The summer heat is posing serious dangers for the farmworkers who’ve helped make California the nation’s leading supplier of fruits and vegetables.

The state has rules designed to protect workers from the devastating temperatures in the vineyards and fields that can hover near or above 100 degrees throughout much of the summer. The rules require mainly that workers have easy access to water and regular shade breaks.

But the rules are inadequate and, in any case, are routinely violated by growers and the labor contractors who hire crews for them, says the United Farm Workers union.

UFW President Arturo Rodriguez is certain “the state does not have the capacity to protect farmworkers … They are not being protected from the extreme heat they labor under to pick the food we have on our table.”

Overall statistics on deaths and illness caused by the heat are difficult – if not impossible – to come by. But the UFW and others cite individual cases that make the danger faced by farmworkers alarmingly clear.

Consider the death this year of a 17-year-old undocumented Mexican

Bit by bit, Al Gore seems to be inching toward a Solartopian view of a future that must be completely sustainable in green energy. This week he advocated getting to an electric power system that is "carbon free" within ten years.

This is an important step toward the mainstream for the decades-long social movement for a totally green-powered Earth. It comes alongside the equally telling move by oil baron T. Boone Pickens to invest $2 billion in wind power.

Gore has reportedly raised some $300 million (that's not a typo) to spend on moving pubic opinion to support the transition to a totally "carbon-free" electric supply system.

That idea has been around at least thirty years, and is a sub-set of the Solartopian demand that our entire energy economy become free of all fossil and nuclear fuels.

The Warming of the Earth

Rising temperatures are altering the earth’s climate in fundamental ways and threatening life as we know it. The preeminent climate expert in the U.S. government, and perhaps in the world, is James Hansen, who is NASA’s director of Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Hansen testified twenty years ago, in 1988, before a congressional committee on the first hard evidence that human activities were responsible for global warming, raising the concentration of carbon, a major greenhouse gas, to a level above the concentration existing prior to industrialization. Since his original testimony, many hundreds of scientifically peer-reviewed studies have confirmed and buttressed his earlier findings, and further established that fossil fuels (along with deforestation) are central factors in the  steadily rising temperature of the earth, and that the consequences are destabilizing or destroying eco-systems around the globe. Hansen commented just a few weeks ago that the relevant scientific community is now over 99% confident in confirming the reality of increasingly harmful and catastrophic global warming.

Tikkun magazine today announced that Rabbi Michael Lerner has accepted the invitation extended to him by the King of Saudi Arabia to attend an international conference of Muslim, Christian and Jewish religious leaders that will begin Wed. July 16 in Madrid, Spain. The conference seeks to foster interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding.