My guest today is YES! magazine executive director and publisher, Fran Korten.
JB: Welcome to OpEdNews, Fran. YES! is a completely ad-free, solutions-based quarterly magazine. And I understand you now publish every day on the web. The result is a wonderfully positive reading experience. I read that YES! received an award recently. What can you tell us about it?
FK: YES! Magazine won the 2013 Utne Independent Media Award for "General Excellence." That's the top media award in our field. It recognized the importance of our solution-oriented journalism both in print and online. Needless to say, we were thrilled.
In telling us of the award Christian Williams, editor-in-chief of Utne Reader, said " YES! Magazine's message of hope and optimism is both inspiring and essential in these uncertain times." I think he summed it up well. People are indeed experiencing so much uncertainty and fear that helping them see how we can make our way through these turbulent times to something better is an urgent task. Sometimes at YES! we say that "no" is a losing strategy. You can't simply resist the old; you must build the new. At YES!, that's what we spotlight. And it is absolutely essential.
JB: Agreed. And congratulations! There are many readers who are hearing about YES! for the first time. It's still a bit abstract. Can you give a concrete example of an issue that YES! has taken on in and how your coverage differs from that of the usual, humdrum media?
Sure. There are lots of examples. Your readers can take a look at our website: http://www.yesmagazine.org/ Take our current (Fall, 2013) issue of YES!, "The Human Cost of Stuff." A lot of people know that we Americans consume way too much stuff. Our consumption is depleting natural resources worldwide and clogging our closets and our landfills. I think there is also a growing awareness that embedded in many of our products is a chain of human suffering--people displaced by mining activities, workers in sweatshops toiling under horrible conditions for minimal pay. This issue of YES! takes on these big problems. The difference in our treatment is that YES! is full of solutions--examples of people taking action and succeeding.
Our opening essay is by Annie Leonard (famous for her Story of Stuff video) citing the importance of citizen action is changing the culture and the institutional drivers that propel our overconsumption. We then show examples of ways people are finding to "unstuff" such as a public lending library for toys in Los Angeles, a "fixers collective" in Brooklyn that can repair almost anything, a meditation on the value of a simpler life. We feature how we can better assure the conditions under which the things we do buy are made--the Madesmith website that tells the story of the people who made the wares it sells; Taza chocolate that buys directly from cocoa cooperatives and works with them to make sure working conditions and pay are fair; Flor Molina, who escaped from a Los Angeles sweatshop and went on to help get California to pass its "Transparency in Supply Chains Act," aimed at eliminating slavery in supply chains. And we spotlight ways to unclog our landfills such as by designing products from the beginning with the end in mind-- the Dutch-based Fairphone is designed for all components to be recycled.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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