Labouring for change

In October of 2013 over 2.5 million workers staged a national strike in Indonesia. Recently the Asia Pacific Currents podcast produced a special program exploring the current state of labour in Indonesia. Here we feature Diana Beaumont in conversation with Kirstie Hoban, an Australian union organizer living in Indonesia. Tara Hardy is a working-class queer femme poet who writes and teaches in Seattle, Washington. She was the recipient of the 2011 Washington Poet's Association Burning Word Award, and in this episode of rabble radio, we get to hear her perform her piece "red states". A lot of people work hard to grow food, but without land, growing food gets pretty tough pretty quickly. Up until the 1970s thousands of hectares of farmland were being lost each year all over the world, and the Vancouver area was no exception. In the 1970s the government decided to do something about the loss of farmland. To protect prime farming land from development, it created the Agricultural Land Reserve or ALR. The pressures to build on urban farmland are huge and Tom Baumann, a professor at the University of  the Fraser has been involved in ALR issues for many years. Lorraine Chisholm from the Redeye podcast caught up with him for an interview. All farm work and gardening involves bugs. But in in Ottawa Ontario BUGs is an acronym. It stands for the Bytowne Urban Gardens project. rabble.ca's own Megan Stacey interviewed two folks with BUGs, Myka Riopel and Pamela Scaiff about the excitement and challenges of urban gardening.