Subjects Archives: Ecology

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has given new license to the killing of Indigenous people in Brazil. Before he came to power in 2019, it wasn’t clear what he wanted to build, but he knew exactly who and what he wanted to destroy: the Indigenous people and the Amazon rainforest, respectively.

On Monday 9th August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a climate report warning of ‘code red for humanity’.

Canadian imperialism in Africa has had a rare social media moment.

Authorities have set aside millions of square kilometres of land and sea as protected areas. It’s an ambitious plan but compliance still an issue, environmental group says.

There is no doubt among scientists that the increasing frequency of extreme weather and associated disasters like fires is a result of climate change.

lon Musk wants to go to Mars. Money, regulations, and public beaches are no object.

For Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, the wreckage of Hurricane Ida is a surreal reminder of what he and others in the Gulf Coast region experienced 16 years ago.

New data sheds light on how much overseas coal power capacity China is involved in, and to what extent it is changing.

The latest IPCC report paints a picture of five potential futures for humanity. In the worst one, if corporations keep calling the shots, we could see catastrophic warming of up to 5.7˚C.

Academics are perfectly placed to wage a rebellion: we exist in rich hubs of knowledge and expertise; we are well connected across the world, and to decision-makers; we have large platforms from which to inform, educate and rally others all over the world; and we have implicit authority and legitimacy, which is the basis of political power. We can make a difference.

Editors urge ‘fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organized’.

Industry expansion relates to sectors such as public transport, where decarbonisation requires more buses and trains and fewer private car journeys. Industry evolution relates to new sectors, such as solar and offshore wind farms, that are newly emerging and do not have any history of labour relations, but there will not be space to discuss this fourth scenario in this column.

Mobilizing the global labour movement for climate justice and just transition is one of the defining challenges of our times. However, for workers in many sectors, it is unclear how climate issues will affect them specifically, and how they should respond.

It is a sign of just how serious matters have become—with the UN COP26 talks on climate in Glasgow this November now regarded by many as a last-ditch effort to achieve a global solution on behalf of humanity as a whole—that the early draft versions of Part II and Part III of the IPCC’s, ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’, were leaked during the summer.

New platforms and data analytics are helping big agribusiness take over Indian agriculture. Ordinary farmers are losing out, writes Bikrum Gill.

Floods, fires, ice caps melting, hurricanes—all attest to the violence of human-caused climate disruption.

But the United States government is not alone here. It has several close allies, such as Canada, which is the home to 60 per cent of the world’s mining companies. Canada’s great interest in what lies beneath the soil of the Americas allows it to treat those who live above that soil with the greatest disdain.

“The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.” (Karl Marx)

The task includes planting 54 million mu of trees and 46 million mu of grass each year, said Zhang Wei, head of the ecological protection and restoration department of the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA).

‘The increased atomization of society and associated political economy of capitalism justifies the logic of reductionism’. – Richard Lewontin