Can we trust the future of food production to giant biotech corporations and their lobbyists?

TED NACE writes: "Today, we rarely hear such simple questions as, 'What is an economy for?' or 'Should we trust our future to corporations?' But these were exactly the sort of questions that farmers in North Dakota decided to ask during the debate over GM wheat. As one farmer, Steve Pollestad, expressed it, North Dakotans had a choice. They could put the future of wheat 'in the hands of people who are accountable to the citizens of North Dakota. Or, we could let Monsanto decide. And maybe we also could get Enron to run our utilities and Arthur Anderson to keep the books.'

It's no coincidence that such sentiments grow out of the fields of North Dakota. Beneath the state's conservative surface are surprising currents of history, some quite radically divergent from the American mainstream. North Dakota's economy cannot be described as corporate, but neither can it be described as socialist. Perhaps the best way to describe it is with a term that doesn't appear too often in economics textbooks: democratic."

-- From Breadbasket of Democracy, Orion Magazine, 2006.

Dr. Andrew Weil, In the Wake of Man: Questions on the State of the Planet

Botanist, Harvard MD, researcher, professor, best-selling health author, and world-renowned pioneer in Integrative Medicine, in this 2-part Video Essay Dr. Weil expresses our collective hopes and fears for the future health of our planet and our species.

James Howard Kunstler

"The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century."

CHARLES WOHLFORTH, "On Thin Ice".

Like canaries in a coal mine, our northernmost Americans are the first to face the alarming challenges of global warming.

Peter de Menocal, Video Interview, "The Event of the Century: Science, Global Warming, and Environmental Policy".

What do Florida, the treasures of Venice (Italy), and Bangladesh have in common? They could all soon be part of our past if we don't muster the political will to reverse course on industrial pollution. Geologist, oceanographer, and climatologist de Menocal shares insights on the known and potential effects of the continuing development of industrial civilization on world climate – and in the near future!

MIKE DAVIS, "Slum Ecology."

The international economic policies that decimated rural infrastructures worldwide have driven hundreds of millions of the poor to already teeming cities.