For me, religion usually doesn’t come to mind when thinking about how to stop pipelines. Luckily the idea to use religious places came to the mind of some nuns. In order to stop a pipeline project going through sensitive land a group of nuns built a chapel! The power of
Continue readingTag: Direct Action
Things Are Good: Tonawanda Provides a Template for Transitioning a Town’s Economy from Coal
Globally, coal is on the way out and in America small towns are suffering because coal demand is dropping. The predictable plight of coal-backed small towns in the USA has some politicians trying to bailout the coal industry in order to protect jobs, which is obviously the wrong approach. Instead,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Build Butterflyways for Beautiful Pollinators
Every pollinator is beautiful and there is an easy way to see more of them while helping the world: butterflyways. The concept is simple: bees and butterflies are under a lot of pressure from human activity so help them on their pollination journey by feeding them. All you have to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Forget NIMBYs, it’s All About YIMBYs
Anybody engaged with civic action knows the prevalence of NIMBYism, those people who say ‘Not in my Backyard’ and try to stop any progress good or bad. This attitude of blocking anything has led to some cities being left behind while other cities leap ahead. Recently Toronto has seen a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Proof Protests Work: Trump’s Cancelled Plans
‘Protesting it pointless’ is a refrain heard around the world by people who disavow public displays of disaffection. For the most part the idea of protesting being useless comes from the people in power who don’t want to be protested (or even questioned). This is evident when it comes to
Continue readingThings Are Good: New bank Account Morally Monitors Your Purchases
money Aspiration financial firm is a B-corporatoin that wants to help people “vote with their wallets”. It’s incredibly hard for individuals to stay up to date on the damage that large organizations do despite that a lot of people care. Consumers want to punish companies for some of their actions
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Bold, Bodacious Beard Club
Beards are wonderful. I say this not has a biased individual who has a beard, but has a person who understands that beards are more than they seem. In the province of Newfoundland there is a beard club that spends their time making the world a better place. The best
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Trump Forest
There’s a new forest growing and it’s spreading over the entire world – and you can help spread it. Trump Forest is more of an idea than a physical place, but it’s all about the physical. President Trump’s ignorance around climate change is apparent and will have disastrous impacts on
Continue readingThings Are Good: Get Rewarded for Supporting Civil Disobedience
If your idea to change the world is creative enough then you could get $250,000 from LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. Technically, it’ll be from MIT Media Lab with money from Hoffman. The Lab and Hoffman teamed up to ensure that creative civil resistance in the USA doesn’t die under the
Continue readingThings Are Good: What You Can do Now to Mitigate Climate Change
You probably feel overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite ways that climate change alters the planet and your life. Thankfully, you don’t need to sit ideally by and watch the world get too hot. You can start making a difference today by just monitoring what you do and where you get
Continue readingThings Are Good: Use Technology to Mobilize Your Community
The current federal leadership in the USA has many people concerned about their rights and freedoms. If you’re one of those people you can use these technological tools to help you stand up and fight back. Newsweek, rather surprisingly, compiled a list of tech tools that can be used to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Why Mining Matters and Why You Should Care
Despite our technological advances modern civilization relies on mineral resources just as much (if not more) than we did in the past. Our computers need rare earth material to work and other products need metals like aluminum. Recycling isn’t perfect and isn’t plentiful around the world. All of these factors
Continue readingThings Are Good: How a Better World Can Come from Supply Chain Management
The Canadian organization Shareholder Association for Research & Education (SHARE) just released a report on how supply chain management can help promote and enforce human rights. Some countries legally require companies to report the status of human rights and any liabilities that may stem from neglect or worse. Canada, however,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Use a Bot to Make Ethical Investments
money A new company, OpenInvest, wants you to use its bots to make your monetary life more ethical. A very popular way to invest in the market is to use index funds, which are a smorgasbord of stocks which will hopefully rise with the stock market as a whole. Most
Continue readingThings Are Good: How to be an Activist
Many people are troubled with the state of global politics and maybe you’re one of those bothered people. What are you going to do about it? Over at Grist they have a simple guide to being an effective activist for your cause (and I’m sure it’s a good one!). In
Continue readingThings Are Good: Visualizing Bold Climate Action
There’s so much talk about taking action around climate change that it can be hard to remember what real action looks like. Climate action can take on many different forms and around the world how places react to climate change is different; meaning that we can see so many ways
Continue readingThings Are Good: Standing Rock Sioux Achieve a Victory
This is proof that direct protest action works. The US Army Corps of Engineers has decided to not grant permission to allow the Dakota Access pipeline to be built as planned. The pipeline was meant to go through burial lands of the Standing Rock Sioux which is offensive in itself,
Continue readingThings Are Good: Stop The Traffik App
Human trafficking is a real problem throughout the globe and sadly it isn’t showing signs of slowing down. An organization, Stop the Traffik, is focused on ending human trafficking and has launched an app to help in that process. The charity has a good history of stopping trafficking (see their
Continue readingThings Are Good: Easily Browse Online Anonymously
In a world where our digital lives are tracked by democratic governments (Canada and the UK amongst them) we need to ensure that we can have private conversations online. Over at Digg they have collected a very easy to follow setup to get your protecting your privacy online in only
Continue readingThings Are Good: Slavoj Zizeck on the Ethics of Consumption
Slavoj Zizeck is a modern thinker that has done a great job of critiquing the overarching assumptions in our society when it comes to power dynamics and the insidiousness of neoliberalism. In the video above his views on capitalistic consumption are summed up rather nicely. It’s worth the ten minute
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