Subjects Archives: Ecology

This article, by Alan Thornett, was written for the current edition of the Green Left’s publication Watermelon in advance of the Green Party conference.

The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.

It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity cannot resolve the anthropogenic ecological crises without radically restructuring our social relations—a consensus shared by the degrowth movement and revolutionary socialism. Panel Discussion at Socialism 2023

Inherent in the nature of insanity is the fact that those inflicted by it are unaware of their mental state, nor do crowds of people or for that matter political parties, and business elites, leading populations to catastrophe, from the scale of the Johnstown all the way to Aushwitz and Berlin to Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan

Planned fossil fuel expansion in the U.S. accounts for more than a third of new oil and gas extraction projects set to begin through 2050, according to Oil Change International.

Long Live Weelaunee.

It is just four years on from the global mass mobilisations of young people inspired by Swedish climate activist and Friday for Futures (FFF) founder Greta Thunberg.

There are reasons for Libya’s ‘chaotic’, ‘dysfunctional’ response to the disaster. And to identify them, we need to look closer to home.

For the first time, an international team of scientists is able to provide a detailed outline of planetary resilience by mapping out all nine boundary processes that define a safe operating space for humanity.

The planet has been laid to waste, and society pays for the waste in both money and lost years of life.

Lancet study finds ‘green growth’ policies fall far short of what’s needed to prevent dangerous change

We shouldn’t treat cannabis like heroin. But we shouldn’t treat it like ketamine either, as a federal agency now recommends.

Highlighting the climate crisis is not ‘alarmism’, as critics say. Big Business wants an exclusive focus on climate because it downplays the true reasons for alarm.

It is long past time we end our mad rush to burn the planet to the ground.

In 40 years, Amazon rainforest lost an area equivalent to France; at this rate, catastrophe is imminent, say scientists.

Nicolas Graham’s book on forces of production and fossil-fuel capitalism gives an important analysis of why fundamental change is needed to solve the climate crisis, finds John Clarke

In June, members of the Sierra Club unit of the Progressive Workers Union (PWU) passed a resolution pledging solidarity with the Palestinian people as the environmental organization pushes forward with its planned trips to Israel.

The recent article Socialism and Ecological Survival in Monthly Review by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clarke makes three essential points about the past and future of the climate movement, is well worth reading in full and poses some crucial strategic questions that we have to confront and work through in praxis.

Corporate and capitalist forces are driving us toward civilizational collapse but institutional myopia and crass electoralism also play their parts in the unfolding planetary tragedy.

Scientists blame ever warming human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.