Subjects Archives: Ecology

Sometimes realization comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow.

Joe Biden chose Earth Day (April 22) to convoke world leaders to a virtual climate summit and pledged to cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030 compared to 2005 levels.

We concur that linking land-use change science, ecology, and epidemiology is a critical step towards developing a more robust understanding of zoonotic diseases. Yet we are wary of the way the authors omit the historical specificities, political economy, and agroecological dynamics of land-use change, and their implications for disease ecologies.

To save the ocean, give property rights to the creatures living there.

You remember the Paris Agreement, right? As a good thing, right?

If nuclear power needs to be part of the climate solution, why not continue to use what we have? I understand the reactors that we have are aging out. But why not either shore those up or use the same design that we currently have where we wouldn’t have to go through the lengthy and costly development phase?

The 149 proposals issued by the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate last June, with the goal of achieving at least a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 compared to 1990, manifestly belong to a thoroughly reformist approach.

After Friends of Nature director-general Zhang Boju saw his activism fail, he went another route.

JAPAN has come under fire after its government announced today that it would release more than a million metric tonnes of radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

China surged past the United States to become the #1 carbon emitter in 2006. Currently (2019 data from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy), its CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning are over 9,800 million metric tons (“tonnes”) a year.

In the Notes from the Editors to the March 2021 issue of Monthly Review, the MR editors questioned some of the arguments in Richard Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, as well as replied to Simon Pirani’s related criticisms (writing under his pseudonym of Gabriel Levy) of MR editor John Bellamy Foster on China and the environment. Both Smith and Pirani have written replies to our March editorial, which we are publishing here, along with our own rejoinder.

On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses.

How England’s government-licensed pirates stole the Newfoundland fishery from Europe’s largest feudal empire.

“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.” Thus reads one of the Hopi prophecies which echo throughout Philip Glass’s haunting soundtrack for Koyaanisqatsi (1982).

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson joins Money on the Left to discuss his Modern Monetary Theory-inspired “cli-fi” novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

From Haiti, Lautaro Rivara unpacks the tired trope of “poor rich Haiti,” highlighting the role of foreign capital and local elites in the destruction of life in the countryside.

Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

Local companies were found to be collaborating with an emission monitoring company to skirt environmental standards.

As the weather grows warmer, bears, birds, and corporate America begin to emerge from their respective hibernations. Bears will awaken hungry with thoughts of berries; birds will fly north, reversing their southern migration; corporate America will prepare their proxies and ballots. Soon it will be annual general meeting (AGM) season.

As industrial agriculture encroaches into the last wild places of the Earth, it’s unleashing dangerous pathogens. Time to heal the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, suggests Rob Wallace.