The climate crisis and efforts to tackle it have witnessed unprecedented mobilisation of popular movements, NGOs, think tanks, experts, intellectuals and activists, as was evident at the Climate Conference in Copenhagen last December. Of course, this “civil society” activism has embraced a very wide spectrum of opinion. Amongst the most vociferous, at various gatherings as […]
Subjects Archives: Ecology
Marxist Ecology, Environmental Science and Ecological Crisis
Terry Eagleton and Tragic Spirituality
Terry Eagleton. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. pp. xii, 185. $25.00. Terry Eagleton in the 1970s stood at the cutting edge of Marxist literary criticism, but his recent book, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate — an expansion of his 2008 Yale […]
Food Sovereignty Tour + Agroecology Short Course in Venezuela
STUDY TOUR TO VENEZUELA: Food Sovereignty, Social Movements and Social Change July 19 to August 2, 2010 Please register asap! You are invited to participate in a two-week study tour to study food sovereignty, social movements, and social change in Venezuela, 19 July to 2 August, 2010. The tour will examine issues of land […]
Deepwater Lesson: Expropriate the Expropriators
“If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.” — Bob Herbert, June 1, 2010 Imagine “the Associated Producers, Rationally Regulating Their Interchange with Nature” Amidst mass capital-imposed structural unemployment and ever-escalating environmental collapse, the ongoing epic […]
Farewell, Robin Wood (1931-2009): The Relevance of a Radical Film Critic
“It is probably impossible today for anyone to make an even halfway commercial movie that shouts, in some positive sense, ‘Revolution!’ as loudly as its lungs can bear, so one must celebrate the films that seem (whether deliberately or not) to imply its necessity.” — Robin Wood1 At a time when comedy shows tell […]
Arizona: Grassroots Organizing to Repeal All Anti-Immigrant Laws
Joel Olson is a member of the Repeal Coalition in Flagstaff, Arizona. Repeal spearheaded the grassroots mobilization that successfully pressured the Flagstaff City Council to pass an injunction threatening a lawsuit against the state for its anti-immigrant law SB 1070. SB 1070 has clearly reignited the immigrant rights movement. What is SB 1070 and […]
Someone Is Watching: The Peril and Promise of School Surveillance
Torin Monahan, Rodolfo D. Torres, eds. Schools under Surveillance: Cultures of Control in Public Education. Critical Issues in Crime and Society Series. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. vi + 264 pp. $72.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8135-4679-7; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8135-4680-3. In the fall of 2009, Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, was caught […]
CRED: A New Model of Climate and Development
The climate policy debate has largely shifted from science to economics. There is a well-developed consensus, at least in broad outlines, about the physical science of climate change and its likely implications. That consensus is embodied in massive general circulation models (GCMs) that provide detailed projections of average temperatures, precipitation, weather patterns, and sea-level […]
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands
Trailer Interview with Peter Mettler Why did you make Petropolis? There are a lot of paths that led to this, going back already 20 years. I’ve always been interested in the way we humans have the ability to create technology out of our given natural environments. My impression is that the technologies we develop […]
People’s Voices Must Be Heard in Climate Negotiations
In April 2010 more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia and developed the historic Cochabamba People’s Accord, a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis. We, the undersigned organizations, both participated in and/or supported this historic process. Reflecting the voices of global civil society and the agreements reached […]
Pakistan: Beyond the Sound Bites
D. Raghunandan: [Media reports of] Pakistan tend to be overdetermined, or overwhelmed, by the issues of terrorism and extremism. Professor Aijaz Ahmad . . . recently spent some time in Pakistan, and we thought this offers a good opportunity to look at other aspects of life in Pakistan. Aijaz, what do you think Indians and […]
Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics
Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames […]
ElBaradei: Brazil-Iran-Turkey Nuclear Deal “Quite a Good Agreement”
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an inter-governmental organization under the auspices of the United Nations, from December 1997 to November 2009. Dr. ElBaradei and the IAEA were awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for “for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for […]
Bolivia: Between Development and Mother Earth
The tremendous success of the April 19-22 World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, has confirmed the well-deserved role of its initiator — Bolivian President Evo Morales — as one of the world’s leading environmental advocates. Since being elected the country’s first indigenous president in 2005, Morales has […]
Interview with Gopalji, Spokesperson of the Special Area Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in a Forest in Jharkhand, Eastern India
Communism in the rest of the world seems to have collapsed. What hope do you have of achieving a socialist state in India? The claim that there is no hope for socialism and communism, that they are dead, is mere propaganda unleashed by the imperialists and the apologists of capitalism. The 20th century saw the […]
Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Working Hypotheses
Listen to Étienne Balibar: Étienne Balibar: . . . I will be trying to reverse the implicit rule of this kind of event. Far from coming with positions for which I would argue, I mean already established positions for which I would argue, trying to convince others that they can be shared, I’m coming […]
GM Crops: The Societal Context of Technologies
The Bt brinjal debate has featured technological worries relating to genetically modified crops which appear relatively minor in comparison to the critical issue of who controls Indian agriculture and therefore food security in India. While there cannot be a mere technological fix to the problems of Indian agriculture, technology — and therefore GM — will […]
Bolivia: Morales Asks Workers to Be Rational and Responsible for the Country
President Morales exhorted workers to rethink, because the latest wage increase of 5 percent is superior to what previous governments offered and, moreover, over the four years under his administration, the wages have risen 40 percent. He called on workers’ unions to compare this wage increase with the current inflation rate of 0.26 percent in […]
Spill Here, Spill Now
“So today we’re announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration. . . . We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security.” — Barack Obama, 31 March 2010 “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. […]
BP: The Worst Safety and Environmental Record of All Oil Companies Operating in the United States
BP is a London-based oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America. In just the last few years, BP has pled guilty to two crimes and paid over $730 million in fines and settlements to the US government, state governments, and civil lawsuit judgments for environmental […]
