On 31 March, 2015, Joni Mitchell – who helped launch Greenpeace with a 1970 benefit concert, and emerged as one of the greatest songwriters and performers of the last 50 years – experienced a brain aneurysm. Friends found her unconscious at her home in Los Angeles. She regained consciousness in the ambulance and entered intensive care at UCLA Medical Center. She was alert and communicating before and after treatment.

"Joni is a strong-willed woman," her friend Leslie Morris said, "and is nowhere near giving up the fight." The public may send messages to Mitchell at We Love You, Joni!. Joni is now at home in Los Angeles and undergoing daily therapies. Although her condition is serious, a recovery is expected.

Vulnerable young artist

I first heard Joni Mitchell's music in the summer of 196...

In 2002, global warming denialist and anti-environmental gadfly Bjørn Lomborg consigned the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, to "the dustbin of history." However, 42 years of data now appear to vindicate the book’s premise, that the human enterprise must accept some limits on economic growth.

Research published in 2014 by Dr. Graham Turner at the University of Melbourne shows that four decades of data track closely to the Limits "Business As Usual" (BAU) scenario, which they warned could lead to resource constrained economies and large-scale economic collapse in this century. The Limits authors did not make predictions; rather, they outlined possible futures and explained how those scenarios could arise, and what the consequences might be.

In outlining the BAU scenario, the The Limits to ...

I live in a forest, and know that I am fortunate. I watch flicker and siskin in the cedars. I hear thrush and vireo in the veiled vastness. Cutthroat trout inhabit the lake, wolves howl on winter nights, and raccoons venture out with their families for my scraps. But I know the forest I live in is rare and under assault. Those cedar and fir, hemlock and spruce, could be converted to money, the great driver of this modern world.

The value of forests is an ancient tale. We may recall that humanity’s earliest stories – Ramayana, Gilgamesh, Raven and People – take place in the forest, with awe for its mysterious immensity. Raven hops from its forest home to find humans inside a clamshell on the beach. Rama enlists the forest animals to help vanquish the world’s evil. When King Gilgamesh fall... Read more >

Russia's overreaction to the Greenpeace Arctic protest — and their ludicrous waffling on the actual charges — will not work out well for Russia. Their extraordinary response will more likely help the global climate movement meet its goals.

Public dissent against abusive authority appears as old as any remembered human history. The Sumerian story of King Gilgamesh begins with public complaints that the king exploited young men for war and young women for his lust, failing in his role as the "people's shepherd." In Antiquities, Jewish historian Josephus recounts peasant protests against Roman abuse, governor Pilate sending assassins and how this overreaction incited men, women and children to offer their lives en masse by laying prostrate in the city square.

In our era, Gandhi liberated Ind... Read more >