Central Skagit Library District

In the wake of global catastrophes that have destroyed industrial civilization, the inhabitants of Union Grove, a small New York town, do anything they can to get by, as they struggle to deal with a new way of life over the course of an eventful summer.

"The story of regional inequality in America as revealed by the rise of Amazon and its distribution network"-- MacGillis shows that Amazon's sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated. Ranging across the country, he tells the stories of those...

An explosive expose of Detroit, icon of America's lost prosperity, from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuf.

"Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours"--Jacket. Attaining the standard of living our parents managed has become impossible. Quart examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children, and shows how our country has failed its families. She offers real solutions to...

A plea -- deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans -- to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure.

With breathtaking clarity, renowned University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing...

The world traveler and photographer joins a family of the Van Gujjar tribe on their spring migration to the Himalayas, during which they contemplate the possibility that their way of life may be coming to an end.

Left for dead after decades of neglect, the terminus of the Colorado River in Northern Mexico was once a vibrant wetland ecosystem the size of Rhode Island. A changing delta chronicles the stories, issues, and people of the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, and what they've done to reconnect one of the most iconic American rivers to the sea.

The film provides fascinating insights into the pressures facing non-western people as they confront the global economy. Follow two women from Ladakh, or Little Tibet, on a reality tour of London to see what life in the West is really like. The women are exposed to aspects of modern urban life homelessness, old-age homes, massive garbage dumps that contrast sharply with the idealized media and advertising images impressed upon people's minds in the...

Founded in 1851 as a four-cabin outpost named "New York Pretty-Soon," Seattle has long struggled with an identity crisis. From a nearly lawless port, to a sedate, conventional company town defined by Boeing Aircraft, to an accessible paradise for artists and recovering urbanites, Seattle repeatedly tried and failed to become bigger, wealthier, more like "major league" cities. In the late 1980s, Seattle's time suddenly arrived. Microsoft, Amazon,...