Brief #34 – Social Justice
By Erika Shannon
The investigation into the attack on our nation’s capitol last January has been underway for several months now. Countless subpoenas have been issued, to both companies and individuals, and thousands of pieces of video and photographic evidence has been submitted. The House Select Committee has been winding down a long list of people who are connected in some way to the events that transpired on and around January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.
Brief #125 – Foreign Policy
By Ailín Goode
The United States has been an active member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) since its creation in January 1995. As of 2019, the U.S. had been a party in 179 cases managed using WTO dispute settlement procedures. It remains active in the creation and maintenance of the agreements set for by WTO to organize and govern world trade.
Brief # 119 – Environmental Policy
By Katherine Cart
Corporate wealth towers like megalithic fungi about the globe. Imagine the coagulated money of the world sprouting graphically in the areas in which the owners of that money are housed, bedded, fed. This should appear rather like a globular histogram, with, say, Beijing, New York City, Hong Kong, Moscow, Shenzhen, San Francisco etc. etc. sprouting great swaying money towers. Now, conversely, consider a similar globular graph that depicts where the physical goods powering wealth are sourced from.
Brief #117—The Environment
By Katherine Cart
Intentional social inclusivity is, once again, generating backlash and the vexed use of the word “all” is causing reaction to a highlighting and attempted remediation of historical discrimination. The March 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARPA) released by the Biden Administration included a $5 billion dollar package designated for the support of “socially disadvantaged farmers.” In the bill’s language these include Black, hispanic, indiginous and other nonwhite farmers.
Brief #5—Fishing Boat Dispatch
By Katherine Cart
Prince William Sound is a quiet place. Storms in the Gulf of Alaska die on the western edges of islands; Montague, Hitchinbrook and Hawkins Islands rise like barbicans about the calm inlets. When one flies low over the Sound, little islands appear as shadows stretched westward: storm waves crush beaches from craggy outcrop. On the leeward side rise unblunted cliffs. At the scooped back of the Sound, one can, in most seasons, drive aluminum skiffs for miles on flat water, jigging for halibut and pulling from 30 fathoms by hand shrimp pots in which an octopus is more likely to be found than shrimp. Treed mountains rise up from the water, are striated by waterfall from glacial seeps, summits. In winter, the bays beneath slush are aquamarine, incredibly clear – the season of rot not yet begun – and the hills are stilled beneath a fathom of snow. The winter nights are long: sun up and down occur near the middle of the working day. In clear dawns and twilights, if one stands in view of the sweep of the Sound, all the snowed islands blaze in alpenglow. On Esther Island, where storms rarely come, the winter sun flits around the periphery of the bay, slinking behind mountain ridge. There is a small cluster of buildings on Esther Island, in which a dozen or so people live and work, hatching and releasing Chum salmon[1] by the millions each year. In the darkest months, daylight is the blued shadow of the mountain across the bay, and night is, with clear skies and luck, the greenish aurora borealis beyond the humped blocks of snowed peaks. Strong moons reflect silver on frozen waterfalls.
Brief #111—Environment
By Jacob Morton
From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump made every effort to weaken the country’s environmental protections and accelerate profits for the fossil fuel industry. Trump’s single term was riddled with attempts to roll back, what he considered, cumbersome environmental regulations, some that had existed for decades. He appointed oil and coal lobbyists to the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior, who would champion the expansion of oil pipelines throughout our federal lands. The work to clean up his mess is far from over. Here is an update on three highly controversial oil pipeline projects made possible by the Trump administration.
Brief #4—Fishing Boat Dispatch
By Katherine Cart
On trawl vessels targeting demersal fish in the North Pacific there is always a government contracted worker – usually a recent college graduate – whose job it is to monitor fishing practices. The Observer’s duties include sampling netted fish for biodiversity, collecting otoliths, sex, length and maturity data, and among many other oddities, standing on deck while a writhing codend[1] the size of a school bus is hauled up the stern ramp. The codend is dumped into the trawl alley; fish flood, flapping dimly, shocked to be, so suddenly, in alien air.
Brief #2—Marine Environment
By Katherine Cart
I came to Amaknak Island by plane. The mountains the plane passes between were, in June, very green. The visual sense that the Aleutian Chain gives is of a treeless Hawaii – its geology is similar; the landscape is very young, and active volcanoes grow the islands sporadically. Extending like a hooked arm, the Aleutians delineate the southern edge of the Bering Sea. Amaknak rises from the North Pacific, 800 miles south of Anchorage. Around the smidge of land that is the Aleutian Chain, there is very little but sea.
Brief #3—Marine Environment
By Katherine Cart
Walk to Maine’s midcoast and look southwest. Unless you’ve gotten yourself in a spruce thicket, you will see Atlantic water filling the hole that is the Gulf of Maine. Likely, you will hear the sea, smell it, be standing in its sandy refuse. It will very possibly feel colder – or at least damper – here than a mile inland. Chilled oceanic air is sucked landwards, dumping sludgy precipitation, heaping fog, painting rime on roof, pine, window pane, dune hollow. A weathered-in gulf can be, to the casual observer, somewhat benign, rather like watching on a TV screen an avalanche shift some unpopulated mountain. Storms are spectacular to witness from the beaches, nasty to endure offshore. Inland Maine is a stronghold well protected from tidal degradation by granitic coastline, carved out over several millennia by the heaving of the Laurentide ice sheet over Appalachian stone. If you are standing at the coast and look down, between your feet you will see the long lateral scratches the Laurentide left, sloughing southwest into the sea. One cannot help but to think of fingernails, and a general determination to cling on.
Brief #2—Agriculture
By Katherine Cart
Before the industrial revolution reworked the entirety of agricultural processes in America, poultry, eggs and meat were not cheap. The average dozen, in 1913, cost today’s equivalent of $9.25. Chicken meat was served on Sundays, or for holidays, and could not be bought boneless, ground, breaded, molded into consumer-pleasing shapes. Small farms produced small quantities of meat and poultry product and lack of mass shipping transit kept businesses local. Now, however, only three mega-corporations control roughly 90% of the poultry market and four control 85% of the beef market. Legal red tape impedes the fair competition of smaller farms. Conversations concerning antitrust reforms are, once again, gaining momentum and new voices. The DIRECT (Direct Interstate Exemption for Certain Transactions) Act, seeks to amend selling restrictions and could be a boon for small meat and poultry producers. Currently, meat and poultry grown by many small processors are inspected and approved for sale within only the state of inspection. The act would lift bans on interstate sales by processors, butchers and other retailers of locally-produced meat and poultry, allowing for the direct-to-consumer sale of normal retail quantities across state lines. Congressman Cuellar says, “the bipartisan legislation will allow meat inspected by the State to be sold online and across state lines, opening up new markets for meat producers and processors.”