In the wildlife preserves of the Okavango Delta—home to 200,000 people and spanning parts of Namibia and Botswana—a Canadian oil company is drilling for oil over the fierce opposition of indigenous people, activists and environmental experts.
Category: Ecology
Ecological Imperialism and Jair Bolsonaro’s Agenda in Brazil
The case of Brazil under Bolsonaro helps to illustrate how authoritarian governments in the Global South see ecological concerns as impediments to capitalist growth.
Biden, the Oil Companies, and the Environment
Years of education, protest, and lobbying seem to be finally having an effect on U.S. environmental policies, though not without constant Republican resistance and Democratic vacillation—and so far, neither fast enough or strong enough for the change we need.
Open Letter to Editors of Jacobin and Monthly Review
Scholars and activists respond to the spirited attacks by Jacobin and Monthly Review on Yaku Pérez, the indigenous candidate in Ecuador’s presidential election.
Climate Change Comes to Republican Texas Producing a Disaster
Twenty years ago, Republicans took over Texas’ governorship, house, and senate and then deregulated and neglected the state’s energy systems, leading to this catastrophe.
State-Corporatist Alliance and Farmers’ Unrest in India
The ongoing Indian farmers’ protest in reaction to corporatisation of agricultural land and access to Mandis (open markets) demands an urgent legal reexamination of its impact on agrarian labour and small-scale farmers.
review
A Leftist Perspective on China’s Environmental Destruction
As “part of China,” we Hong Kongers have seen how China’s economic growth has contributed to the degradation of its environment. To be fair, Hong Kong’s economic takeoff had already harmed its environment before China took over the city. We . . .
review
Capitalism, Romanticism, and Nature
Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy’s Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature is an extremely interesting book—enjoyable, informative, and intellectually stimulating.
Structures of Fossil Feeling
In this easily accessible, passionately argued intervention, Dawson gives the reader both a valuable primer on contemporary struggles for energy justice and an entry into the theoretical debates whose outcome will inform and guide movement strategy going forward.
Indonesia: Mass Strikes Show Intersection of Class, Gender, and Ecology
Over a million people have taken to the streets in Indonesia to protest a neoliberal law that would roll back labor protections, especially for working women, while also opening the road toward greater environmental destruction.
The Hunger of Vibrant Matter: Materialism and Food in the Pandemic
The fundamental contradiction between production for exchange (profit) versus production for use (need) is the source not only of intermittent food deprivation, but of chronic and acute, life-threatening hunger for hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Karl Marx: Promethean Visionary?
“This small book is a very useful account of how Marx came to develop his materialist conception of history.” Michael Löwy reviews Eric Rahim, “A Promethean Vision: The Formation of Karl Marx’s Worldview” (Glasgow: Praxis Press, 2020).
A Green Recovery and the Fight Ahead to Avoid a Return to Business-as-Usual
As lockdowns ease, we must restart our presence on the streets, solidifying movements like Extinction Rebellion, and we must not allow the Neoliberal elites and their alt-right allies to coopt the conversation around the economic recovery.
Ecology, Democracy and Development: Capitalist Crises and Covid-19
For the past four months Covid-19 has revealed the contradictions and unsustainability of global capitalism perhaps in a manner that no other single phenomenon has ever done in history.
The New Deal Against the Environmentalists
Not only was the “greenest” of the original New Deal programs not established by nascent environmentalists, it was also internally fractured by their influence.
To Make Our Cities Green, We Must First Paint Them Red
There’s no question that the city will be dramatically reshaped in the coming years. Now we must ask, in the Lefebvrian tradition: Does everyone share in the benefits of this reshaping? Does the urban working class control the process?
Ten Aphorisms on Capitalism, Covid-19, and the Climate Crisis
The climate crisis, and by extension, the COVID-19 crisis, is a prolonged act of violence perpetrated on the 99% by capitalism’s accumulation for accumulation’s sake.
Planet of the Capitalists
Planet of the Humans follows a sensationalist path toward the needed debate over climate and capitalism. Worse, it takes an utterly wrong and dangerous position on population.
Protecting Nature in a Conservation Revolution
Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2020.
In a welcome contribution to discussions of radical green vision, Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher propose an intriguing concept called “convivial conservation.” . . .
France: Covid-19: A Very Political Virus
I’ll begin by telling you a story. In August 1940, when the Luftwaffe was crushing London with its bombs, British bourgeois politicians were very reluctant to open the subway system so that people could take refuge there. It took the . . .
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