The Unbearable Unawareness of our Ecological Existential CrisisOver the past two years, the full report on Climate Change Mitigation by IPCC scientists, as well as research from other centres such as the Stockholm Resilience Centre, has consistently confirmed that we are on a doomsday trajectory. Unless we move rapidly in the opposite direction, the chances that we will face planetary catastrophes that seriously threaten the existence of life on our planet in the next twenty years are realistic and probable. Unsustainable capitalism keeps us deluded and largely unaware that we are on the brink of a serious existential risk. Therefore the great challenge is to provoke the awareness and critical thinking of ordinary citizens. Only a Citixens Revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arouse Now! –– Álvaro J. de Regil Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global ContextThe corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints. –– Nubia Barrera Silva Spiral of contradictions between financialised capitalism and rural smallholdings in South and MesoamericaIrreversible destruction of the Earth's soil food webs leads to drought and collapse of global food security. The logic of peripheral capitalism slips through the cracks of economic growth without development... Thus we have a direct correlation between the dispossession of land, the alienation of the rural workforce and the loss of food sovereignty. — Nubia Barrera Silva Urban Commons and Collective Action to Address Climate ChangeCommunity centres can have a key role in the social mobilisation of community climate commons. Group-based learning on climate change is more effective than individual learning. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., “urban green commons,” “coworking spaces,” and “community climate commons.” — Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson and Stefan Sjöberg The Case for Universal Basic ServicesThis paper shifts the focus from transfers to public services. It mounts a case for Universal Basic Services (UBS): a proposal to safeguard and develop existing public services and to extend this model of provision into new areas. The first part argues that public services require a distinct conceptual justification and sets this out in terms of shared human needs and a foundational economy. The second part develops the normative arguments for UBS, in terms of efficiency, equality, solidarity and sustainability. The third part considers some of the issues to be faced in delivering UBS and the role of state institutions, with brief service provisions. The final section summarises some developments, including experience of Covid-19, which might enhance the political impetus for UBS. –– Ian Gough World Development under Monopoly CapitalismIn the recent period of globalisation - following the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the reintegration of China into the world economy - global value chains have become the dominant organisational form of capitalism. From low-tech to high-tech, from basic consumer goods to heavy capital goods, from food to services, goods are now produced in many countries, integrated through global value chains. According to the ILO, between 1995 and 2013 the number of people employed in global value chains increased from 296 million to 453 million, representing one in five jobs in the world economy. We live in a world of global value chains. -- Benjamin Selwyn and Dara Leyden Transitioning to Geocratia — the People and Planet and Not the Market Paradigm — First StepsParting from the fact that saving Planet Earth, our home, changes everything, we need to build a new ethos where the majority of humankind commits to a system whose only purpose is the pursuit of the welfare of people and Planet Earth. This requires that all Earth resources necessary for the enjoyment of life of all living things be managed to achieve true long-term sustainability. — Álvaro J. de Regil Population in the IPCC’s new mitigation report.A new IPCC climate change mitigation report confirms that population increase and economic growth are the main drivers of today’s historically high greenhouse gas emissions. — Philip Cafaro Just Transition Is About Systemic ChangeSince the 1970s, a term has gained prominence as workers have forced governments to look at the social side to their environmental policies: just transition. Today the term is everywhere, its meaning at once elusive but also key to facing the multiple crises of environmental breakdown, social injustice, and global inequality. In a forthcoming collection on the concept and practice, Dirk Holemans unpicks just transition as cause for Greens. –– Dirk Holemans Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human DevelopmentThe word degrowth designates a family of political-economic approaches which, in the face of the acceleration of the current planetary ecological crisis, reject exponential and unlimited economic growth as the definition of human progress. With continuous technological development and the improvement of human capabilities, mere replacement investment is capable of promoting constant qualitative advances in production in mature industrial societies, while eliminating exploitative labour conditions and reducing working hours. Degrowth, which is specifically targeted at the most affluent sectors of the world's population, is thus aimed at improving the living conditions of the vast majority, while maintaining environmental conditions of existence and promoting sustainable human development. –– John Bellamy Foster Marketocracy and the Capture of People and Planet — The acceleration of Twenty-First Century Monopoly Capital Fascism through the pandemic and the Great ResetThis study examines the trajectory that the world has followed since neoliberalism was imposed on humanity half a century ago, assessing the subsequent motivations—and their consequences for humanity and the planet as a whole—of key global elite groups and individuals (Gates, Musk, Bezos and the World Economic Forum, and its proclaimed "Fourth Industrial Revolution" through "The Great Reset") who have powerful influence on the world's governments. We live in dangerous times on our planet that threaten the future of all living things, but there is a way to avoid such a future –––– Álvaro J. de Regil Lithium and the Contradictions in the Energy Transition that Devastate the Global South In Favour of the Global NorthGreen Capitalism is a Hoax, because switching to batteries is not sustainable and it keeps depredating the ecosystems. — Nubia Barrera Silva Let the cities move by pedallingThe way urban space is configured has an immediate effect on our quality of life. In Spain alone there are more than 30,000 premature deaths associated with poor air quality. Let's get the bikes on our streets. –– Samuel Romero Aporta The New IrrationalismMore than a century after the commencement of the Great Crisis of 1914–1945, represented by the First World War, the Great Depression, and Second World War, we are seeing a sudden resurgence of war and fascism across the globe. The capitalist world economy as a whole is now characterised by deepening stagnation, financialization, and soaring inequality. All of this is accompanied by the prospect of planetary omnicide in the dual forms of nuclear holocaust and climate destabilisation. In this dangerous context, the very notion of human reason is frequently being called into question. It is therefore necessary to address once again the question of the relation of imperialism or monopoly capitalism to the destruction of reason and the ramifications of this for contemporary class and anti-imperialist struggles. –– John Bellamy Foster Is Population Crucial for Degrowth?Most proponents of degrowth tend to avoid the population factor, many of them fearful of being perceived as Malthusian. This is not the case. However, in the context of a genuinely democratic ethos, we must incorporate population degrowth into the core of any degrowth imaginary, as we are the preeminent source of our planet's unsustainable consumption. If people become aware of the existential danger we face, we expect that many will choose to embark on a transition that includes gradual population degrowth as a key driver of our trajectory. If the majority refuses, that is always their right. In such a case, we will have to face the consequences of significantly reducing the chances of achieving a safe and just transition-ecologically safe for all species and socially just for people, especially in the Global South-to avoid the obvious existential threat we face. –– Álvaro J. de Regil Africa boasts examples of ecological resilienceDespite its low pollution levels, the black continent is much more committed to ecological transition than many other territories tied to their old patterns of industrial production. Despite its low pollution levels, the black continent is much more committed to ecological transition than many other territories tied to their old patterns of industrial production. — Johari Gautier Carmona Where We Mine: Resource Politics in Latin AmericaAs the drive to expand renewable energy capacity speeds up, there is a rush for lithium and other materials around the world. What will the expansion of rare earth mining in Latin America mean for the indigenous communities and workers who have historically borne the harms of extractivism? Thea Riofrancos, author of Resource Radicals (Duke University Press, 2020), explains how the energy transition in the Global North risks being anything but just without structural changes to supply chains and the governance of extractive industries. –– Annabelle Dawson – Thea Riofrancos There will be no ecological transition without a social and labour transitionAt present, hardly anyone doubts the need for an ecological transition. Environmental denialism, although it exists, seems to be in retreat in the face of overwhelming evidence of the negative effects of our way of life on nature. The energy model must be changed. But even more urgent is a transformation that addresses the limitation of wealth, consumption and the necessary sharing of labour. –– Vicente López Trees and the ‘Net-Zero‘ Emissions HoaxThe trees of the forest, a natural paradise of complex plant engineering under the deception of 'net zero' emissions in the Amazon. The irreconcilable contradictions of capital. — Nubia Barrera Silva Decent Living Standards: Material Prerequisites for Human WellbeingA normative basis to develop minimum wage and reference budgets, and to assess the environmental impacts—such as climate change—of eradicating poverty. — Narasimha D. Rao and Jihoon Min Urban Green Commons for Socially Sustainable Cities and CommunitiesIn these times of global pandemics and climate crisis, social sustainability has become a crucial issue within various sectors and disciplines. This article aims to broaden debates on social sustainability in general, and in relation to community work within professional social work in particular. Through an interdisciplinary craft approach - with a focus on the commons - we aim to build a holistic view of urban social sustainability, remixing arguments and examples concerning social sustainability with environmental and spatial dimensions to develop an urban green commons. –– Stephan Barthel, Johan Colding, Anne Sofie Hiswåls, Peder Thalén and Päivi Turunen On energy transitions and ecological transitionA notable editorial in Nature, in March 2022, vindicates the 1972 study The Limits to Growth (the first of the reports to the Club of Rome) and notes that "although there is now a consensus on the irreversible effects of human activities on the environment, researchers disagree on solutions, especially if these involve slowing economic growth. This disagreement prevents action. It is time for researchers to put an end to their debate. The world needs them to focus on the larger goals of halting catastrophic environmental destruction and improving well-being". The Nature editorial goes on to argue that the debate today, having accepted the existence of biophysical limits to growth, centres on two main positions, green growth versus degrowth, and that they should make an effort to dialogue with each other. –– Jorge Riechmann Note on the Limits To GrowthCapitalist growth must stop. But “Any human activity that does not require a large flow of irreplaceable resources or produce severe environmental degradation might continue to grow indefinitely”. The general message of The Limits to Growth is not to be faulted, namely that humanity, if it is to save itself, must enter “a period of great transition,” the “transition from growth to...a desirable, sustainable state of global equilibrium”. — The Editors of Monthly Review Marx’s Critique of Enlightenment Humanism: A Revolutionary Ecological PerspectiveMarx’s materialist perspective was ecological from inception: humanalienation from nature was simply the other side of the coin of the alienation of labor. Marx’s analysis was thus unique in offering a higher synthesis envisioning the reconciliation of humanism and naturalism, humanity and nature. — John Bellamy Foster Two Scenarios for Sustainable Welfare: A Framework for an Eco-Social ContractMore nation states are now committing to zero net carbon by 2050 at the latest, which is encouraging, but none have faced up to the transformation of economies, societies and lives that this will entail. This article considers two scenarios for a fair transition to net zero, concentrating only on climate change, and discusses the implications for contemporary ‘welfare states’. The first is the Green New Deal framework coupled with a ‘social guarantee’. I argue that expanded public provision of essential goods and services would be a necessary component of this strategy. The second scenario goes further to counteract runaway private consumption by building a sufficiency economy with ceilings to income, wealth and consumption. This would require a further extension of state capacities and welfare state interventions. The article provides a framework for comparing and developing these two very different approaches. –– Ian Gough The irrelevance of animalsSo-called "laboratory meat" is simultaneously generating great expectations and concerns. The huge investment and research efforts of economically powerful private initiatives have uncovered an important economic niche waiting to be exploited. The promoters of the market for laboratory meat or meat derived from vegetable products have seen in their ethical and ecological foundations the great lever that will mobilise consumers on a massive scale towards their products. The growth in supply and speculation around these products responds, among other factors, to two very different pressures: on the one hand, the climatic behaviour of meat production. On the other hand, the growing pressure from animal and vegan groups on the living and dying conditions of the animals that are raised for their consumption. –– Pedro M. Herrera Human well-being and climate change mitigationWell-being approaches that focus on capabilities and human needs are better suited to inform climate change mitigation research than hedonistic or happiness approaches. — William F. Lamb and Julia K. Steinberger Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Other “-Cenes”Why a Correct Understanding of Marx’s Theory of Value Is Necessary to Leave the Planetary Crisis. Why a Correct Understanding of Marx’s Theory of Value Is Necessary to Leave the Planetary Crisis. — Carles Soriano The Fishing Revolution and the Origins of CapitalismHistorians “have grossly underestimated the historical economic significance of the fish trade, which may have been equal to the much more famed rush to exploit the silver mines of the Incas.” The Fish Revolution was “a major event in the history of resource extraction and consumption…[which] permanently changed human and animal life in the North Atlantic region.” He adds that “the wider seafood market was transformed in the process, and the marine expansion of humans across the North Atlantic was conditioned by significant climatic and environmental parameters. The Fish Revolution is one of the clearest early examples of how humans can affect marine life on our planet and of how marine life can in return influence and become, in essence, a part of a globalising human world.” –– Ian Angus The United States of WarBetween 1980 and 2020, two U.S. wars and sanctions in Iraq and the U.S. war in Afghanistan killed more than two million people. Washington’s proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria resulted in roughly nine million deaths. U.S. military interventions, support for client states and rebels, and related famines in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria cost the lives of another five million people. The U.S. Empire’s role in the collapse of most socialist regimes [including the imposition of economic shock therapy] made it partly responsible for well over seven million deaths. “Imperialism,” Magdoff wrote in 1969, “necessarily involves militarism. Indeed, they are twins that have fed on each other in the past, as they do now.” To combat the spread of militarism and war throughout the globe today, it is necessary to confront the imperialist world system centred in Washington. –– The Editors of Monthly Review Vegan capitalism: food multinationals and BlackRockAfter seducing the population with the "wonders" of veganism, transnational meat producers and investors are presenting themselves as substitutes for the vegan diet. — Gustavo Duch Paradise Lost? — The iron cage of consumerismTo resist economic growth is to court economic and social collapse. To pursue it relentlessly is to endanger the ecosystems on which we depend for long-term survival. Our systematic failure to address existential anxiety robs society of meaning and blinds us to the suffering of others; to persistent poverty; to the extinction of species; to the health of global ecosystems. With this think piece, Tim Jackson adds to an eclectic set of essays, published in honour of Wolfgang Sachs. — Tim Jackson Ten Questions About Marx—More Than Twenty Years After Marx’s EcologyRoberto Andrés: I have long wanted to interview you about a book that was decisive in my intellectual formation: Marx’s Ecology. This book was published in 2000 in English and immediately translated into Spanish and inaugurated what has become known as second generation ecosocialism, which recognises the ecological conception of Karl Marx, unlike the previous generation. However, in the more than twenty years since, Marx’s Ecology not only opened a wide debate but was also the object of multiple criticisms (it could not be otherwise). –– John Bellamy Foster: I am of course pleased to provide answers to your questions with respect to Marx and my book Marx’s Ecology two decades after its publication. My views have remained generally the same, though they naturally have been refined over the years. Nevertheless, I am glad to offer some clarifications. ––John Bellamy Foster and Roberto Andrés | ||
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El Niño and its (flaming) sea in the era of the Great Acceleration
We are breaking records with an increasingly unnatural naturalness: 40¡C in Siberia, historic fires and the slowing of ocean currents essential for sustaining marine life.
There are moments in a person's life or the world itself when it seems like time speeds up. In just ten days, changes take place, lasting for decades or even centuries. On those days, one feels there is more to tell, yet time is not enough. Not even to understand what is happening. Even less to describe it. Marguerite Duras said that to write is to try to know what we would write if we wrote. So, let's at least try.
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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking
We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.
Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...
Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.
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Gaza: On Zionism, Judaism, Racism and Barbarism
I last visited the occupied territories in 2016. The photos accompanying this article are from my visit to Hebron. Knowing I was Jewish (my name is Ariel, like the infamous Ariel Sharon), they opened their homes to me, told their stories, and let me take pictures. The girl in the portrait on the stone wall suffered an assassination attempt by settlers, and the teenagers on the terrace told me about their impossible futures. Hebron is a highly contested city because it is home to the Abraham Mosque, where the tombs of the patriarchs who share a Jewish and Muslim religion are said to be located (in 1994, Goldstein, a fundamentalist Zionist, entered the mosque and murdered 29 people at prayer and wounded more than 100 others). The city is home to fewer than a thousand settlers and more than 200,000 Palestinians. The photos of soldiers and children are from when I witnessed the Israeli army guarding, as it does every Friday, a provocative parade of settlers through the streets of the Palestinian market in Hebron to show them that they not only dominate the Jewish quarter in the heart of their city but that the whole city belongs to them.
In Gaza, the reality is radically worse. Palestinians in the West Bank often excuse themselves from commenting on Hamas's methods in the Strip because they say they cannot know what they would do under that level of oppression. When one considers the systematic attempt at dehumanisation that Israeli colonialism entails, which seeks to drive the Palestinians to their bare minimum, the perseverance of the Palestinian people is simply admirable. Gaza has been under a 16-year blockade by land, air, and sea, with constant bombardment of the civilian population, with cuts in the supply of water, electricity, fuel and essential goods. It is now customary to call Gaza an open-air prison. But it should be added that it is a prison where the most basic human rights are not respected. Gaza is a ghetto, and we are witnessing in real-time and on television the process of annihilation of that ghetto and its population. The Jewish ancestors, whom the Nazis tried to dehumanise in the concentration camps, the victims of the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and the very worthy uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto, today would rise in indignation at the racist colonialism of the State of Israel and its ongoing genocide. Again, not in our name.
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The Disinformation Wars: An Epistemological, Political, and Socio-Historical Interrogation
What really is going on in the current mobilisation against disinformation? Whose interests are being served by it? Could it be that those forces portraying themselves as bulwarks against disinformation are actually the most insidious purveyors of disinformation? Does the focus on disinformation conceal the real deceit? The current wave of interest in disinformation is predicated on a perceived decline in truthfulness, even blatant deception, in public discourse—sometimes called post-truth society. Disinformation studies has emerged in academe as a subdiscipline offering big research funding and fast-track career progression.1 There are many powerful players pushing this agenda.2
I do think that public discourse is full of deceit and self-deception and that there has been a definite rise in this. But the dominant discourse surrounding disinformation and disinformation studies is oblivious to the historical presence of this deception as well as the present pervasiveness of it. Such studies typically focus on social media rather than mainstream media as the source of the problem, but I want to focus on mainstream media as a source.
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Marine plastic pollution as a planetary boundary threat – The drifting piece in the sustainability puzzle
The exponential increase in the use of plastic in modern society and the inadequate management of the resulting waste have led to its accumulation in the marine environment. There is increasing evidence of numerous mechanisms by which marine plastic pollution is causing effects across successive levels of biological organisation. This will unavoidably impact ecological communities and ecosystem functions. A remaining question to be answered is if the concentration of plastic in the ocean, today or in the future, will reach levels above a critical threshold leading to global effects in vitalEarth-system processes, thus granting theconsideration of marine plastic pollution as a keycomponent of the planetary boundary threat associated with chemical pollutants. Possible answers to this question are explored by reviewing and evaluating existing knowledge of the effects of plastic pollution in marine ecosystems and the ‘core planetary boundaries’, biosphere integrity and climate change. The irreversibility and global ubiquity of marine plastic pollution mean that two essential conditions for a planetary boundary threat are already met. The Earth system consequences of plastic pollution are still uncertain, but pathways and mechanisms for thresholds and global systemic change are identified. Irrespective of the recognition of plastic as a novel entity in the planetary boundaries framework, it is certain that marine plastic pollution is closely intertwined with global processes to a point that deserves careful management and prevention.
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“Not growing but thriving”: The Beginning of a Paradigm Shift
What if we understood the economy not as some abstract construct at once shaping society but separated from the living planet that we all call home? What if the European Union transformed itself to meet the people’s needs without pushing beyond planetary boundaries? The Green European Journal sat down with Kate Raworth, the renegade thinker and author of Doughnut Economics, to talk prosperity beyond growth.
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Controversial Demographic Projections Under Climate Collapse in 2050 - South and Mesoamerica in a Global Context
Agri-food production, consumerism, waste and food waste
The corporate sector is building another aggressive re-engineering of global agrifood systems in South America and Mesoamerica. The region represents a pillar for global food security, warns the UN in the New Mission. Capitalist euphoria assumes 10 billion inhabitants by 2050. This is forging higher agricultural productivity, innovation, digitalisation and the expansion of standardised agriculture. Thus, they produce and market food destined for populations with some or enough consumption capacity, overconsumption and waste of food with equivalent carbon footprints.
In contrast, global overpopulation predictions based on empirical data analysis by Vienna Applied Systems analysts have declined over the last decade. From this perspective, the UN replicates another unsustainable pressure on fertile land in productive decline, under unreturnable alterations of soil properties, following ecological fractures in the Earth's biogeochemical and hydrological cycles. Among the consequences, meteorological collapse spreads through fires, high temperatures, droughts and water shortages. From the South, internal displacement, border crossings and migration to the North of thousands of people are escalating, driven by hunger, undernourishment, loss of food security and family livelihoods. At the same time, from different parts of the world, a variety of livelihood solutions are being developed outside of consumerism, with other political options for change and transformation.
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The Ecological Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun
Raging fires rage across Canada, an unprecedented drought is raging in Uruguay and global temperatures have broken all records. An urgent people's plan to adapt and mitigate the situation is still possible.
In 2023, different climatic anomalies have been recorded that set new historical records in the tragic progression of climate change at the global level.
Thus, in June, the surface temperature in the North Atlantic reached the maximum increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius with respect to preindustrial values. In a similar direction—although in lower values—the average temperature of the seas at the global level increased. On the other hand, the retraction of Antarctic ice reached a new limit, reaching the historical decrease of 2016, but several months earlier in the middle of the cold season.
The combination of these records has led scientists who follow these processes to warn of the danger of a profound change in the currents that regulate temperature and life in the oceans and globally. The heat waves recorded on the coasts of a large part of the world—in Ireland, Mexico, Ecuador, Japan, Mauritania, and Iceland—may, in turn, be proof of this. These phenomena, of course, are not limited to the seas. On Thursday, July 6, the global air temperature (measured at two meters above the ground) reached 17.23 degrees Celsius for the first time in the history of the last centuries, 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial values; last June was already the warmest month in history. Meanwhile, temperatures on the continents, particularly in the North, also broke records: 40 degrees Celsius in Siberia, 50 degrees Celsius in Mexico, the warmest June in England in the historical series that began in 1884.
And its counterpart, droughts, such as the one plaguing Uruguay, where the shortage of fresh water since May has forced the increasing use of brackish water sources, making tap water undrinkable for the inhabitants of the Montevideo metropolitan area, where 60 percent of the country’s population is concentrated. This is a drought that, if it continues, could leave this region of the country without drinking water, making it the first city in the world to suffer such a catastrophe. But the stifling heat and the droughts also bring with them voracious fires, such as the boreal forest fire that has been raging across Canada for weeks, with more than 500 outbreaks scattered in different regions of the country, many of them uncontrollable, and the widespread images of an apocalyptic New York darkened and stained red under a blanket of ashes.
This accumulation of tragic evidence, against all the denialist narratives, makes it undeniable that the climate crisis is already here, among us. It also indicates the absolute failure of the policies and initiatives adopted to reduce the emission or presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The banners of a change inspired by social and climate justice and the effective paths of this socio-ecological transition raised by popular movements are becoming more imperative and urgent today. It is possible to propose an emergency popular mitigation and adaptation plan. But to make these alternatives socially audible, to break with the ecological blindness that wants to impose itself, it is first necessary to break the epistemological construction that wants to inscribe these catastrophes, repeatedly and persistently, in a world of supposedly pure nature, in a presumably external field, alien and outside human social control.
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The Progressively Accelerated Degradation of the Environment COP28
–Eighteen years after the Paris Agreement and on the eve of COP 28
The explanation for the progressively accelerating degradation of the environment is complex because it is due to several factors. But the root causes lie, on the one hand, in the systematic plundering and destruction of nature - particularly deforestation - carried out on a global scale by colonial powers for centuries and, on the other, in the superfluous and uncontrolled production and consumption of all kinds of objects and products, some necessary and some not. This is the result of what is known in economics as extended reproduction.
Extended reproduction is inherent to the capitalist system. Understanding how it works is essential tounderstanding and explaining the ecological catastrophe.
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Prioritising U.S. Imperialism in Evaluating Latin America’s Pink Tide
Two conflicting leftist positions on Latin America’s wave of progressive governments known as the Pink Tide have become increasingly well-defined over the last two decades. One position is favorable, while the other highly critical, to the extent that Pink Tide presidents—including Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula)—are sometimes put in the same category as conservative and right-wing leaders.
At the heart of these differences is the issue of imperialism. The key question that emerges from the debate has paramount implications: Is the struggle against U.S. imperialism the left’s foremost priority worldwide, no matter what view is taken on the Ukraine war? If the answer is yes, then steadfast support for Pink Tide governments, which have been subjected to and resisted U.S. interventionism, is particularly compelling.
Or has globalisation set in motion other contradictions that needto be prioritised since the principal target must be global capital, and not Washington’s political machinations? Furthermore, the environment, Indigenous rights, gender equality, and participatory democracy—all banners of what some call the “anti-globalisation movement”—have to be foremost in the formulation of leftist strategies and goals in the twenty-first century.1 The Pink Tide’s performance on these fronts has been far from exemplary, thus explaining the line of reasoning of those on the left staunchly critical of those governments.
I.A.