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converging crises

CLIMATE CRISIS

Does Iran’s water crisis play a role in its growing political turmoil?

16th January 2018

Louis Proyect writes: As a rentier state, Iran’s economy was based on handouts rather than the production of manufactured goods. Cheap oil and subsidies made the massive use of pumps feasible just as was the case in neighbouring Syria. Groundwater extraction nearly quadrupled between the 1970s and 2000 while the number of wells rose five-fold….

ALTERNATIVES

For saving the earth we need to tell the whole truth: A response to Richard Smith

8th January 2018

No doubt, capitalism has largely enabled the huge growth of human numbers in the last two hundred years. But human population growth has been occurring even in pre-capitalist eras. Parallel to this, also environmental destruction has been occurring and growing in these eras. It is not good to tell our readers only half the truth….

ALTERNATIVES

The 2017 movements and victories that give us reason to hope

31st December 2017

The bad news streaming through our media in 2017 has been relentless. However it doesn’t tell the full story. Beyond the headlines, there have countless amazing social movement struggles in different regions of the world that deserve to be celebrated. Here are ten stories showing that people power works, courtesy the Transnational Institute‘s 2017 recap….

ALTERNATIVES

To embrace the transition, we must go beyond ‘environmentalism’

29th December 2017

Erik Lindberg writes: In contrast to a conflictual and adversarial approach to activism, which aims at victory over those who stand in the way of progress, the Transition model and the community spaces it creates, open doors for the sort of narrative whereby we accept responsibility and move forward with recognition of our collective errors….

ALTERNATIVES

Without a viable alternative to capitalism, our goose is cooked

27th December 2017

Richard Smith writes: The fundamental contradiction with capitalism is that maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, occasionally they coincide for a moment. But saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns— and this no corporation can do….

CLIMATE CRISIS

How climate change and water woes drove ISIS recruiting in Iraq

20th December 2017

From National Geographic: Already battered by decades of shoddy environmental policies, which had hobbled agriculture and impoverished its inhabitants, villages across rural Iraq and Syria were in no state to navigate the extra challenges of climate change. When ISIS came along, many of them quickly emerged as some of the deep-pocketed jihadists’ foremost recruiting grounds….

ALTERNATIVES

The first Ecosocialist International is born!

16th December 2017

From Ecosocialist Horizons: The First Ecosocialist International is not just another gathering, nor another reunion of intellectuals to define ecosocialism. Neither is it a single organization with a seal, or with the omnipresent danger of becoming a bureaucracy. It’s simply a common program of struggle, with moments of encounter and exchange, which anyone may join….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Bill McKibben: With climate change, winning slowly is the same as losing

12th December 2017

“This may take a while, but we’re going to win.” This is true about most political fights, but not for climate change. If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth. It’s what makes climate change different from every other problem our political systems have faced….

ALTERNATIVES

Why “Warning to Humanity” gets the global crises (and its solutions) wrong

10th December 2017

From Entitle Blog: The “Warning to Humanity” signed by more than 15.000 scientists calls for action to save the planet proposing elitist environmentalism and missing the real target. The problem is not in the “barbarian hordes” and the “overpopulation bogeyman” but in the West’s “imperial mode of living” that is now expanding around the world….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The icesheet cometh

3rd December 2017

From Grist.org: Two Antarctic glaciers act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans —an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. Finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today….

Consumerism/Lifestyle

George Monbiot: Why ‘conscious consumption’ won’t save the world

29th November 2017

Recent studies show that those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not. Why? Because, environmental awareness is higher among wealthy people. It’s not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions….

ALTERNATIVES

Learning to see in the dark: An interview with deep ecologist Joanna Macy

24th November 2017

Joanna Macy, an eco-philosopher and a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, coined the phrase “The Great Turning” to describe “the essential adventure of our time”: the shift from what she calls the “industrial growth society” that is consuming the planet to a life-sustaining civilization. Here’s Macy’s interview with Truthout.org’s Dahr Jamail….

ALTERNATIVES

Announcing Presscoin/Insurge: The blockchain for people and the planet

22nd November 2017

A coalition of investigative journalists, privacy activists and alternative economy enthusiasts including Nafeez Ahmed, John Pilger and Barkha Dutt, have announced Presscoin/Insurge, a fascinating new hybrid platform that seeks to meld cutting-edge journalism with activism and alternative currencies. “Dedicated to people and the planet, it represents a fundamental break with the old paradigm,” Nafeez says….

ALTERNATIVES

Sulak Sivaraksa on the structural violence of the global economy

13th November 2017

Sulak Sivaraksa, the 85-year-old Thai Buddhist monk, thinker and peace activist, is currently facing the prospect of a fifteen-year jail sentence, for criticising his country’s royal family and military junta. Here, he speaks on the global economy’s built-in inequities and biases. Also included is ‘Heavenly Messengers,’ an excerpt from his book, ‘The Wisdom of Sustainability.’…

ALTERNATIVES

Noam Chomsky: Indigenous people are our only hope for survival

4th November 2017

According to the legendary scholar Noam Chomsky, the world is “facing potential environmental catastrophe and not in the distant future,” and the only communities standing between humankind and catastrophe is the world’s Indigenous people. Here we present a selection of articles & essays on indigenous people and their fight to defend nature from ‘civilised’ humans….

Development/Growth

A global police state? Digital capitalism and the rise of authoritarian leaders

2nd November 2017

William Robinson highlights some revealing statistics to expose what is really behind the rapid digitalization of global capitalism, the rise of authoritarian leaders and the creeping spread of the global police state. These, he says, are nothing but an insecure transnational capitalist elite’s attempt to insure themselves against rising inequality and a looming economic crisis….

Conserve/Resist

The insect ecosystem is collapsing due to humans. It’s a catastrophe

26th October 2017

From The Guardian: Insects are multitudinous beyond our imagining, and have triumphed for hundreds of millions of years, in every habitat. This makes all the more alarming the great truth now dawning upon us: insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them….

ALTERNATIVES

Reality check: Fossil fuel expansion crushes renewables

24th October 2017

Barry Saxifrage writes: What determines our climate fate is how much climate-polluting fossil fuels we burn. Renewables are great, but only if they actually replace oil, gas, or coal. Sadly, rising renewables haven’t stopped our fossil fuel burn. Instead, we keep expanding both renewables and fossil fuels at the same time, in a new business-as-usual….

ALTERNATIVES

Bookshelf: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot

14th October 2017

George Monbiot‘s powerful new book looks at how democracy and economic life can be radically organised from the bottom up. He argues against the “society-crushing system of neoliberalism”, and for a political agenda “that isn’t destined to destroy the living planet”, power given back to people so that wealth isn’t continually distributed to the rich….

ALTERNATIVES

Is there a way out? Announcing the new Radical Ecological Democracy website

3rd October 2017

Ashish Kothari & Pallav Das write: Genuine alternatives to the destructive juggernaut of corporate and finance capital are emerging as much from contemporary progressive resistance as from the wisdom of indigenous peoples’ and other traditional community world-views. “Radical Ecological Democracy” (RED) is one such emerging paradigm based on which we can fashion a meaningful future….