by Michelle Chen
- USA -

A typical suburban supermarket aisle today will feature free-range turkeys and grass-fed steak glistening in shrink wrap—a sign, perhaps, that Americans are growing more conscious of the connection between tonight's dinner and the environment. But while organics and natural products are trendier than ever, old habits loom large over the American appetite: despite evidence that carnivorous diets drive ecological destruction, milk, eggs and meat remain staples of the Western diet.

Still, while most Americans are not about to swear off cheeseburgers, concerns about climate change and environmental sustainability are raising public consciousness about the treatment of farm animals and the ethics of food production.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

The landscape of Guiyu, a remote town in China’s Guangdong province, embodies a collision between past and future. Amid acidic plumes of smoke and vast mountains of trash, migrants scour for valuable scraps using their bare hands and simple tools. Yet Guiyu’s apocalyptic wasteland is a byproduct of the Information Age: the workers have eked out a living from dissecting cell phones, computers, televisions, and other toxic debris of the electronics industry.

by Michelle Chen
– USA –

“I can scream, and nobody can hear me.”

The walls had been closing in on Monica Bejar for years. She and her husband had both crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border for work, like countless other migrants. But only he had secured a green card. For over a decade, Monica’s hopes of obtaining legal status depended, as far as she knew, completely on the man who battered her.

A host of legal binds tightened the grip of abuse. Bejar had banked on the hope that her husband would help her become a legal resident. Instead, to prove a point, he tore up her immigration paperwork and threatened to report her to authorities if she tried to leave. She feared losing her children.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

Tanya McLeod’s marriage was hurting, but her husband thought he could make it up to her when he brought her a cute dog as a “peace offering.” The family stayed together and the dog grew up alongside her children—until the day her husband decided to destroy the animal with his bare hands.

At that point, McLeod says, “I knew that he was capable of killing me.”

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

Feb. 5th - Today marks Fat Tuesday in New Orleans and the most celebrated day of Mardi Gras festivities. As thousands of visitors flock to the city to celebrate, thousands more have yet to return home. - Ed.

• Despite demonstrations and resistance, the demolition of New Orleans' public housing continues. Photograph by
Mavis Yorks. •

Her home survived Hurricane Katrina, but it will crumble under the city’s plan to demolish low-income housing in the name of “redevelopment.”

To the 33 year-old single mother of three, the officials pushing to raze St. Bernard are carrying out disaster by design. “How could they just get away with it?” she asks.

The pending demolition of the St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper, C.J. Peete, and Lafitte projects has confirmed the fears of the city’s poorest, blackest, and hardest hit communities: that New Orleans’ “recovery” in the wake of the storm is built on the city’s old demons of racial and class strife.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

Angela Greene has a tough job: she and her workcrew scale the rooftops of Richmond, California to run wires, lay racks, and bend metal piping. Yet in the end, when she unfurls a gleaming solar panel over her community, it feels easy to save the planet.

After being laid off from her former job at a printing business, Greene went through a vocational training program and then joined Solar Richmond, an organization that is bringing sustainable energy along with new jobs to the heavily black and Latino port city.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

After spending years living in the homes of strangers, Andreah Moyer finally found her way back to her grandfather at the age of seventeen.

• Over half a million children are in foster care today, many of them shuttling from placement to placement. Photograph by Michael J. Fajardo. •

For her first eight years, Moyer’s grandparents helped raise her in rural Iowa. But her parents’ substance abuse eventually forced the household apart. Moyer and her two brothers were swept into the state’s foster care system, and she spent most of her adolescence isolated from her family. By the time she left foster care in her late teens, Moyer had bounced through more than 15 state-funded substitute homes.

After they reunited, her grandfather told her that throughout those years, her grandparents desperately wanted her back home again. But as a farm family living on a fixed income, they were convinced their hearts stretched beyond their means.

by Michelle Chen
USA

"Rich men dam the water
Flooding the hill rice field, causing problems for Mother
Rich men dam the river
Flooding the roof and making Mother homeless"

• The lives of the Karen are threatened by Burma's dam projects. Photograph by Pithawat Vachiramon. •

For thousands of years, the Salween has flowed freely through China, Burma and Thailand, nourishing lush ecosystems and indigenous communities throughout its 2,800-kilometer course. But the military junta, which has ruled Burma since it seized power in August of 1988, has caught up to the possibilities of international “development” by deciding to harness the latent energy of the Salween. The dictatorship known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) is now driving four massive multibillion-dollar dam projects that would exploit the river for the first time with the intent of producing hydroelectric power. Human-rights groups say that the multiple emerging Salween dam projects will ignite the latest spark in the Burmese people’s long-smoldering struggle against this government.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

• Students line up to enter KGIA on the first day of school. Photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Paper (Tom Callan) •

The recent New York Times article focused on key players in the political wrangling over the school. We believe the WIP’s coverage of this issue complements the Times’ investigation by highlighting the voices from the communities involved–students, grassroots groups pushing for multicultural education in the city, and the youth activists who, in an effort to bring visibility to Arab community issues, found themselves swept up in a political firestorm.

by Michelle Chen
USA

• Detail of mural co-painted by the author. Photograph by Michelle Chen. •

A smile blooms on the round face of a middle-aged man as his home begins to glow. For the past three days, he has watched volunteers, including me, spread paint over the front wall, washing the drab cement slab in a torrent of rainbow stripes and geometric shapes.

We work and sweat contentedly, surrounded by children who color in purple bubbles alongside us and never tire of crying, ‘What’s your name?’ in English. The wall fills up: a lone crude window is subsumed in a human-sized purple triangle, and paralleled on the right by a pink triangle containing an imaginary window, which looks out on a landscape that one of the inhabitants instructively scribbled for us on paper. As I put the last dots of color on a scene of a pink sailboat drifting before a forest with snow-capped mountains, the man offers a gentle suggestion.

by Michelle Chen
USA

“Before, we could just drink straight from the river – we could drink from any stream. But it’s not like that now.”

• An Achuar Apu or spiritual leader. Photograph by Isabel Sande/Películas Atabamba •

For over thirty years the once-pristine expanse hugging the Corrientes River has been known to the oil industry as Block 1AB. But the Achuar people are now defending it as their ancestral home, and they want the US company that first opened the area to oil extraction, Occidental Petroleum, to pay for the environmental aftermath.