environment
Video: Stop the financialisation of nature!
NO REDD+! in Rio+20: A declaration to decolonise the earth and the sky
“Against Amazonian Genocide.
Climate Connections, June 18, 2012 -- What’s wrong with the green economy?: Joanna Cabello of Carbon Trade Watch at Rio+20.
For more coverage of the Rio+20, click HERE.
By Patrick Bond, Rio de Janeiro
June 18, 2012 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, a version of this article also appeared at Climate and Capitalism -- Given the worsening world economic crisis, the turn to "Green Economy" rhetoric looms as a potential saviour for footloose financial capital, and is also enormously welcome to those corporations panicking at market chaos in the topsy turvy fossil-fuel, water, infrastructure construction, technology and agriculture sectors.
On the other hand, for everyone else, the Rio+20 Earth Summit underway this week in Brazil, devoted to advancing Green Economy policies and projects, appears as an overall disaster zone for the people and planet.
Rio de Janeiro, June 14, 2012 -- La Via Campesina -- About 3000 people from around the world will mobilise to say NO to the commodification of life and nature at the "Peoples Summit for Social and Environmental Justice and in Defense of the Commons", the parallel opposition activity to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development or Rio+20.
The peoples' summit is a space for discussion, debate and construction of alternative proposals by the global civil society, social movements and peoples collective organisations. La Via Campesina -- the international organisation of small farmers -- has been actively participating in the construction of this activity in order to denounce the false solutions of the same failed economic model that are now being dressed in green under the name “green economy”. La Via Campesina is instead promoting peasants' sustainable agriculture as a true solution to the global climatic and environmental crises.
Royal Society’s tunnel vision on population and poverty
People and the Planet
Royal Society Science Policy Centre Report
April 2012
Review by Ian Angus
May 23, 2012 -- Climate and Capitalism, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the Ian Angus' permission -- The radical ecologist Murray Bookchin once compared populationism to a phoenix, the mythical bird that periodically burns up and is reborn from its own ashes. No matter how often the “too many people” argument is refuted, it always returns, making the same claim that people are breeding too much and consuming too much, devouring the Earth like a plague of locusts.[1]
Pablo Solon on Rio+20: 'We must change the capitalist system, not Earth's system'
Earth photographed from Russia's Electro-L weather satellite, taken from 36,000 kilometres with a high-definition 121-megapixel camera, creating the sharpest image of our planet yet.
By Pablo Solon
May 16, 2012 -- Focus on the Global South/Climate and Capitalism -- Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, the environmental crisis continues to worsen.
The unsustainable development model that gained dominance in the world resulted to grave loss of biodiversity, melting of polar ice caps and mountain glaciers, alarming increase in deforestation and desertification and the looming danger of an at least 4º C increase in temperature, which will threaten life as we know it.
Science is saying that we are approaching a point of no return that will change the way our planet has behaved over 650,000 years.
Revolutionising production itself: for humanity and for the world
Under capitalism it is “profitable” to scar the precious mountains to retrieve coal in small seams.
By Mike Ely
April 24, 2012 -- Kasama, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with the author's permission -- There is a valuable exchange happening on the Kasama website site. I won’t try to encapsulate it here, but want to respond to it. I think there are some sharp contradictions here — that are posed within our theory, and within the very choices facing people.
A horizon beyond scarcity and inequality
An exchange on Marx and Engels and 'small is beautiful'
[Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal urges its readers to consider taking out a subscription to Monthly Review, where this article
Bolivia: Challenges face Morales' goal of 'governing by obeying the people'
A march by indigenous group Conisur in favour of a controversial highway being built through Indigenous lands.
February 19, 2012 -- Green Left Weekly -- A new twist in the turbulent saga surrounding a proposed roadway through Indigenous land has reignited a debate raging throughout Bolivia since the middle of last year. The controversial highway ― which would cut through the Isiboro-Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) ― has been at the centre of protests and counter-protests. It has polarised Bolivian society and divided Indigenous groups that are the heart of the Evo Morales government’s social base.