Subjects Archives: Ecology

  John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  288pp.  $17.95 (pb).  ISBN 9781583671795. This book is a major achievement.  It combines enormous breadth of scholarship with consummate theoretical integration to produce a powerful political argument.  It should be required reading for anyone who cares about […]

Workers in the electrical sector are set to embark on nationwide consultation process to elaborate strategic and immediate solutions for the electricity crisis.  Alongside proposals for improving the sector and energy-saving measures, discussions will focus on introducing workers’ participation in the management of the state-owned electricity company, Corpoelec. In February this year, Venezuelan President Hugo […]

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat.  I’d been waiting for months to hear from them.  I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days.  That was to […]

  Zimbabwe’s land issue has generated unprecedented debates both within and outside the country.  The debates, which followed the dramatic occupations of white farms by rural peasants in the late 1990s, are generally polarised between those who support radical land reform and those who support market-orientated reforms.  The former stand accused of supporting Mugabe’s regime […]

The prospects for democracy, socio-economic development, and conflict resolution will suffer if the West continues to rely on punitive measures. This time, the warmongers’ silly season found its apogée in U.S. neo-conservative Daniel Pipes’ advice to Obama to “bomb Iran,” which appeared shortly after Tony Blair, having outlined why he helped invade Iraq, remarked ominously, […]

Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

On March 2, the New York Times ran a story informing readers of recent “controversies” related to global warming.  The story chronicled the efforts of scientists affiliated with the United Nations Climate Panel and other major research institutions to answer the claims of conservatives who suggest there is a conspiracy to hide the “debate” over […]

China and India are generally regarded as the two large countries in the developing world that are the “success stories” of globalisation.  This success has been defined by the high and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income; and the substantial reduction in income poverty.  Further, both China and India are […]

This is not an ideological issue related to the irremediable hope that a better world is and must be possible. It is known that homo sapiens has existed for approximately 200,000 years, equivalent to a minuscule space in the time that has passed since the first forms of elemental life on our planet emerged around […]

  The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day, The black man calls you Naxalite today. But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow. — Excerpt from the Telugu poem ‘Final Journey: First Victory’ by Sri Sri 1 It has been a long and tortuous route.  Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist […]

  Brasilia — President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva just reiterated, in a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that Brazil will continue to maintain commercial relations with Iran and will seek a peaceful solution to Iran’s nuclear issue. After meeting with Hillary Clinton at the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center, the provisional […]

From 21 January to 2 February 2010, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond — both involved in alterglobalization activism and members of the International Council of the World Social Forum, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt 1 — participated in various events and […]

  Interview by Aleix Bombila, for En Lucha (Spain), of John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, and author of Marx’s Ecology and The Ecological Revolution En Lucha: In your book Marx’s Ecology you argue that Marxism has a lot to offer to the ecologist movement.  What kind of united work can be established between […]

It’s now more than a month since the earthquake that laid waste to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting millions of people into the most desperate conditions. But according to the U.S. government, Haitians have a lot to be thankful for. On February 12, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted: “In […]

Decisive battles between the forces of revolution and counter-revolution loom on the horizon in Venezuela. The campaign for the September 26 National Assembly elections will be a crucial battle between the supporters of socialist President Hugo Chavez and the US-backed right-wing opposition. But these battles, part of the class struggle between the poor majority and […]

Dambisa Moyo was no doubt an excellent student.  Unfortunately, she is a product of the conventional economics curriculum, which is great if one is to embark on a career at the World Bank or Goldman Sachs.  She attempts a radical critique of ‘aid’ but sadly she is not up to the task, her noble intentions […]

Introduction by Geoffrey Gunn It is probably a cliché to observe that tropical rain forests host the greatest known concentrations of bio-diversity on the planet.  Together, the three great global equatorial biozones are central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Indonesian archipelago, including southern Sumatra Island, and the even more remote tin-rich offshore island of […]

  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that Iran’s latest statements and actions were compelling the United States “. . . and other countries” to resort to stiff sanctions.  Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Vladimir Nazarov said in his turn that Moscow might support sanctions but that they must be “adequate to […]

The capitalist world has experienced its deepest economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Paradoxically, whereas the earlier period saw the breakdown of liberal capitalism, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the Soviet alternative to liberal capitalism, today neo-liberalism and capitalist globalization still remain powerful, and apparently supreme, on the stage of […]

Jeffrey Sachs has become something of a force in international development circles over the past decade.  As special advisor to the UN’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former director of the UN’s Millennium Development Project, and a decorated economist at Columbia University, Sachs certainly has much to brag about.  The publication of his runaway bestseller, The […]