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Ecology and value theory
Jason W Moores Capitalism in the Web of Life sets itself the challenge of locating an account of capitalist commodity production inspired by Karl Marx within the biological, chemical and geological totality we normally call nature. The ambition of the book is therefore immense. Moore proposes a method for understanding world history that shows how economic development is connected to long-wave ecological transformations. At a time when humanity faces profound and simultaneous ecological and economic crises, Moore proposes a kind of meta-theory that explains them as the outcomes of a single logic.
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Trashing the planet for profit
Before I began this essay I read through some of my past forays that mentioned climate change and capitalism, the first I think, being in 2006 where I opined in a piece on the ‘War on Terror’.
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Capitalism, exterminism and the long ecological revolution
teleSUR spoke to Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about climate change & the need to fight for an ecosocialist, revolutionary alternative to the profit-driven world capitalist system.
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Resilience is not enough
In “The Other Side of Resilience” Renata Silberblatt and Eamon Tewell (Progressive City, October 2017) raise some important questions about the focus on resilience as a way to respond to floods, droughts, wildfires, and climate change. But they don’t go far enough. It’s not just that resilience is more complex than it seems and has multiple meanings, as they point out.
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As ‘epic winds’ drive California fires, climate change fuels the risk
Santa Ana winds are whipping up wildfires in Southern California after a devastating season in wine country. Rising temps can make the West dangerously combustible.
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‘Valve-Turners’ putting lives on the line for our climate emergency
In October 2016, while President Barack Obama was still in office, five climate change activists, including me, cut chains and closed emergency shutoff valves on five tar sands oil pipelines in four states. In one morning, we briefly stopped the flow of all Canadian tar sands oil into the United States.
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Mugabe, Land, Thatcher, Blair & imperialism
So, farewell then, Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe for 37 years. As the western media celebrate your demise, and Zimbabwe’s people wonder what will happen next, it is worth making a note of some forgotten events that helped pave the way for your country’s crisis. As one might expect, this involves the Brits.
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More than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries issue ‘warning to humanity’
“Our mandate is that we take care of Earth and earthlings and human beings because we’re all family.”
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A century after the Bolshevik Revolution
In the world we’re living in, it’s not enough to solve the tension between capital and work, the ongoing crisis of civilization urgently demands that we address the tension between capital and nature, which is currently compromising the existence of life in our planet.
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Stuart Hall’s deconstruction of fate
The island of Barbuda is currently devoid of human life, a bleak reality that is both unfathomable in its scope and seemingly inevitable under the conditions of racialized capitalism. The severity of Hurricane Irma’s impact was undoubtedly worsened by the gross consumption of natural resources, particularly by nations that historically benefitted from colonialism and the construction of empire.
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Imperialism is suffocating India
More than a month ago we published an article detailing some of the fallout of the ecological crisis in the Third World. The article detailed a study published by “greenpeace” that had shown figures projecting 1.2 million deaths in India every year due to air pollution-related conditions.
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Richard York in Mauritius discussing the Anthropocene and ecological rift
A capitalist system cannot aim at responsible production that will reduce the negative impact on our future, and this is why we need a system change! This was the main theme of the second presentation of the day, done by Richard York. He exposed this concept through 6 different perspectives.
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Foreword to Creating an Ecological Society
As Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams point out in their new book, Creating an Ecological Society, the word “ecology” (originally œcology) was first coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel, Darwin’s leading German follower, based on the Greek word oikos, or household. Ironically, the word “economy,” to which ecology is often nowadays counterposed, was derived much […]
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Criminalizing environmental activism
Berta Cáceres, assassinated in her home on March 3, 2016, was just one of hundreds of Latin American environmental activists attacked in recent years. At least 577 environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) were killed in Latin America between 2010 and 2015—more than in any other region—as documented by Global Witness.
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The Mexican earthquakes in perspective
Mexico suffered two powerful earthquakes in September 2107. The first, with magnitude 8.2 took place on September 7. With its epicenter off the Pacific coast of southern Mexico, it caused damage mainly in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca. The second took place on September 19 and had a magnitude of 7.1, with its epicenter about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City, damaged the surrounding area, including Mexico City.
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Animal liberation, human liberation
The Left must endeavor to make visible the political valence of meat, let alone other industrial uses of animals. This act of acute empathy reveals the extent of one’s political imagination.
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The bipartisan militarization of the U.S. federal budget
The media likes to frame the limits of political struggle as between the Democratic and Republican parties, as if each side upholds a radically different political vision.
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‘Brazil has lost control over its natural resources because it has lost its sovereignty’
One of the main issues of Michel Temer’s government is the surrender of Brazilian natural resources to national and foreign economic groups.
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Memo to Jacobin: Ecomodernism is not ecosocialism
Ecomodernism is incompatible with ecosocialism. If Jacobin recognizes that and changes course, it can make important contributions to the fight against climate change.
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UK unions call for energy to be returned to public ownership
The annual congress of the UK Trades Union Congress (TUC) has passed a historic composite resolution on climate change that supports the energy sector being returned to public ownership and democratic control.