The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Africa
The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.
The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.
I had a letter from a young reader last week, asking what I thought about concrete steps that we might be taking in place of what passes for activism in our present culture.
On this segment of Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by William Rees, Nora Bateson, and Rex Weyler to discuss the purpose of ecology and what it might look like to have a civilization centered around it.
There’s a wider point here—that in general the private sector would never be profitable if it had to pay for the environmental capital it gets through—but it’s rare to see such a clear cut example.
A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for “community rights” and more recently, “self-owned land.”
The Cuban experience now looks to me like an even more impressive success story, showing purely human intelligence coping with a seriously life-threatening situation at nation-state scale.
There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.
As I noted in 2012, 2014 and 2015, nothing will change in Alberta’s petrostate until its citizens embrace representative taxation (and pay their own way), shut down the oil revenue roller coaster and save for a rainy day. Or months of wildfires.
Collectively known as the de-eucalyptising brigades, these groups of volunteers work to fell mature trees and remove the wood from the forest, so that light can reach and begin to regenerate the leafy native plants of the understory.
So let’s make Vermont everywhere. And Brooklyn. And Albuquerque. Let’s occupy our own lives wherever we are. And maybe, when we stop supporting the overburden, we can all work out how to build that hearth.
When confronted with a choice between building a society based on communitarian values or expanding to dodge the difficulties that would have entailed, the U.S. consistently chose imperial expansion.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, the agricultural sector has found itself embroiled in an ongoing crisis.