Category Archives: Whole Life Times

Veg-O-Lution

July 2008

“Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.” (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times

We Don’t Stop

Michael Franti Talks Peace, Love and Music

Apr 30, 2008

If the contemporary struggle for a better world has a soundtrack, it surely features the music of Michael Franti. To Franti, music and activism are one and the same — his albums, the last three of which have sold over 100,000 copies combined, are truth-telling manifestos you can dance to. While touring constantly, he tirelessly promotes peace, sustainability and human rights. His annual Power to the Peaceful festival raises money for different causes each year — from Mumia Abul Jamal’s legal case to bringing American troops home from Iraq. Last year, 60,000 people attended in San Francisco and 4,000 in São Paulo, Brazil. He has been named an Ambassador of Peace by the World Health Organization, and performs benefit concerts for Iraq Veterans Against the War, grassroots workers in New Orleans, as well as free concerts in prisons. In his personal life he is a vegan and yogi, and if you find yourself behind his hybrid or his biodiesel tour bus, follow him: he’ll pay your bridge toll. Last month we visited Franti in his San Francisco studio as he was putting the finishing touches on his new release, “All Rebel Rockers,” due out in September.

Read it on Common Ground…

Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times

Pisco Shakedown

March 1, 2008

The basic story is disarmingly pat: on August 15, 2007, an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale devastated Pisco, Peru, a city of 80,000 on the desert coast south of Lima. Around 520 deaths were reported. Fifty thousand became homeless. In newspapers around the world, this calamity ran as a few inches of print, and then disappeared.

But six months later, the disaster is not over. Rolling into town on an unkind February wind — a sea breeze both salty and dusty — I passed jagged ruins and fields of rubble. Hasty piles of brick, adobe and dust dotted the city. Even the beach was covered in it. Tents from aid agencies around the world filled the streets, along with Peruvian government earthquake shacks that looked like toolsheds, except less sturdy.

But in a yellow concrete house in a residential neighborhood, where intact buildings stood next to collapsed buildings, newly vacant lots and windblown reed-and-tarp shelters, I found a hopeful, even cheerful scene: the Pisco headquarters of Burners Without Borders.

Read the whole story…here too…

Posted in Magazines, Whole Life Times