Subjects Archives: Ecology

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics a young man born on the day of Hiroshima nuclear bombing was selected to be the last torch bearer on the relay, to signify that Japan had stood up from nuclear ruin. In an attempt to replicate the 1964 Olympic theme, the Abe government has constructed the idea of a Fukushima “revival,” a returned to normal. Exposing this illusion is an important cultural war.

What constitutes acceptable Marxist theory is a topic of endless debate. Over the past few decades, much ink has been devoted to how we should go about reconciling Marxism and ecological concerns.

We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unravelled the close structural links between the climate crisis and the global capitalist mode of production.

Pandemics such as coronavirus are the result of humanity’s destruction of nature, according to leaders at the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) International—and the world has been ignoring this stark reality for decades.

The Black Lives Matter protests across the world show the ‘necessary force’ people need to use when fighting global warming, teen activist turned climate change icon Greta Thunberg believes.

There is a fairy tale that Marx was first of all an admirer of technology and that he considered it ‘the foundation of what exists and the engine of the future’. Although this fairy tale has been refuted countless times, people continue to believe it.

British climate activist and socialist Martin Empson writes on why the fight against climate change must be a fight for system change and for socialism.

Join us and Fórum Popular da Natureza on Friday, June 5, at 6 pm ET/5 pm CT, for a conversation with Monthly Review author Rob Wallace, Mike Davis, and Sabrina Fernandes about capitalism, climate catastrophe, and pandemics. The event will be in English with simultaneous translation in Portuguese. To find out more, check out the Facebook […]

Jack Mundey, the leader of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation between 1968 and 1974 has passed away at the age of 90. An initiator of the “green bans”, Jack was a Marxist who rediscovered the ecological essence of Marxism.

The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis which raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization and which has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economy system, where everything is secondary to profits.

Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.

Taking a fresh look at animal production also involves considering its effect on world hunger.

Every degree of global warming will push a billion people out of the human survival zone.

This documentary short film captures the meaning and importance of Mauna Kea to the native Hawaiian people and why they stand to protect this sacred land.

The film makes numerous good points, but fails as a whole because it spreads corrosive disinformation and mistruths about wind and solar. It also utterly fails to articulate a vision of what the alternative environment movement it claims to be a clarion call for would actually look like.

The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a [person] perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. [Humans], too, [are] part of this balance.

With nearly everyone trapped at home for the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, Michael Moore released a film that picks apart the U.S. environmental movement as it may have looked ten years ago, and then misleadingly presents it as breaking news.

If you are reading this, you probably already know a lot about climate change. But what images come to mind if I asked you to visualize climate change?

Mostly, Planet of the Humans is just so fucking bad. So bad that its good points are useless. It does have some good points–there seem to be a lot of rock festivals in Vermont that claim, incorrectly, to be running on solar.