The Lies We’re Told About Appalachia
By Ivy Brashear, YES! magazine
Stories about Appalachia, who tells them and who gets to claim them, matter a great deal when it comes to understanding the place and people more fully. And that understanding is critical, because without a deeper and more complete understanding of Appalachia, it will be hard for its people to build a brighter future that crosses lines of division and works toward parity between race and class.
Trudeau Will Fuel the Fires of our Climate Crisis if he Approves Canada’s Mega Mine
By Tzeporah Berman, The Guardian blog
From a climate and economic perspective, Canada clearly needs a different plan than expanding oil and gas. Such a plan means standing up to the oil industry’s unrelenting lobby and recognizing the oil sands, which already produce 2.91m barrels a day and climbing, are more than big enough.
Britain’s Moment of Truth
By Laurie Macfarlane, Open Democracy
It’s clear to anyone who has been following British politics that the tectonic plates of British politics are shifting. But to attribute this shift to Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn is to confuse cause and effect. The roots of the stark choice facing British voters this week can be found in a trio of deep, interconnected crises.
COP25 Climate Summit: Action must Include Divestment, Decolonization and Resistance
By Diana Vela Almeida, Catherine Windey, Gert Van Hecken, Melissa Moreano, Nicolas Kosoy, Vijay Kolinjivadi, The Conversation
Caring for nature means resisting the commodification of nature and standing up to environmental injustice. It also means getting to know the struggles and aspirations of environmental defenders and forest dwellers, who they fight and how you can help from where you are. It is crucial to mobilize and get politically organized, to come together in solidarity for a long-haul struggle.
A Just Food Transition
By Caitlin Bradley Morgan, Uneven Earth
To combat climate change, we must shift how we produce, distribute, consume, and dispose of food. To adapt to climate change, we must build agricultural systems that are resilient to disruption. The timeliness of this move was evident recently as a national coalition of farmers and ranchers endorsed the Green New Deal.
Three Ways to Regenerate Bioregions
By Joe Brewer, Medium
We need to organize our societies (and all of their material flows) around bioregions. Only then might we learn how to function as regenerative economies that restore ecosystems and heal the Earth. This is what my colleagues and I are supporting at the Regenerative Communities Network. We are mobilizing a growing number of existing efforts to create bioregional economies into a peer-to-peer learning network that shares tools and knowledge to speed up all our efforts.
Analysis: Global Fossil-Fuel Emissions up 0.6% in 2019 due to China
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
After increasing at the fastest rate for seven years in 2018, global CO2 emissions are set to rise much more slowly this year – but will, nevertheless, reach another record high. Emissions from fossil fuel and industry (FF&I) are expected to reach 36.81bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) in 2019, up by only 0.24GtCO2 (0.6%) from 2018 levels, according to the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP).
Guy Standing’s ‘Plunder of the Commons’
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
In his recent book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, Guy Standing, an economist at SOAS in London, brings together both end-points of this history. The focus is on enclosures, but the point of the book, its manifesto, is to reclaim the commons, chiefly understood, in this context, as public assets and services.