By Minsu Longiaru There’s an old, fiendishly catchy Sesame Street song that has been going through my head recently that goes: “Everybody eats, / everybody eats / Meat and fish and cereal / Carrots, peas and beets / Everybody knows / That everyone he meets / Likes to eat / How do we know it’s so? ‘Cause everybody, everybody eats.” While we would all like a world in which everybody eats a healthy diet, a rec ...

In balance with nature? Published • Sun, Aug 26, 2012 Segregation and sustainability in Detroit By Gregg Newsom This is the latest in a series of columns discussing the Environmental Justice Principles drafted and adopted by delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held Oct. 24-27, 1991. Environmental Justice Principle No. 12 “affirms the need for urban and rural ecolo ...

By Grace Lee Boggs Special to the Michigan Citizen The Boggs Center recently enjoyed a visit by members of Heartside Ministry, a community organization in Grand Rapids. The visitors included a man, five women and three middle school children. One of the women, an African American, was accompanied by her great-granddaughter. I was impressed by the variety of services the Ministry provides: Narcotics Anonymou ...

By Cheryl Simon On Aug. 22 at 5:30 p.m. at Gleaners Community Food Bank, the Detroit Food Policy Council (DFPC) will be hosting a public listening session on the sale of city-owned land. With recent media stories about a pending sale of a substantial number of city-owned lots to Hantz Farms, the DFPC received many calls from Detroiters asking about the land acquisition process in general and this potential ...

By Patrick Geans-Ali DETROIT — This week’s column addresses environmental Justice Principle No. 12, which “affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and provide fair access for all to the full range of resources.” There are probably more community-based initiative ...

By Richard Feldman Boggs Center Last week, Ray Lesser and Sue Wolpert, publishers of Funny Times, came from Cleveland to visit the Boggs Center. Ray and Sue have been publishing for more than two decades. Today, their 24-page tabloid has more than 65,000 subscribers from across the globe. It is filled with cartoons, comic strips and stories readers have sent to them. During the day, they got a sense of our ...

By Malik Yakini In the mid-1970s, I was a member of the Detroit-based Pan-African Congress, USA. Inspired by the South African political party, the Pan-Africanist Congress, the PAC-USA asserted that “land is the basis of power.” Of course, this slogan echoed the words of Malcolm X and countless other Black activists before him. It embodied the understanding that it is from the land that we get the food that ...

By Victoria Goff Each week, this column discusses the principles of different movements, including the environment, digital and food justice movements. This week, we’re discussing the 12th environmental justice principle, which “affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our commun ...

By Gregg Newsom Environmental Justice Principle 11 “recognizes a special legal and natural relationship of native peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination.” I have to thank my co-columnists for their expressions around this principle. Two week’s ago Victoria Goff’s article Environmental Justice through Tribal Sovereignty ...

By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen RE-Imagining Work is an essential part of RE-Imagining Revolution. That’s why Detroit 2012 provided exciting opportunities July 1-15 for participants to re-imagine Work. - Every morning participants could put on work gloves and go to one of Detroit’s ongoing community sites (e.g. Feedom Freedom Growers, Hope District, Heidelberg Project, D-Town Farm) to gar ...