Subjects Archives: Ecology

This guide is designed to help understand the central ideas in Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy. New York: Monthly Review, (2017)

Property violence kills no one. And yet, to say it again, I’m not today advocating property violence. I am, on the other hand, advocating a discussion of it. – Thomas Neuburger

Public opinion has been shaken by the ‘discovery’ of unmarked graves of children who died in residential schools. The word ‘discovery’ has to be placed in quotation marks because Indigenous communities have been saying for many years that terrible things happened at these places. The time has come to call this what it is–a genocide.

A Q&A on capitalism, media, and climate.

A Review of Hannah Holleman’s ‘Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism’.

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.

Climate change is already leading to rising sea levels, threatening island and coastal communities and devastating food security and access to fresh water. Long-term drought and changes in weather patterns are causing hunger and destroying farming land.

Warnings about how the capitalist mode of production is putting pressure on the earth’s ability to handle all forms of stress have continued to come at an increasing pace.

The other side of ecocide thrives in the fertile ground of radical socioecological theory.

As temperature records were smashed all up and down the Pacific coast in the last week of June, reports emerged of rolling blackouts, buckling roads, damaged wires and newly sparked wildfires.

CounterSpin interview with Vivek Shandas on climate impacts

In bourgeois society a violation of property rights is the supreme injustice. Hybrids provided a solution in agriculture. Commercial hybrids decrease the yield of the following generation. This means that farmers have to renew their seed every year. Hence, hybrids create a perpetual market for seed.

Climate crisis is a disaster which impacts us all, but the culpability is not evenly distributed. The rich nations of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia have contributed 60% of global cumulative CO2 emissions, compared to 13% for the two largest developing economies, China and India, taken together.

Previously solid ground is quickly degrading. The melting of the permafrost is about to cause huge damage to buildings and infrastructure across the country, Russia’s natural resource minister warns.

Ecological and social conditions are mostly ignored in a system in which profit is the goal: Fred Magdoff discusses capitalist agriculture

The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the area and the empowerment of pliant local elites.

Upon reading Sohn-Rethel it becomes clear that his work is important for contemporary debates on ecology, the Marxist critique of science and debates on post-revolutionary societies such as the former Soviet Union.

The world needs safe, non-exploitive technologies. Nuclear doesn’t qualify.

The Red Deal is a revolutionary call to reject capitalism and restore a mutually beneficial relationship with our world. It deserves to be widely read, discussed, and built upon.

In early 2020, the #ShutDownCanada movement in solidarity with Indigenous Wet’suwet’en people sparked a wildfire of resistance across the country.