"Heat, heat, heat is the name of the game on planet Earth this year," says Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at Weather Underground. "The world is beset with extreme weather events that have caused the deaths of thousands and the displacement of millions."
The United States is the world's greatest polluter and a leader in per capita carbon emissions. We are experiencing the full impact of extreme heat in Southern California where temperatures have set records accompanied by wild fires. All this is taking place in 2018 — six years after the release of this riveting collection of columns by Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television. and the Internet and her colleague Denis Moynihan. We each need to play our part to restore ecological sanity, as Goodman and Moynihan remind us from a variety of angles: from "Listen to the People, Not the Polluters" to "The Long, Hot March of Climate Change."
The climate-change section alone would make this volume worth reading, but equally compelling are columns on Obama's three wars and his legacy; money in politics, dirty energy, the myth of post-racial America, capital punishment, corporate rule, uprisings, and stopping the violence. And even that is not an exhaustive list for this thought-provoking collection. Amy Goodman has said: "Democracy is not something we just achieve in one fell swoop. It's something we have to fight for every day." She and her colleague have fought the good fight with honesty, courage and integrity, and their example invites us to do the same.
