Subjects Archives: Ecology

“Don’t want to hear Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion? Try J.P. Morgan instead.”

Climate change, unchecked, promises planetary disaster. All forms of life are threatened. Scientific evidence strongly suggests capitalistforms of production and consumption gave rise to climate change in the first place and have allowed the process to advance.

Sociologist John Bellamy Foster on the modern divide between humanity and nature and his book “The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift” from Monthly Review.

Having our own media allows us to tell the stories that the millionaire press barons don’t want to engage with and it gives us a space to debate and explore issues without the toxic influence of climate deniers.

My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.

There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.

The word catastrophe is being used more and more by institutions reporting on the effects of extreme weather in the two regions of Africa, Southern and South Eastern Africa, and of late Australia. The word means a number of things: tragic; fiasco; utter failure; sudden and violent change in a feature of the Earth. All are completely fitting for the situation we now face.

While the stark reality of the global climate emergency struck home in Australia with its worst bushfire season, its neighbour Indonesia faced catastrophic floods and islands disappearing below the rising sea. Green Left’s Peter Boyle interviewed Yuyun Harmono, the climate change campaigner of Friends of the Earth Indonesia (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia – WAHLI).

In an interview with the socialist writer and activist, John Molyneux, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig asks him about climate change, capitalism and socialist transformation. In an important initiative John has recently founded the Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) which brings together activists and researchers from across the Global North and South.

“A new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed”

Making sense of remote ownership problems and place-based governance. Grappling with entrenched problems of remote ownership is one way to take a focused approach to building momentum for this movement.

Now even right wing politicians are talking about using traditional Aboriginal land management techniques to mitigate fire risk. But pre-Invasion land management wasn’t about logging and clearing land for profit: it combined knowledge of land with collective, egalitarian planning.

And while it turns out that the U.S. media have indeed ramped up their coverage of the climate crisis, they continue to give short shrift to what are arguably the most important factors for determining our future: what specific human practices are responsible for the changing climate, why carbon emissions continue to rise, and what we can and should be doing about it.

The virus’s final penetrance worldwide will depend on the difference between the rate of infection and the rate of removing infections—by recovery or death. If the infection rate far exceeds removal, then the penetrance may approach the whole of humanity, although there will likely accrue large geographic differences.

Australia has always been a dry continent where fire has played an important ecological role. But the latest massive conflagrations there are evidence that a hotter climate has thrust Australia into a new normal where fires will keep burning on an unprecedented scale.

The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity. The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.

Most calls for a Green New Deal correctly emphasize that it must include a meaningful commitment to climate justice. That is because climate change—for reasons of racism and capitalist profit-making—disproportionately punishes frontline communities, especially communities of color and low-income.

NBC’s Camel News Caravan was one of the earliest television news programs in the United States. Sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, the program had an anchorman who not only kept an ashtray on his desk and often smoked while delivering the news, but also encouraged viewers to light up a Camel.

When, decades ago, ecology emerged as a crucial theoretical and practical issue, many Marxists (as well as critics of Marxism) noted that nature–more precisely, the exact ontological status of nature–is the one topic where even the crudest dialectical materialism has an advantage over Western Marxism.

Research has shown that the people most responsible for a warming planet were disproportionately the same people attending the summit and an increasing number of observers see climate change, inequality and capitalism as bound together.