Island Press Field Notes

This Monday, Chris Johnson will appear on WORT-FM in Madison, WI to discuss his and David Govatski's new book, Forests for the People.

This week, we celebrate the third release of our new E-ssential, Trash Backwards by David Naylor, with a selection from High Tech Trash. From Wired magazine:

I've never been a fan of bumper stickers, though I’ve always thought the idea had potential. Done right, you’d think a bumper sticker could be a sort of ideological haiku, an elegant little distillation of a person’s unique perception of the world. Or, alternatively, that it could express genuine wit by being a joke that doesn’t take too long to tell. And even if a bumper sticker isn’t very likely to prompt people to act, it should at least make them imagine. As in, for example, “Visualize Whirled Peas.”

Next month will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth. Given the last two centuries' stratospheric advances in technology and the past century's progress in human rights policy, one would think that child labor, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and the export of hazardous industrial refuse to poor countries and communities would be a thing of the past. But as several reports released last month show, Dickensian working and living conditions are still very much with us. Children continue to be engaged in hazardous manual labor instead of attending school.