Because People Matter

Editorial: It's Not That Easy Being Green

How People Matter

By Muriel Strand, Co-Coordinating Editor for this issue

As I write my first BPM editorial, my mind wanders back to when I helped start the Sacramento Greens, before the Green Party, when we met in Dale Crandall-Bear’s New Society bookstore. Why the Greens? Because the integration of social and ecological sustainability is a key Green principle.

A few years later this newspaper was created Because some Sacramentans believe People Matter. People can make a difference, and people deserve consideration from others.

But how much do people matter?

Daniel Singer Millennium Essay 2009

Annual prize for best essay on a selected topic

By Muriel Strand

The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation annually recognizes an original essay that helps further socialist ideas in the tradition of Daniel Singer. Singer, a writer and journalist who passed away in 2000, was for many years the European correspondent for the US magazine The Nation. Singer’s last book was Whose Millennium? (1999), a polemic against market fundamentalism and the rule of capital.

Daniel Singer’s ideas can summarized as follows:

What To Do With All Those Extra Cucumbers!!?

Share by gleaning and trading locally

By Karen Hansen and Muriel Strand

Gleaning—the ancient practice of picking over farm fields after the harvest—is making a comeback. Joe and Chris Miller’s fields at a Colorado farm were picked so clean in one day last November that a second day of gleaning was canceled Sunday after 40,000 people showed up the first day.

There are Gleaning Projects all around the nation.