The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics – Book Review

George Lipsitz has sculpted a set of essays into a masterful volume that engages the critical questions of the last several generations of Americans. He provides stunning insights into the ways in which whiteness has been formulated and put into action in the past century, how it has shifted and changed, how it is in itself a fractured and mutable construction, and what its current manifestations are

Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 – Book Review

Dana Frank argues that Seattle\u27s working people rode an unprecedented wave of power and control from the World War I boom economy to the early 1920s. During that era, not only did Seattle trade unions give some grudging limited support to unionization among women, African Americans, and Japanese Americans, they also sought to create a political economy controlled by and for the working class. Leaders of the Seattle Central Labor Council attempted to wield the purchasing power of union members to carry out consumer boycotts against unfair retailers in the city, to establish worker owned cooperative enterprises such as grocery and dry goods stores, barbershops, laundries, and theaters

Legacy and Testament: The Story of Columbia River Gillnetters – Book Review

Who controls the commons and with what end in mind? Irene Martin proposes that Columbia River gillnetters have rights to fish for salmon that are rooted in custom and community (p. 109). Since the 1920s, canning companies on the Columbia began to buy fish from independent boat owners rather than running fleets of their own. As a result, small groups of those fishermen established drift rights by clearing snags and debris from the stretches of the river bottom. Competition among fishermen, complicated by the sale and inheritance of drift rights, led to court battles that confirmed the legality of drift rights as property. Up to 1990, Martin explains, [d] rift rights were a community\u27s way of organizing access to fishing grounds (p. 33). In that year, however, the Washington Supreme Court ruled: Only the Department [of Fisheries] is in a position to establish the orderly promotion of gillnet fishing on the Columbia River (p. 99). That decree, along with the placement of salmon on the endangered species list and the competition for the resource with Native Americans (who have treaty rights) and with sport fishers, has proven a death knell for the lifeways of Columbia River gillnet fishermen

Review: Peace Weavers: Uniting the Salish Coast through Cross-Cultural Marriages by Candace Wellman

Independent historian Candace Wellman spent nearly two decades painstakingly combing local sources regarding “cross-cultural” households created by the unions between Coast Salish women and American men in the northern Puget Sound between the 1850s and 1870s. Out of more than a hundred such cases for which she has data, Wellman focuses on four couples arguing that the “Indigenous wives occupied a middle ground between people of alien cultures” and successfully blended cultures (p. 11). She also contends that the women and their descendants contributed significantly to the social and political successes of tribal communities in the region

The Northwest Salmon Crisis: A Documentary History - Book Review

In this work, editors Joseph Cone and Sandy Ridlington have brought together an impressive set of documents dating from the mid-1850s treaties with Native Americans to the present. The authors divide the volume into four sections that cover the ideologies and parties involved in the debates over the place and role of salmon fisheries

COP27 Climate Change Conference: Urgent action needed for Africa and the world

Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate change.The 2022 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) paints a dark picture of the future of life on earth, characterised by ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and climate hazards such as heatwaves and floods. These are all linked to physical and mental health problems, with direct and indirect consequences of increased morbidity and mortality. To avoid these catastrophic health effects across all regions of the globe, there is broad agreement—as 231 health journals argued together in 2021—that the rise in global temperature must be limited to less than 1.5oC compared with pre-industrial levels. While the Paris Agreement of 2015 outlines a global action framework that incorporates providing climate finance to developing countries, this support has yet to materialise. COP27 is the fifth Conference of the Parties (COP) to be organised in Africa since its inception in 1995. Ahead of this meeting, we—as health journal editors from across the continent—call for urgent action to ensure it is the COP that finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries. This is essential not just for the health of those countries, but for the health of the whole world

COP27 CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE: URGENT ACTION NEEDED FOR AFRICA AND THE WORLD

Wealthy nations must step up support for Africa and vulnerable countries in addressing past, present and future impacts of climate chang

COP27 climate change conference: Urgent action needed for Africa and the world

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