Under pressure from the public, the Vermont Legislature can close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

The Vermont Legislature will make history in a vote expected as early as January on whether to allow the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to continue operating after 2012. Never before has a state taken such a vote. "This is a tremendous opportunity for us," said Deb Katz of the Citizens Awareness Network, an antinuclear group based in Shelburne Falls, Mass. "But it's not going to be easy."

With the closing of big box stores in Brattleboro and Hinsdale, local environmentalists consider how to reuse sites in a greener, more economically responsible way

Four years ago, Home Depot opened a store in Brattleboro directly across the street from a locally owned hardware store. A citizens' group called BrattPower quickly formed to call for a boycott of the giant corporate chain. Members of the group stood outside the Home Depot holding "Shop Local" signs and talking to passersby about the importance of keeping their money in the community.

The consequences of growing corporate control of mass media were underscored as never before at the fourth National Conference for Media Reform, held June 6-8 in Minneapolis. Some 3,500 people heard Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and others hammer major news outlets for suggesting that scientists seriously disagree on whether global warming is caused by human activity. Other speakers argued that more diversity in media ownership—and therefore of coverage—would hasten the end of war in Iraq and enhance organized labor's attempts to reduce economic inequality.

For more than three decades, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant has been the subject of intense public debate throughout the state, especially in Windham county. In the past few years, several towns passed Town Meeting resolutions calling for the plant to be closed when its operating license expires in 2012. The state legislature has spent countless hours passing laws relating to Vermont Yankee. Dozens of people have been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience at the plant’s gates in Vernon, and at the Brattleboro office of Entergy Corp., the reactor’s Louisiana-based owner.

There are only seven Web sites that more people use than Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that lets anyone edit most of its articles. None of the sites that are more popular than Wikipedia have as their main purpose producing information about the world. The top sites, Google and Yahoo, mainly function as links to other sites. Facebook and Myspace, which people use to keep in touch with their friends, are third and fifth most popular, respectively.

Two lessons can be taken from the history of the nuclear power industry. First, the 103 reactors now operating at 65 locations around the United States should be closed immediately. Second, ordinary people, acting together, can close existing nuclear power plants, and stop new ones from being built.

About 30 years ago, the middle class in the United States was the biggest it’s ever been. Today, the U.S. is looking more like a country in Europe in the 1600s: a king, a handful of rich people around him, and almost everyone else living in varying degrees of poverty. Why does that matter? Well, if you ask Derek Dobiecki, a worker at the Cingular Wireless store in the Holyoke Mall, the answer is, leanin.’