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The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 3

8th August 2016

Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we re-publish interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The climate crisis is already here – but no one’s telling us

7th August 2016

George Monbiot writes: If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All of them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the media….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Climate change is here and now, warns dire new report

5th August 2016

Common Dreams reports: Environmental records of all kinds are being shattered as climate change takes effect in real time, a new climate research report says. 2015 was the hottest year on record since at least the mid-to-late 19th century, confirming the “toppling of several symbolic milestones” in global temperature, sea level rise, and extreme weather….

Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 2

30th July 2016

Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best….

CLIMATE CRISIS

What would a global warming increase of 1.5 degrees be like?

27th July 2016

Fred Pearce writes: How hard would it be to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees? At various times in the past six months, global average temperatures have sometimes gone above 1.5 degrees. The truth is that scientists are only now getting out of the blocks to address what a 1.5-degree world would really look like….

Dr Jill Stein, the U.S. Green Party's candidate for the 2017 presidential elections

ALTERNATIVES

The case for the green state

26th July 2016

William Hawes writes: Critiques of the modern nation-state have been growing, due to the abysmal failures of the capitalist, neoliberal order. On the other side, the leftism of social-democratic reforms promote endless government spending. Neither of these models address the many crises our world faces. Green political theory offers a way out of this impasse….

A Warli painting depicting collective life

ALTERNATIVES

Beyond development: The commons as a new/old paradigm of human flourishing

25th July 2016

David Bollier writes: The brute facts of climate change are calling into question models of economic development, transforming the terms of debate, compelling us to mythologies of development and growth, and quickly imagine credible alternative paths. Suddenly, the social economies of indigenous peoples, traditional communities and localized systems seem highly relevant to the challenges ahead….

Bookshelf

The Great Derangement: Conversations with Amitav Ghosh – 1

22nd July 2016

Acclaimed novelist Amitav Ghosh‘s non-fiction take on climate change and our collective inability to acknowledge its danger – titled The Great Derangement – has been hailed as a landmark, which promises to change the conversation around this crucial issue. In this series, we’re re-publishing interviews which feature the writer at his forceful and articulate best….

ALTERNATIVES

Clean energy won’t save us – only a new economic system can do that

21st July 2016

Jason Hickel writes: When it comes to climate change, the problem is not just the type of energy we are using, it is what we’re doing with it. What would we do with 100% clean energy? Exactly what we are currently doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture….

ALTERNATIVES

Sustainability – The Simpler Way perspective

16th July 2016

Ted Trainer writes: Following is an outline of the case, firstly that present ways are grossly unsustainable and secondly that the solution must involve far lower rates of production and consumption and GDP, frugal and self-sufficient lifestyles in small, localized, and largely self-governing communities, in a zero-growth economy which is not driven by market forces….

Conserve/Resist

The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels

15th July 2016

Chris Mooney reports: In an ambitious study representing the latest merger between big data approaches and the quest to conserve the planet, scientists have found that across a majority of the Earth’s land surface, the abundance or overall number of animals and plants of different species has fallen below a “safe” level identified by biologists….

ALTERNATIVES

Christopher Alexander’s neglected challenge to Permaculture

Dan Palmer writes: Christopher Alexander is a radical architect and writer respected by permaculture practitioners. According to him, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: and the form of the whole comes second, but “it is impossible to form anything which has the character of nature by adding preformed parts.”…

CLIMATE CRISIS

We just broke the record for hottest year, nine straight times

13th July 2016

Dana Nuccitelli reports in The Guardian: 2014 and 2015 each set the record for hottest calendar year since we began measuring surface temperatures over 150 years ago, and 2016 is almost certain to break the record once again. It will be without precedent: the first time that we have seen three consecutive record-breaking hot years….

Bookshelf

Why we do not hear the waters: The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

Raghu Karnad writes: The mysterious absence of climate disaster from contemporary arts and fiction is the central issue in Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, a genuinely important book. The book’s about much else: but stops at every point to ask why our pressing concern, that we are wrecking our climate and habitat, is so ignored….

ALTERNATIVES

The commons: A credible strategy for building a radically different world

29th June 2016

David Bollier writes: How are we to imagine and build a radically different world when the incumbent system aggressively resists change? Our challenge is not just articulating alternatives, but identifying strategies for actualizing them. The commons —a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices— holds great promise in transcending this conundrum….

ECOCIDE/EXTINCTION

Environment: It’s a question of survival now

28th June 2016

Bharat Dogra writes: The full dimensions of the environmental crisis in the 21st century need to be understood in wider terms of several critical parameters, together disrupting the life-creating conditions on earth to such an extent as to pose nothing less than a survival crisis for many forms of life and ultimately for human beings….

Conflict/Dispossession

Dmitry Orlov: Negative interest rates and the impending global financial collapse

25th June 2016

What the flashing neon words on the wall seem to be saying is: negative interest rates are on the way throughout the “developed world.” In due course, they will demolish any remaining value of the US dollar, and blow up the bond bubble. In turn, this financial collapse will trigger the next stage: commercial collapse….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The climate change PR disaster

20th June 2016

Bob Pickard writes: It is remarkable how little has actually been done to deal with climate change – and the current lack of public affairs urgency is absolutely breathtaking… There are many reasons why climate change is such a vexing communications conundrum; but as a PR professional, here is what I‘ve pieced together so far….

The endangered white rhinoceros

Conserve/Resist

The illegal wildlife trade and the business of ecocide

16th June 2016

Colin Todhunter writes: Without addressing the impacts and nature of corporate greed and a wholly corrupt neoliberal capitalism that privileges corporations and profit ahead of people and conservation, regardless of any success in the area of the trafficking of wild animals or plants, much of the world’s wildlife and biodiversity will remain under serious threat….

ALTERNATIVES

Farming for a small planet: Agroecology now!

5th June 2016

Frances Moore Lappé writes: The primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system, embodied in industrial agriculture, that views life in disassociated parts, obscuring the destructive impact this has on humans, natural resources, and the environment. The emerging alternative, relational approach —agroecology— has already shown promising success on the ground….