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?
Catholic Ethics Necessitate Life Style Change
by: Isaac Vanderburg - printed on 12-07-2000
The Pope John Paul II warns “Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life style”. However here on the bluff our ‘life style’ has been without such a look since the school’s founding in 1901. At the University of Portland, mountains of Pepsiâ cups are mined and leveled daily. The blue ore is filled then drained of fluid, eventually finding itself in a classroom trashcan with other Pilot waste that should be recycled.
A one year old monkey, Happy Birthday
by: Mono Vergara - printed on 10-24-2001
After a year of publication, I can step back and look at the 13 issues that we have successfully completed. Part of our mission has been accomplished; we brought a new forum for people to talk about the issues that affect their lives. During this period we all have learned that The Wise Monkey is needed more than ever. Today the world is facing the atrocities of war, and after thousands of years we still don’t seem to understand that war accomplishes nothing.
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.
The need for change in America's high schools
by: Ryan O'Connor - printed on 01-23-2002
A bull's eye has been strapped to the back of the public education system. Republicans, Democrats, the Christian-Right, Libertarians, rich, poor, black, red, white, brown, everyone has discovered to root of societies ills-today's high schools.
Most public schools today are in fact a microcosm of society: numerous factions competing for limited resources, with those with the loudest, strongest, most visible, supporters commandeering the spoils.
Protecting Freedom
by: Celine Fitzmaurice - printed on 03-28-2001
My views on US military and foreign policy changed drastically one January day in 1989. I was travelling on a delegation to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala with 20 students from my college and we woke up that morning in a hotel room in Guatemala City. After breakfast we boarded a bus and traveled through the Guatemalan countryside to the tiny village of Poaquil, San Jose where a series of “disappearances” had reportedly just taken place.
The Giant of Africa Comes Up Short
by: Anu and Tomi Oladele - printed on 01-31-2001
After 40 years of independence under alternating military and civilian regimes, where does Nigeria stand today? Wonder with me…
A great oil boom in the 1970’s exposed Nigeria’s abundance of natural resources, especially hydrocarbons. She was the top oil producing country in Africa and among the top five oil producers in the world. Because of this, the Nigerian economy was completely dependent on its oil sector, which continuously supplied 95% of its foreign exchange for two decades.