Subjects Archives: Ecology

  • President Donald Trump

    Federal court denies Trump’s last-ditch attempt to derail the youth climate lawsuit

    A federal court has denied the Trump administration’s last-ditch effort to prevent a landmark climate lawsuit from going to trial. It called the motion “entirely premature” and argued that the administration had failed to reach the “high bar” required for dismissal.

  • Sea Ice.

    NASA Studies an unusual Arctic warming event

    Winter temperatures are soaring in the Arctic for the fourth winter in a row. The heat, accompanied by moist air, is entering the Arctic not only through the sector of the North Atlantic Ocean that lies between Greenland and Europe, as it has done in previous years, but is also coming from the North Pacific through the Bering Strait.

  • People gathered in protest to gene drives.

    Movements of millions say no to gene drives as Brazil attempts to legalize genetic extinction technology

    The largest rural movements in Brazil, representing well over a million farmers, are protesting a new Brazilian regulation that would allow release of gene drives, the controversial genetic extinction technology, into Brazil’s ecosystems and farms.

  • Person pointing a gun at someone drifting in a canoe after a natural disaster

    There is no such thing as a natural disaster

    “Policies aimed at aid and reconstruction became their own forms of punishment, leaving the island more indebted, unequal, dependent and polluted than it was before the hurricane hit.”

  • Cropped cover of The Progress of this Storm by Andreas Malm

    The progress of this storm

    Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action.

  • Lebanon

    Will Lebanon be the next energy war?

    In 2010 the oil and gas geopolitics of the Mediterranean changed profoundly. That was when a Texas oil company, Noble Energy, discovered a huge deposit of natural gas offshore Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Leviathan Field, one of the world’s largest gas field discoveries in over a decade.

  • Shell

    Shell ruling is bad for democracy and the planet

    TODAY’S ruling that oil giant Shell cannot be pursued in British courts for activities that took place in Nigeria is bad news for poor communities the world over—and for the planet.

  • Hurricane Katrina Biloxi Mississippi March 16, 2006

    There is no such thing as a natural disaster

    “Instead of considering these [events] as natural disasters we should be calling them humanitarian disasters with a natural trigger, where this natural trigger ignites and exaggerates the structural inequalities that capitalism produces along racialized, gendered, and class lines.”

  • Corbyn

    Jeremy Corbyn calls for public ownership to combat ‘threat of climate catastrophe’

    This is a government that has licensed fracking, declared a moratorium on renewable levies while massively subsidising fossil fuels, dithered over tidal, held back onshore wind, U-turned on making all new homes zero-carbon and is failing to take the necessary measures to meet our legal commitments to reduce CO2 emissions.

  • Artist's rendition of the Beijing New Airport Terminal building

    What does China’s ‘ecological civilization’ mean for humanity’s future?

    Imagine a newly elected president of the United States calling in his inaugural speech for an “ecological civilization” that ensures “harmony between human and nature.” Now imagine he goes on to declare that “we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it” and that his administration will “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.”

  • Pollution

    Radical action now is the only sensible option

    BRITAIN faces a number of serious and interlinked threats to the public’s health and future wellbeing. Tinkering around the edges, gradual reform or triangulation-style politics are simply no longer commensurate with the challenges bearing down on us. Radical action, implemented right now, is the only realistic option.

  • If we talk about hurting 'our' planet, who exactly is the 'we'? | Aeon Essays

    The African Anthropocene

    Every year, human activity moves more sediment and rock than all natural processes combined, including erosion and rivers. This might not shock you. In fact, you’ve probably seen similar soundbites circulating online, signals of the sheer scale of how we’re terraforming the planet in the era of the Anthropocene. Natural and social scientists argue passionately about almost everything Anthropocenic, from the nuances of nomenclature to the start-date of the new geological epoch, but most agree on one thing: the Earth will outlive humanity. What’s in doubt is how long we will populate the planet, and under what conditions.

  • Shit pile dive

    The shitty new communist futurism

    Editors’ note: This is the first in a series of ENTITLE blog articles that critically engage with the ongoing discussions about “eco-modernist socialism” and “communist futurism”, projected in Jacobin magazine’s climate change issue ‘Earth, Wind, and Fire.’ 

  • Habaneros wade through floodwaters near El Malecón after Hurricane Irma. YAMIL LAGE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

    Cuba embarks on a 100-year plan to protect itself from climate change

    On its deadly run through the Caribbean last September, Hurricane Irma lashed northern Cuba, inundating coastal settlements and scouring away vegetation. The powerful storm dealt Havana only a glancing blow; even so, 10-meter waves pummeled El Malecón, the city’s seaside promenade, and ravaged stately but decrepit buildings in the capital’s historic district. “There was great destruction,” says Dalia Salabarría Fernández, a marine biologist here at the National Center for Protected Areas (CNAP).

  • John Bellamy Foster speaking at an Occupy Demonstration in Eugene, OR

    ‘Socialism a necessity for human survival’

    According to John Bellamy Foster, the world environmental crisis is a systemic crisis, a product of capitalism, and requires systemic changes in the capitalist system. He says that environmental sustainability is incompatible with capitalism.

  • capitalism in the web of life

    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.

  • Image by Collin Anderson via Flickr

    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’.

  • Planetary boundaries

    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.

  • Photo by Giovanni Arechavaleta on Unsplash

    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.

  • U.S. WILDFIRES CALIFORNIA

    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.