Media & Communications

Social movements call for a Permanent Peoples’ Assembly, Rio 2012

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We, organizations, networks and social movements, involved in the building of the Peoples’ Summit for social and environmental justice, against the commodification of life and nature in defence (Río+20), call for the mobilization and coordination of struggles across the planet. To ensure fulfillment of the rights of all peoples, especially those most vulnerable, to have access to water, food, energy, land, seeds, territories, and decent livelihoods, and to demand the rights of Mother Earth.

How is the Sharing economy different from the Anarchy economy?

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The Sharing economy is quickly becoming a diluted term, just like ‘sustainable” and ‘all natural”. If “sharing” means “make some side cash”, let’s call it what it really is. It is a way to raise cash using owned assets (a room, a car, a wheelbarrow, etc.) that boomerang back to the rightful owner at some point.

Cultivating a sustainable community: The cycle of collaboration

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In order to survive peak oil, climate change, economic failure, and ecological collapse we must make fundamental shifts in our collective way of life. Individual change is necessary but not enough because our means of survival are embedded in complex social and economic systems. On the other hand, direct change of the massive business and government institutions we now depend upon is unrealistic because the nature of all large institutions is self-perpetuation, not transformation. The practical domain in which we can effectively create a sustainable way of life is our local community.

Oil executive son’s powerful testimony at Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline joint review panel (includes transcript)

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Lee Brain, son of an oil man, receives a standing ovation and brings a crowd to tears after delivering powerful & inspirational testimony in front of the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel in Prince Rupert on February 18, 2012.

Climate & science – Feb 22

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– Monbiot: We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists
– Climate scientist Peter Gleick admits he leaked Heartland Institute documents
– On the environment Canada is a rogue state
– Stark warning emerges from AAAS summit: science is ‘under siege’

Will Occupy Wall Street start drilling for peak oil?

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Though there’s been a flurry of books about the Occupy movement in the last few months, few of them have said much about energy and the environment. Predictably, writers have largely focused so far on the core issues that originally filled Zuccotti Park last fall, an unfair economy and politics corrupted by corporate lucre.

Now comes a new title on Occupy that takes ecological overshoot seriously, Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform. Refreshingly, the book also zeroes in on the issue that the energy-savvy find behind all our financial and political woes today: peak oil.

As Greece erupts, BBC’s Paul Mason on “The New Global Revolutions” over austerity, inequality

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Greece is bracing for protests after eurozone finance ministers concluded a deal that will provide a $170 billion bailout in return for another round of deep austerity cuts. We’re joined by Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC Newsnight and author of the new book, “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.” He has just returned from Greece. “What makes the headlines are, of course, the riots,” Mason says. “What doesn’t make so many headlines is what is happening to real people… We are living in a time where the world has, in the last couple of years, erupted in a way that many people thought they would never see again since the 1960s… The underpinnings of this new global unrest are that…people are sick of seeing the rich get richer during a crisis.”