The author explores various social, political, and cultural sites that explore and highlight the Black pastoral experience.
Subjects Archives: Environment
In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory
One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.
On Paul Kingsnorth and Unruly Nature
Myth, an early and enduring human technology, will always be with us, in both unconscious and conscious forms. As we now face the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the call for new myths is not so much an escapist alternative to concrete analysis and action as a starting point.
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap
Sometimes realization comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow.
Should marine species own the high seas?
To save the ocean, give property rights to the creatures living there.
What Bill Gates has wrong about “advanced” nuclear reactors
If nuclear power needs to be part of the climate solution, why not continue to use what we have? I understand the reactors that we have are aging out. But why not either shore those up or use the same design that we currently have where we wouldn’t have to go through the lengthy and […]
Battles lost, wars won: An environmentalist’s story
After Friends of Nature director-general Zhang Boju saw his activism fail, he went another route.
Grave concerns raised as Japan announces release of radioactive water into the sea
JAPAN has come under fire after its government announced today that it would release more than a million metric tonnes of radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.
China and climate change: an exchange
In the Notes from the Editors to the March 2021 issue of Monthly Review, the MR editors questioned some of the arguments in Richard Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, as well as replied to Simon Pirani’s related criticisms (writing under his pseudonym of Gabriel Levy) of MR editor John Bellamy Foster on China […]
Zambia is the tip of the tail of the Global dog
On 12 August 2021, the people of Zambia will vote to elect a new president, who will be the seventh person elected to the office since Zambia won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964 if the incumbent loses.
We are living through a time of fear not just of the virus but of each other
Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.
12 Arrested in Hebei for fabricating emission data
Local companies were found to be collaborating with an emission monitoring company to skirt environmental standards.
Ecosocialism versus degrowth: a false dilemma
Ecosocialists and degrowthers need to map the many overlaps of their views to improve the effectiveness of their shared struggle for an ecologically-sound and socially-fair world free from patriarchal, racial and colonial legacy.
Capitalism, romanticism, and nature
Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature is an extremely interesting book—enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating.
Chomsky and Prashad: Three major threats to life on Earth that we must address in 2021
Large parts of the world—outside of China and a few other countries—face a runaway virus, which has not been stopped because of criminal incompetence by governments.
You don’t want to imagine an ocean without coral reefs—but you might have to
The reefs will die. That seems certain. The UNEP report will not circulate. That seems equally certain. The Marshall Islands and Rwanda will file their updates. That has already happened. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies will sit on the sidelines, expanding fracking with a “who cares” attitude.
The environment movement we have, and the one we need
The ecological crisis—the disasters of earth, water, air and fire that are afflicting the global environment and the human society that depends on it—is a crisis of capitalism’s making. Karl Marx famously described capital as coming into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.
More important than gold, water should not be traded on Wall Street
Water is essential for life, access to fresh water is a human right, and most importantly, water is sacred. Water is life.
These indigenous women are leading a land struggle against the wealthiest people in the U.S.
While the United States shudders in the shambles of another election year, whether from a collective sigh of relief or fear of what’s to come, a different system of governance blooms in a swath of woodlands jutting into the Atlantic Ocean.
Engels’ struggle for a dialectical concept of nature
To prevent climate catastrophe, revolutionary decisions are needed based on a widespread understanding of the “dialectics of nature”, which Friedrich Engels, on his joint mission with Karl Marx, sought to explain.
