Subjects Archives: Ecology

The American West is facing a water crisis, compounded by climate change, a history of bad policy, and government refusal to address Big Ag head-on.

Campesinos high up in the beautiful Andean valley of Gavidia are working to preserve the native potato and the way of life that goes with it.

A review of ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’, Kohei Saito (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

An estimated 12 million metric tons of plastic currently enters the ocean each year.

The surprising history of cars in the U.S. offers hope for a shift toward more climate-friendly transportation options.

Let’s start with the total amount of radiation that the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant STILL contains today. The spent fuel at the site contains 85 times more cesium-137 than Chornobyl and 50,000 to 100,000 times more than the Hiroshima bomb. 

Over the northern hemisphere summer that has been dominated by floods, fires, and unrelenting heat, with temperature records being regularly smashed, climate scientists have become increasingly alarmed.

In a mind-numbingly irresponsible political gamble, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak last month announced a reversal of the UK’s key climate change pledges.

What links Karl Marx, William S. Burroughs, Dalit struggles in India and the Yetties’ famous Muckspreader Song? Ed Emery writes on the centrality of excrement, both metaphorical and literal, to the modern world.

THE Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover for starting projects that rake in profits. It is amending the Forest Conservation Act to remove those forest patches that are not deemed as such by the government from protection under the Act.

Foster explains Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism and how the concept of “metabolic rift” highlights the alienation between humans and nature caused by capitalism’s focus on profit over sustainability.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last week welcomed a UNESCO World Heritage Committee decision not to list the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”. But what is “great news” to Plibersek is not great news for the reef. 

“Public schools belong to us, and we know we deserve better,” said a Sunrise Movement organizer and the youngest school board member in Idaho.

At least 75,000 marched in New York City on September 17, quite impressive, inspiring to be a part of. As compared to previous marches, last seen pre-Covid, there were more people of color, indigenous and immigrant participants.

PROINPA is a grassroots campesino organization promoting food sovereignty, endogenous seed production, and an agroecological transition.

This article, by Alan Thornett, was written for the current edition of the Green Left’s publication Watermelon in advance of the Green Party conference.

The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.

It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity cannot resolve the anthropogenic ecological crises without radically restructuring our social relations—a consensus shared by the degrowth movement and revolutionary socialism. Panel Discussion at Socialism 2023

Inherent in the nature of insanity is the fact that those inflicted by it are unaware of their mental state, nor do crowds of people or for that matter political parties, and business elites, leading populations to catastrophe, from the scale of the Johnstown all the way to Aushwitz and Berlin to Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan

Planned fossil fuel expansion in the U.S. accounts for more than a third of new oil and gas extraction projects set to begin through 2050, according to Oil Change International.