Wise Monkey News is here to provide young people an opportunity to discuss the issues that affect their lives. We hope that, through your participation, this website serves as a forum for the development, exchange, and expression of ideas that will prepare us to assume our positions as the leaders of tomorrow's world. Have something to say?
Romero’s Legacy of Liberation Call and Challenge
by: Dawn Hunter - printed on 11-15-2000
Within the Catholic Church, a new approach to theology has blossomed during the second half of the twentieth century. This theology is now known throughout the world as the theology of liberation.
This theology is astonishing because its deepest insights did not spring from the minds of scholars in Europe, but rather from small communities of the poorest and least literate men and women in Latin America.
China’s Environment versus Economy
by: Jefferson Azevedo - printed on 10-10-2001
It is impossible to talk about China without taking into account the environmental problem. With a population of about 1.2 billion people – one out of every five human beings in the world – China alone has the potential to raise the greenhouse effect to levels far beyond scientists’ worst nightmares. And this is considering that its population, four times as big as that of the United States, uses only half as much energy and resources as America does.
Questioning nature's world view
by: Isaac Vanderburg - printed on 04-25-2001
Last Thursday night, some 2000 years after the death of Jesus, a group of UP students gathered in Buckley Center auditorium to discuss two videos about the salmon in the rivers and the smoke in the air. After 60 Minutes assured the students that economists and salmon don’t get along, Ted Koppel assured them that neither do politics and the global atmosphere. Enraged by the evident injustice, students eagerly chortled over the issues, assuring each other that Bush is bad, alternative energy is good and the woman on Koppel’s program who had opposed the Kyoto clean-air agreement was typical of those damned pro-oil types.
El Salvador: Liberating the poor, liberating ecology
by: Jessica M. Jenkins - printed on 01-23-2002
Raul's family has no rice this year. As peasants in the northern mountains of El Salvador they live off the land, so when the land suffers so do they. In good years, they can eat corn, beans, rice, and vegetables, and have just enough left over to sell in order to purchase tools, clothing, medicine. The problem is that the good years have been few and far between as of late. Within the past ten years, both drought and hurricanes have struck Central America with extreme agricultural instability, bad for any farmer but devastating for subsistence growers like Raul.
Winging it Costa Rica style: studying snakes in the tropics
by: Eron Osterhaus - printed on 02-20-2002
It's not that it's overly hot-it's not. It's the humidity. A shower is required after taking the effort to walk down the hall to take a shower in the first place. If it weren't for this rickety fan over-head, this room would be unbearable. Well, I guess the liter of Ron Bacardi Superior "Gold" that is currently accompanying me aids in that end as well. Often times there is not much else to do but "talk" to the bottle-considering I don't speak Spanish and my dorm mates don't seem too interested in carrying on conversations in English.
When life on the streets meets the yellowbrick road
by: Erin Goodling - printed on 02-27-2002
What began as a mild interest in the homeless issues of Portland (thanks to my morning bike commute past Dignity Village, Portland's tent city), soon became a logistical understanding of homeless youth services in Portland (thanks to a term paper for Br. Stabrowski's Urban Politics class at the University of Portland). Shortly thereafter, I found out that my friend, Scott, works at Yellow Brick Road, the street outreach component of Willamette Bridge Youth Services.