Subjects Archives: Environment

The history of California in the capitalist era is as mythic as the American Dream itself. From around the world, countless workers have emigrated to the “Golden State” in search of a better life.

On the anniversary of his birth, we recall the volcanic strength Ernesto Guevara carried within, already evident in the young man who met Fidel in Mexico.

On 26 June 2021, tens of thousands of Indian farmers will gather in front of the government offices in India’s twenty-eight states.

The global discourse on sustainability has revolved around the need to transition towards “Sustainable Consumption” ever since it was introduced during the 1992 Earth Summit chaired by Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman who made his wealth from the oil and gas industry.

While large polluting countries have refused to take necessary measures to slow the climate crisis, Nicaragua, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, has taken impressive steps to shift to more sustainable energy.

In 1974, the UN urged the world to celebrate that day on 5 June with the slogan ‘Only One Earth’; this year, the theme is ‘Ecosystem Restoration’, emphasising how the capitalist system has eroded the earth’s capacity to sustain life.

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Making Peace with Nature (2021), highlights the ‘gravity of the Earth’s triple environmental emergencies: climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution’.

This is a talk given online at the ESRC Festival of Social Science on November 11, 2020: ‘Was Marx a climate warrior?’ for a panel organized by Bangor University.

Russia’s weather has gone crazy. There is currently a heatwave inside the Arctic Circle where the coast is hotter than Mediterranean beaches.

Apparently—and entirely predictably—low-Earth-orbit is now firmly within the widening tides of corporate capitalism’s great waste ocean.

Chinese cryptocurrency businesses mine two-thirds of all Bitcoin. But for how long will they remain welcome in the country?

The author explores various social, political, and cultural sites that explore and highlight the Black pastoral experience.

One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.

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.

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.

To save the ocean, give property rights to the creatures living there.

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 costly development phase?

After Friends of Nature director-general Zhang Boju saw his activism fail, he went another route.

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.

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 and the environment. Both Smith and Pirani have written replies to our March editorial, which we are publishing here, along with our own rejoinder.