Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world’s poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South.

The extraordinary British radical historian Edward Thompson described one of his goals as being to spare those whose lives and dreams are lost to history from the “enormous condescension of posterity.” In writing the first half of the life of James P. Cannon, Bryan Palmer takes up an even more ambitious task.

Jeffrey Simpson, Mark Jaccard and Nic Rivers belong to the second group. In Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge, they show convincingly that, if government doesn’t act, this country’s appalling record on greenhouse-gas emissions will get much worse.

Every street in every old Canadian industrial town has its own Gus Popadopolous. He’s the old timer on your block that stuck around when the abandoned factory morphed into gentrified condos. His mode of dress is a white undershirt, no matter what the weather. His all-purpose accoutrement is a shovel, not a cell phone. He might cheer you on at road hockey, but wouldn’t hesitate to yell at you if the ball went into his garden. You know him. You might even be him!

The Canadian peace movement has just held a series of marches to mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and to call on the Canadian government to end our military involvement in Afghanistan. A majority of Canadians want the troops home, and over sixty per cent oppose extending the mission past 2009. Yet, almost every Liberal MP lined up with the Conservatives on March 13 to support Stephen Harper’s plan to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan to 2011.

The earth moved. It was one of those rare moments in history when all that had been solid (and stultifying) seemed to melt into air. As William Wordsworth wrote of the epoch of the French Revolution, in 1805 – verse that also captured something of the spirit of the ‘68: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven!”

H.L. Mencken once wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. “British Columbia’s recently announced carbon tax is a case in point. It won’t reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and it will have no impact on global warming – but it will hurt working people and the poor.

Peter Kulchyski, Native Studies professor at the University of Manitoba, took up this challenge through many years living in the north, most notably in the communities of Panniqtuuq, in Nunavut, as well as Fort Good Hope and Fort Simpson, in Denendeh (Northwest Territories). The results can be found in his book, Like the Sound of a Drum (University of Manitoba Press, 2001).

Resources and effort must be placed into building the knowledge and capacity amongst First Nations and Métis leadership, including grassroots, elders and youth, to engage in both an Indigenous-led corporate-finance campaign and in decision-making processes on environment, energy, climate and economic policies related to halting the tar-sands expansion.

Plans are afoot for the wholesale ecological reconfiguration of vast parts of the northern hemisphere. The planners are suggesting that infrastructure is required to facilitate far-reaching change: the second-largest dam in the world, a possible nuclear-power station at Peace River, and pipelines across Alberta to the west coast, across the prairies, and down the Mackenzie River.