The Left must endeavor to make visible the political valence of meat, let alone other industrial uses of animals. This act of acute empathy reveals the extent of one’s political imagination.
Subjects Archives: Ecology
Marxist Ecology, Environmental Science and Ecological Crisis
The bipartisan militarization of the U.S. federal budget
The media likes to frame the limits of political struggle as between the Democratic and Republican parties, as if each side upholds a radically different political vision.
‘Brazil has lost control over its natural resources because it has lost its sovereignty’
One of the main issues of Michel Temer’s government is the surrender of Brazilian natural resources to national and foreign economic groups.
Memo to Jacobin: Ecomodernism is not ecosocialism
Ecomodernism is incompatible with ecosocialism. If Jacobin recognizes that and changes course, it can make important contributions to the fight against climate change.
UK unions call for energy to be returned to public ownership
The annual congress of the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) has passed a historic composite resolution on climate change that supports the energy sector being returned to public ownership and democratic control.
What we sow is what we eat
Our treatment of the earth, of the dirt beneath our feet, is directly connected to our system of food production. The pollutants we put in the soil show up in our groceries. And the entire wretched business of agriculture derives from the nature of our economic system, which compels every giant corporation, every “entrepreneur,” to […]
The great nutrient collapse
Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with bright green algae, a biologist told Loladze and […]
As Arkema plant burns, six things we know about petrochemical risks in the wake of Harvey
In many ways, Harvey is unprecedented. Yet, we live in a world where our president revokes policies that ensure our infrastructure is storm ready, where climate mitigation efforts have stagnated, and where disaster relief efforts often don’t reach those that need it most. We must do better.
Slick maneuvers
Both ExxonMobil and the Wall Street Journal have been engaged in pretty slick maneuvers in order to protect their profits by failing to publish any opinions critical of ExxonMobil.
The hidden environmental impacts of “platform capitalism”
New technological platforms like Uber are promising to reshape society: but what is the impact for people and the world we live in? What does this mean for our environment?
Land (in) justice in Brazil
The implementation of austerity measures in the Brazilian countryside, then, casts a long shadow on the potential of farming and land reform to provide the next generation with a sustainable future. It threatens decades of progress made by land justice warriors.
The root of the climate crisis is capitalism, not demographics
Growing concerns about climate change and other environmental trends have set off the next round of old Malthusian diagnoses, raising the specter of overpopulation. In this context, it bears repeating that under capitalism the “population problem” is about ideological and social control and has nothing to do with demographics or ecology.
Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 – 2016
This video illustrates how drastically temperatures in each of the world’s 191 countries have changed over the last century.
Diesels and honorable men
Lower the curtain, change the scene. The atmosphere in the government building in Berlin on August 2nd is fully different, not a bit of similarity. Those present, most in tailored apparel, sit in soft leather chairs and sip aromatic drinks from fine glassware. Who are they? Germany’s power people!
Talking about a revolution
The conflict between the needs of the majority and the interests of the few runs throughout our economy.
Militant particularism and ecosocialism
Marx showed how history was materially transformed through a series of contradictions toward greater complexity, but held out the promise of one particular class representing the universal interests of humanity, if activated within objective conditions by political agency. The problem today is that cyclical and conjunctural crises that have propelled capitalism to hegemonic global reach […]
Battle to oppose water privatization returns Greece to frontlines of E.U. crisis
Greece is on track to privatize its water systems, while other countries like Germany are in an opposite position of de-privatization due to poor management and exorbitant price hikes.
Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals
While we busy ourselves with creating a more green and climate friendly lifestyle, an astonishing 100 companies are responsible for producing 71 percent of carbon emissions. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged […]
Third nature
John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of […]
Maize, rice, wheat: alarm at rising climate risk to vital crops
No one likes to think about how extreme weather events could devastate food production which could cause global panic and disaster. However, scientists, led by Chris Kent, of the Met Office, focused their initial efforts on how extreme weather would affect maize, one of the world’s most widely grown crops. Along with maize other staple […]
