Plastic, Plastic Everywhere — Even at the UN's "Plastic Free" Conference. From the moment I landed in Ottawa, the counter-argument of the plastics industry was inescapable, from wall-sized ads at the airport to billboards on trucks that cruised around the downtown convention center. Their message? Curtailing plastic production would spell literal doom. "These plastics deliver water" on an ad depicting a girl drinking from a bottle in what was implied to be a disaster zone.

Who Has the Right to "Disrupt" the University? Perhaps the most egregious example of the administrator-as-disruptor is Gordon Gee, currently the president of West Virginia University (WVU), whose administration pushed through extraordinarily deep cuts to the institution's academic offerings last fall. During a meeting of the faculty senate, Gee said "I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it . . . And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption."

Protesters seek not only to advance their points of view, but to change the facts on the ground on their campuses. In doing so, they correctly recognize that the contemporary American university is much more than a marketplace of ideas; it is an unprecedented institutional form that acts as a powerful force in fields from real estate to healthcare to finance—to, indeed, weapons manufacturing. In fact, it is precisely these operations—and their entanglements with the Israeli and US war machines—that student protesters are targeting, with demands that are not only expressive (asking administrators to join calls for a ceasefire, for example) but also material. When the very point of protesting is to put a stop to business as usual, the right to disrupt becomes a central part of the right to protest. Indeed, university administrators are aware that campus protest is about disruption rather than just expression—not least because they have spent the last few years contending with a wave of "disruptive" union activity that has spread to nearly every part of the large and growing university apparatus.

How we heal. "First out was a rust-red calf, legs unsure against the solid ground of a Rocky Mountains meadow. Then in an instant a whole herd of shaggy bison surged, hooves flashing, tails up, eyes wide, a long-awaited storm of buffalo power thundering into the wild... the first free-roaming bison ever to be unleashed onto the North American prairie by a sovereign Tribal government."
More on tribal/federal collaborations and tensions from National Parks magazine: an innovative archaeological field school; freeing the lands between Badger Creek and the Two Medicine River from oil leases; a Blackfeet-run tour company in Glacier National Park, over a century after Native Americans were displaced to create the park.

"This mountain front may be someone's park, or someone's vacation but this is our cultural homeland. This is where we were given the gifts of life itself." If every national park sits on ancestral lands, what does it mean to be a Native American working for the Park Service today? A recorded discussion and screening of Paving Tundra.