Brayan Caicedo
ALTERNATIVES
We must rethink the question of states, market and society. We have dismembered the state; grown the market and believed that we’ve empowered society. Slowly, the circle closed— state, market and aspiring, consuming society merged. They became one. Anyone outside this circle stopped getting counted. This cannot work. This is our future’s most important agenda….
Read More about Sunita Narain: The future is in our hands
Paresh Nath/The Khaleej Times
Culture/Cognition
Kenn Orphan writes: Earth Day has morphed into an opportunity for corporations and politicians to tout empty gestures at “saving the planet” while they mercilessly plunder it. It neutralises public outrage at the world’s dire state and spreads an all-pervasive “feel goodism” to a situation that’s truly existential, for countless other species, and our own….
Read More about Earth Day and the phantoms of a pathological cultureBookshelf
In his new book, Why Are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change, Nicholas Stern explains why, notwithstanding the great attractions of a new path, it’s been so difficult to tackle climate change. He makes a compelling case for climate action now and sets out the forms that action should take….
Read More about Nicholas Stern: Why are we waiting?
ALTERNATIVES
From Open Democracy: Open cooperativism is an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons based peer production. Here are six interrelated strategies for post-corporate entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices, toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy….
Read More about How to form a global counter-economy
CLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read writes: In financial parlance, a ‘black swan’ is a radically unexpected event. Ever-worsening man-made climate change (that is, barring a system change) is not a potential ‘black swan’ event. It’s a white swan, an expected event. It is, quite simply, completely what anyone with a basic understanding of the situation should now expect….
Read More about Why climate change is a ‘white swan’Bookshelf
“What you see in a lot of countries is a predatory capitalism, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Australia, which show the corporations that are involved in the neo-liberal agenda, an agenda that has been implemented without really any public consent. This is happening, I would argue, almost by stealth,” says author and journalist Anthony Lowenstein….
Read More about How vulture capitalism is swallowing the world
Gopal Aggarwal/Wikimedia Commons
Development/Growth
Andrew Russell writes: The most undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist. This shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of entropy and un-doing– and the work we do to slow or halt them, rather than on introduction of novel things….
Read More about Innovation is overrated; it’s maintenance that matters more
ALTERNATIVES
From Kosmos Journal: What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating?…
Read More about Seeing Wetiko: On capitalism, mind viruses, and antidotes for a world in transitionCLIMATE CRISIS
Rupert Read, a philosophy professor at the University of East Anglia, UK, recently shocked his new 1st year students with a ‘welcoming address’ that dealt with the looming dangers of climate change. Watch the video or read the transcript of his speech below to know why Prof. Read chose to dwell on this unexpected subject….
Read More about Rupert Read: Why I had to tell my students that I fear for them
Bookshelf
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded–but virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top. In reality, it is precisely the other way around. This is one of the biggest taboos of our times– the truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state….
Read More about Rutger Bregman: Wealth isn’t created at the top; it’s only devoured there
ALTERNATIVES
Jeremy Lent writes: We’re going to be hearing a lot about grand solutions to our climate emergency in the coming years. There’s no shortage of proposals for how to do this. We need a way to distinguish authentic pathways to a sustainable civilization from false solutions. I suggest three ways to consider any such proposal….
Read More about False solutions? 3 ways to evaluate grand climate proposals
SvitalskyBros
ALTERNATIVES
Editor’s Note: Last week, Ecologise carried the well-known Marxist scholar John Bellamy Foster’s foreword to a new book, Facing the Anthropocene. In response, noted eco-socialist writer Saral Sarkar posted a comment questioning the usefulness of Marxist analysis in understanding the global ecological crisis. This short piece, first published on Ecologise, is Foster’s reply to Sarkar….
Read More about Marxism, ecology and the Anthropocene: A debate
ALTERNATIVES
John Bellamy Foster writes in the foreword: It’s capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it….
Read More about Bookshelf: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth SystemConflict/Dispossession
Yesterday, a local court convicted 31, and acquitted 117 of the 148 workers charged with the murder of an HR manager at Maruti-Suzuki’s Manesar plant five years ago. The verdict once again puts the spotlight on the extreme exploitation and structural violence that characterise Indian industry, described by G. Sampath in this unforgettable 2012 article….
Read More about Can India Inc. face the truth about the Manesar violence?ALTERNATIVES
The pioneering American economist who helped found the discipline of Ecological Economics, and presently a leading theorist of ‘steady-state economics’, muses on Pope Francis’ ground-breaking encyclical on environment and justice. “At a minimum, he’s given us a more truthful, informed, and courageous analysis of the environmental and moral crisis than have our secular political leaders.”…
Read More about Herman Daly: Thoughts on Pope Francis’ Laudato Si
Economy
A wave of revulsion rolls around the world. Approval ratings for incumbent leaders are everywhere collapsing. Symbols and slogans trump facts and nuance. One in six Americans now believes that military rule would be a good idea. From all this I draw the following, peculiar conclusion: no country with a McDonald’s can remain a democracy….
Read More about George Monbiot: The Golden Arches Theory of Decline
Conflict/Dispossession
From The New York Times: …It is impossible to imagine a world without global connections: They have always existed, and no place has escaped their formative influence. But this does not mean that there is any inherent merit in interconnectedness, which has always been accompanied by violence, deepening inequalities and the large-scale destruction of communities….
Read More about Amitav Ghosh: What nutmeg can tell us about globalisation
Scroll.in
ALTERNATIVES
Gandhi and Kumarappa shared an objective of building a non-violent social and economic order that promoted equity and justice for all. Their understanding led them to conclude that “the only path to true democracy in political life, and to peace among nations” was a decentralised economic and political system where, necessarily, the “rewards were moderate”….
Read More about Defying capitalism and socialism, Kumarappa and Gandhi had imagined a decentralised Indian economyECOCIDE/EXTINCTION
Fidel Castro, the legendary Cuban revolutionary and politician who passed away on November 25th was known for his pioneering policies in health and education, but was equally committed to environmental issues. In this short talk given at the 1992 Earth Summit, Fidel described the global environmental crisis and identified its causes more powerfully than any other delegate….
Read More about Watch: Fidel Castro: Tomorrow will be too late
Consumerism/Lifestyle
George Monbiot in The Guardian: The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself… It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise, owned by a big corporation. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours….
Read More about Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine
