Subjects Archives: Environment

Cities across the world are facing a double-barreled existential problem: how to adapt to climate change and how to pay for it.

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics a young man born on the day of Hiroshima nuclear bombing was selected to be the last torch bearer on the relay, to signify that Japan had stood up from nuclear ruin. In an attempt to replicate the 1964 Olympic theme, the Abe government has constructed the idea of a Fukushima “revival,” a returned to normal. Exposing this illusion is an important cultural war.

We know how the first paragraph begins. We’ve read about the changing climate for over twenty years, infrequently at first and then daily until we couldn’t deny it any longer. The world is burning.

Jack Mundey, the leader of the NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation between 1968 and 1974 has passed away at the age of 90. An initiator of the “green bans”, Jack was a Marxist who rediscovered the ecological essence of Marxism.

The balance of nature is not the same today as in Pleistocene times, but it is still there: a complex, precise, and highly integrated system of relationships between living things which cannot safely be ignored any more than the law of gravity can be defied with impunity by a [person] perched on the edge of a cliff. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. [Humans], too, [are] part of this balance.

Mostly, Planet of the Humans is just so fucking bad. So bad that its good points are useless. It does have some good points–there seem to be a lot of rock festivals in Vermont that claim, incorrectly, to be running on solar.

Warmer temperatures and shifting storm tracks are drying up vast stretches of land in North and South America.

There is growing interest in a Green New Deal, but far too little discussion among supporters about the challenging nature of the required economic transformation, the necessary role of public planning and ownership in shaping it, or the strategies necessary to institutionalize a strong worker-community voice in the process and final outcome.

In the light of the current pandemic, here is a rough excerpt from my upcoming short book on Engels’ contribution to Marxian political economy on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

On July 15, 2013, the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), led by Berta Cáceres Flores, went to protest the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River. This river, in western Honduras, is considered to be sacred by the indigenous Lenca community. No one from the company that wanted to build the dam had talked to the Lenca.

“Don’t want to hear Greta Thunberg or Extinction Rebellion? Try J.P. Morgan instead.”

Climate change, unchecked, promises planetary disaster. All forms of life are threatened. Scientific evidence strongly suggests capitalistforms of production and consumption gave rise to climate change in the first place and have allowed the process to advance.

The word catastrophe is being used more and more by institutions reporting on the effects of extreme weather in the two regions of Africa, Southern and South Eastern Africa, and of late Australia. The word means a number of things: tragic; fiasco; utter failure; sudden and violent change in a feature of the Earth. All are completely fitting for the situation we now face.

While the stark reality of the global climate emergency struck home in Australia with its worst bushfire season, its neighbour Indonesia faced catastrophic floods and islands disappearing below the rising sea. Green Left’s Peter Boyle interviewed Yuyun Harmono, the climate change campaigner of Friends of the Earth Indonesia (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia – WAHLI).

The donation would be equivalent to someone who earned $500 per week announcing on social media that they had just donated five cents to help tackle the blazes.

Sagebrush, Ponderosa Pine, Juniper Trees, and Piñón Pine are important flora in the western United States. Juniper can live more than 1,000 years, as can some Piñón. Ponderosa live up to 400 years. Sagebrush is a perennial and can survive for 100 years. All have been and are used for a variety of purposes by native peoples.

In what follows, I will first briefly summarize the core arguments of the book, which promises to provoke important discussions on the matter of limits and subjects. Then I will reflect on the fuzziness of the primarily cultural conceptualization of capitalism, and argue that neither self-limitation nor degrowth qualifies as a mode of production, such that they could constitute an alternative to capitalism.

New fires are expected to ignite, while strong winds are predicted to fan the hundreds of blazes that are already burning. Hundreds of thousands of people were urged yesterday to evacuate the most-at-risk areas.

Christopher Caudwell, who died at age 29 fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, wrote: “Either the devil has come amongst us having great power, or there is a causal explanation for a disease common to economics, science, and art.” That disease, he recognized, was the self-alienation of humanity under capitalism

In the face of climate crisis megafires and an air quality health crisis, 40,000 people rallied and marched in Sydney to demand action on Wednesday night. The city is choking, and New South Wales is on fire. In Randwick on Tuesday, the air pollution was 11 times higher than “hazardous”.