Subjects Archives: Ecology

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    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!

  • South Bend Voice at 2014 Peoples Climate March

    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

    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 and to the point of near absolute structural crisis have also eliminated resistance in the form of a consequential collective agent that would avert ecological collapse.

  • Greek protest of water privatization

    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.

  • Your Country Needs You to Recycle

    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 over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action.

  • "Where the Green Ants Dream," Werner Herzog

    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 […]

  • A villager lifts up fallen corn plants after a flood at a farm in Jianhe county, Guizhou province, China in July 2017. Photograph: Reuters

    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 crops could be affected including those of rice, wheat and soya beans.

  • No nukes

    Haves, have-nots, and need-nots: The nuclear ban exposes hidden fault lines

    A total of 147 non-nuclear states have expressed support for the ban treaty process, while 37 non-nuclear states have not.… [But] a single variable correlates almost perfectly with this breakdown: 89 percent of the non-nuclear states that have criticized the ban are “umbrella states” that belong to an alliance with a nuclear power or are actively seeking to join such an alliance, while only 4 percent of the non-nuclear states supporting the ban are umbrella states.

  • World Map Climate Change

    This atlas maps the end of the world

    Today, “we’re cognizant of the fact that there is no future unless there is an ecological future.” That’s a reality one comes to see clearly after clicking through the digital pages of the “Atlas for the End of the World.”

  • Skull with Sunglasses fossil

    Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.

    David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.

  • Ce que tout écologiste doit savoir à propos du capitalisme (What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism)

    The earth shall rise on new foundations

    The United States is sometimes viewed as the most extreme capitalist society on earth. The decision of the newly elected Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement would seem to affirm such a judgment. It highlights the fact that while capitalism cannot solve the environmental problem, a more extreme capitalist society can, if it is not stopped, eliminate all possibility for a future sustainable society, by accelerating the runaway train to catastrophe represented by today’s business as usual.

  • Trump Is Trying to Make NAFTA Even Worse

    Trump is trying to make NAFTA even worse

    Many on the Left have been deeply critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since before it was fast-tracked into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Now, President Donald Trump’s current plan to renegotiate NAFTA is poised to make the massive trade deal even worse.

  • Students at Bay Point Middle school work on a science assignment in 2011

    New Florida law lets any resident challenge what’s taught in science classes

    Any resident in Florida can now challenge what kids learn in public schools, thanks to a new law that science education advocates worry will make it harder to teach evolution and climate change.

  • The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    The trouble with geoengineers “hacking the planet”

    To be sure, I can actually imagine a world in which a small and strictly limited amount of albedo modification could sensibly be deployed as a complement to strong and largely successful efforts to bring carbon dioxide emissions towards zero, accompanied by successful deployment of technologies for actively removing the gas from the atmosphere. But that would be a world with a truly exceptional level of international agreement, fact-based decision-making, and cooperation towards shared goals. A world where somebody like Donald Trump can become president of a superpower is not that world.

  • Capitalism or Socialism

    What is to constitute the new “yes” is the problem

    For Klein, developing a meaningful anti-shock politics involves some combination of what Sanders represented and what Clinton symbolized: Sanders with respect to class and economics, Clinton as far as race and gender, and everything else. Imperialism and war scarcely enter the argument.

  • Wildfire in Kansas

    The worst of Donald Trump’s toxic agenda is lying in wait

    The same theories of racial hierarchy that have been used historically to justify violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are surging to the surface as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously. Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.

  • Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accords

    We won’t always have Paris

    Donald Trump today sentenced Planet Earth to death. Whether he has the power actually to have that sentence carried out is open to serious question.

  • Climate Change

    Anything wrong with eco-socialism?

    Political feasibility becomes irrelevant when science teaches us that this is the course human society must follow if we are to survive.

  • Measuring National Ecological Consumption

    Which Countries Live Within Their (Ecological) Means?

    The information contained within the 2017 edition of the National Footprint Accounts, and especially its elegant publishing platform, will be useful to critics of the status quo maintained by the major capitalist economic powers. To make sense of the data critically, however, one must go far beyond the explanation given below, as root causes are […]

  • The Steps to Ecosocialism

    John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus reply to a recent article published by Daniel Tanuro on carbon pricing schemes. Tanuro, a vehement critic of such schemes, focuses his critique on the cautiously critical support given by Foster and Angus to proposals developed by climate scientist James Hansen.