find these views to be mutually relevant...

that all people, by virtue of their basic humanity, deserve the opportunity to live, work, and associate according to the dictates of their own consciences and capacities;

that the exercise of such freedoms is only tenable in conjunction with the ability of...