Remembering the 1984 UK Miners' Strike: Energy Transitions and Environmental Justice by Ho Tsz Ching           On the left is a 1996 photo of a boarded-up house on an empty street in Grimethorpe, north-east England, a pit village that was economically dependent on its closed coal mine. On the right is a polluted river delta in Gokhana, Nigeria, home of the Ogoni people. What do these two pictures have in common?  They are connected by Britain’s neoliberal energy policy of the 80s, which sought to cut costs by replacing domestic union-produced coal with foreign oil and gas at the cost of indigenous peoples like the Ogoni, who saw their homes rendered unlivable for decades to come. Today, the world stands at the cusp of yet another energy transition. In the West, coal is dead, and the oil and natural gas which supplanted it may soon make way for nuclear, solar, and wind. As each resource fades into irrelevance, however, it takes with it the liveliho...

  Wangari Maathai by Valeria Yraita-Zevallos "Trees are living symbols of peace and hope. A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded," wrote the incredible Wangari Maathai in her memoir  Unbowed .  On April 1st, 1940, a baby girl named Wangari from Nyeri, a rural area in Kenya, was born . She grew up facing certain economic struggles but she remained inclined to obtain an education and pursue bigger dreams. Wangari Maathai expressed that she is eternally grateful to her mother for allowing her to attend school, even when it was not the norm for women to do so. Being able to attend school and be surrounded by the environmental beauty of Nyeri allowed Wangari to develop an interest in learning more about the natural world.  In the early 1950s, Maathai was sent to a boarding school for her protection, as “a guerrilla war for independence began in Kenya” . As she completed her early schooling and high s...