Tracy Frisch | The Sun Magazine

Tracy Frisch

Tracy Frisch finds joy and wonder in her expansive food gardens and advocates for pollution reduction in Upstate New York.

— From September 2022
The Sun Interview

The Great Decline

Shanna Swan On The Worldwide Drop In Fertility

Frisch: You found about a 1 percent decline in sperm counts per year.

Swan: Yes, which would mean a 50 percent decline over fifty years. We’re actually seeing something a little steeper than that.

September 2022
The Sun Interview

Something In The Water

Robert Bilott On Corporate Greed And Chemical Contamination

The cows were getting sick and wasting away. They were developing tumors. Their teeth were turning black. Calves were stillborn or born with cloudy or deformed eyes.

March 2022
The Sun Interview

The Most Dangerous Place

Rachel Louise Snyder On The Persistent Problem Of Domestic Violence

Another woman’s husband got a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage at home. He would threaten to put it in the bed or the shower with her. That kind of emotional torture needs no physical violence.

September 2020
The Sun Interview

The Four Invasions

Nick Estes On Indigenous Resistance And The Vision Of A Better Future

Indigenous people are protecting the earth’s lungs and liver. Without us, civilization would be even farther down the road to its own destruction.

May 2020
The Sun Interview

To Free Ourselves, We Must Feed Ourselves

Leah Penniman On Bringing People Of Color Back To The Land

We have food apartheid, a system of segregation that relegates certain people to food abundance and others to food scarcity. If you’re a black child in America, you are twice as likely to go to bed hungry tonight as a white child.

July 2019
The Sun Interview

Unfair Advantage

Stacy Mitchell On How Amazon Undermines Local Economies

To think of Amazon as a retailer is to miss the true nature of this company. Amazon wants to control the underlying infrastructure of commerce.

November 2018
The Sun Interview

An Embarrassment Of Riches

Les Leopold On Forty Years Of Runaway Inequality

Our economy does not work for all of us. It works for a small handful of elites who are extracting as much wealth from it as they can.

May 2018
The Sun Interview

The End Of Insurance?

Andrew Coates On Fixing Our Broken Healthcare System

It’s appalling that one person’s illness would be an opportunity for another to make money. The care of human beings should not be a commodity.

March 2018
The Sun Interview

An Open Mind

Sera Davidow Questions What We Think We Know About Mental Illness

I’ll tell you what we don’t do: we don’t call the person’s doctor, or dial 911, or drive people to the emergency room. We ask what’s going on for them — not what’s “wrong” with them or if they have been given a diagnosis. If they do mention a diagnosis, we ask what it means to them. If they talk about voices, visions, suicidal thoughts, or injuring themselves, we meet this with calm curiosity. We’ve found that what helps people move through such feelings is being able to talk openly about them. Unfortunately many people don’t talk openly in clinical environments for fear that alarms will be sounded.

April 2017
The Sun Interview

Criminal Injustice

Maya Schenwar On The Failure Of Mass Incarceration

Prison deepened my sister’s addiction, crushed her self-esteem, narrowed her options for jobs and education, and diminished her hope for a good life. She was in a much worse situation each time she came out.

June 2015
The Sun Interview

Too Much Of A Good Thing

Daniel E. Lieberman On How Civilization Makes Us Sick

There’s growing attention to the importance of nutrition and physical activity, which is a cause for hope, but my concern is that these trends are very much class driven. Wealthy people tend to be able to afford to be physically active and to eat healthy foods and to reduce stress and to get enough sleep and to stop smoking. There have always been disparities in health between classes, but I worry they are going to widen. Just as we have income inequality, we’re heading toward a world in which we see an increased burden of noninfectious chronic diseases in the lower classes.

March 2015
The Sun Interview

Sowing Dissent

Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin Digs In

A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them.

October 2012
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