Editor's Note: Matthew Mccue is an Iraq War vet turned farmer and member of Farms Not Arms!. When he wrote this piece, he was teaching Agriculture for the PeaceCorps in Niger, Africa. He now runs his own small produce farming operation outside of Sebastopol, California.

My hoe strikes the ground every time I take a step. A local woman follows behind, tossing seeds in the holes that I dig. The West African sun beats down without mercy but I keep working. The soil is a well weathered remnant of the jungle that used to dominate the arid land that is now known as the Sahel. I am planting millet, one of the most robust crops known to man. I can not create or even fully control what will spring up from this seemingly barren field. I can only guide it.

You can cover a soldier with night vision, Kevlar, GPS tracking systems, advanced infantry weapons, put him in a Bradley fighting vehicle, and send him in to battle, but without his or her personal force and motivation the equipment reveals itself for what it is: lifeless machinery. If I tell you of my experience in combat surely you will be able to read a story with more bravado, more blood, more adrenaline, and more pain. I can tell you that to kill you have to shut off a piece of your heart, and to see another soldier die will shatter what is left of it. To function you have to become immersed in the machine that is killing you and keeping you alive at the same time. You have to bring life to the machine.

Abandoning caution and effectively coopting opposition parties for safety-second Chernobyl-style nuclear policies of his minority government, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper boasted on 11 December 2007: "there will be no nuclear accident."

Harper referred to the "NRU" nuclear reactor operated by federally-subsidized Atomic Energy of Canada Limited outside its regulatory license at Chalk River, 150 kilometers west of Ottawa on the Ontario shore of the Ottawa River.

NRU (National Research Universal) is an aged (51 years old) facility notable for its production of molybedenum-99 and other radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnoses, which are then processed at an Ottawa plant of MDS Nordion.

There's a missing ingredient in our discussion of local foods, according to author Margaret Webb, and that's local farmers. But Webb is determined to change that. "Most of us have doctors, lawyers and financial planners," Webb said. "Shouldn't we have a close personal connection with the most important people in the food chain, the people who feed us well, our farmers?"

In the early morning of 7 August 2008, a group of UK climate change activists locked themselves together in a ring formation to block a road used for fuel deliveries at the Vopak terminal on Oliver Road in West Thurrock (Essex, UK). Normally delivery trucks leave the depot every 90 seconds. The campaigners, who say that agrofuels will cause runaway climate change if left unchecked, also dropped a 35 foot banner from the top of one of the site's biggest oil containers.

Editor's note: With all the sudden banter in the media about the crisis emerging in Georgia, I thought you might like to hear from the Georgian peace movement. I have no way to verify the accuracy of this translation, but you can contact the Georgian Peace Committee using the contact information at the end of this english translation.

Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed. A new fratricide war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil. To our great disillusion, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of a pro-fascist and nationalist policy have had no effect.

To play junior partner to empire, we've militarized our identity

Some government policy decisions are so profound in their impact that they can actually change the nature of the country. Medicare was one such policy decision and so was the signing of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

It could be argued that the decision to take on an explicitly war-fighting role in Afghanistan will turn out to be another watershed decision, this one at odds with Canadian values and Canadians' convictions about the military's role in the world and society.