This expression has had such a long run that it has comprised all conventional history. All the while, civilization as top-down exploitation and expansion has been ratcheting up spectacularly, especially in recent decades, despite -- and partly because of -- fast-shrinking resource limits. Climate instability is barely beginning to act as a brake.

The relatively slow process of civilization's march via exploitation and expansion has finally graduated and adapted to something unanticipated little over a century ago: mass consumption.

The non-labor orientation of our political reality has a lot to do with the loss of May Day (May 1st) in the U.S. as a workers' show of force and rallying tool.  This is ironic when the world picked up on it big time, honoring it to this day, almost a century and a half after the U.S. anarchist labor movement created it.

Background for Sail Transport Network readers: Greenhorns partnered with the Vermont Sail Freight Project when it made its historic voyage down the Hudson River bringing food cargo last year.

Uruguay made a groundbreaking legislative change in 2013 when the nation legalized the growth, sale, and consumption of marijuana all at once. That monumental change appears to have accelerated the legalization of the plant across parts of the U.S., which has subsequently reduced much of the stigma attached to marijuana.

The foundation Harlingen Sail, the municipality of Harlingen and the province of Fryslân are hosting the race that involves several nearby countries. A feast for the eyes, it is also a training opportunity for many young sailors.

Human population growth is a major driver of unsustainable consumption levels. Like any issue, it has its pessimists and optimists. Pessimists point to the doubling of human numbers over the last half century and the projected addition of a further 50% or some 3.5 billion by the end of the century. Optimists point to the fall in the birth rate by one third over the last fifty years and that over half of the world’s citizens now live in countries at or below fertility replacement rate.

Occupying UC Berkeley land

And they never really went away.

So-called balance is exercised by the some corporate news media, catering mainly to science skeptics, to allow denial of human-generated global-warming. But there is a true balance to be met: while the progressive, science-minded alternative press does not reflect total gloom and doom, critics see this as denial of our near-term extinction. Balance in coverage must be between predicting near-term extinction from multiple climate forcings versus science-based consideration of separate, known factors in global warming that even together do not indicate runaway greenhouse effects beyond the IPCC's worst case.

Each spill, we have seen over the decades, does practically nothing to stop the next one, and the next one. News items surface for a couple of days, only to disappear unless there was dramatic loss of human life. The public's glimpse of every major pollution event is fleeting, while the polluting interests and impotent "relevant" government agencies carry on.