Produce Less – Exploring Degrowth

Many of the desert plants do indeed resemble ocean creatures: coral-like cactus and urchin-like succulents. Although it is commonly thought of as desolate and emptiness, the high desert steppe is incredibly abundant and alive. 350 species of wildlife and insects depend just on sagebrush herself. … There is so much in the sagebrush sea, so many plants with lineages enmeshed with the Indigenous Tribes who traditionally tended them. The ecology of the high desert steppe exist in part due to the intentional cultivation of these plants to create future abundance. … These First Food plants have evolved to be prolific […]

When the European imperialist powers decided among themselves to carve up Africa during the 1884-5 Berlin Conference, they granted Léopold his wish, officially recognizing the International African Association of the Congo (later the Congo Free State). In what was to represent a long-lasting relationship, the United States was the first nation to recognize Léopold’s claim to this land prior to the Conference, and lobbied the European powers to do the same… Photographer Alice Seely Harris brought to life the horror of Léopold’s rule in the Congo Free State through her now-famous photograph of Congolese man Nsala in 1904. In the […]

On Juneteenth weekend, tens of thousands of people walked up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the U.S. Capitol as part of the epically titled Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. (Priti Gulati Cox and I traveled via Amtrak from Kansas to join in.) Although we were following the footsteps of a mob that had stormed the Capitol seventeen months earlier, this march embodied the polar opposite worldview. At the rally ending the march, Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. William J. Barber II made that clear, saying that the event was not a violent […]

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that about 700 million metric tons of copper have been extracted to date. Based on mining statistics from the Copper Development Association, that means about half of all the copper ever mined has been mined from the year 2000 through 2018 inclusive… For lithium annual production is now 25.39 times the 1970 rate… the governing ideology of the age is that technology will always give us a way out of scarcity—providing the substitutes we need at the time that we need them in the quantities we require and at the prices we can afford.

In May 2022 temperatures in India and Pakistan reached 50°C. Heat this fierce causes chaos to infrastructure, water security and also triggers irreversible cell damage within the human body. This extreme event, which plunged nearly a billion people into heat stress, was made 30 times more likely due to climate change. The response for those that can afford it,is to buy an air conditioner. Cooling buildings isn’t just about shiny new tech. Human history, is full of effective, low-tech, passive cooling techniques. The hospital in Tambacounda, Senegal, draws on the climate-friendly design principles developed by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in the 1956 […]

This is the first part of a two-part series on anti-lithium mining protests that have erupted in Serbia over the last several months, and the broader environmental movement around it. Last September, the outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel made her farewell tour to the Balkans. In Belgrade, she was welcomed by Aleksandar Vučić, the Serbian president whose authoritarian stunts she was repeatedly willing to overlook in exchange for a stable partnership.

The change in marijuana laws across the US raises issues far beyond, “Hey, dude, we can blow a joint now without getting busted.” The racism that permeated the age of criminalization now lurks throughout the phase of decriminalization. The burgeoning business of growing pot raises the specter of corporate agriculture with its threats to human health and natural ecosystems. Are there ways to enjoy weed while challenging racism and corporate domination over the environment? An Attack on Black and Brown Cultures Spanish-speaking people, who have lived in the US since it stole half of Mexico’s land, have a tradition of […]

The ecocidal accumulation of capital threatens the very conditions of human life on the planet.  The Covid pandemic confirms this, insofar as the increase in zoonoses over the last forty years is attributable to the destruction of ecosystems. The global ecological limits of sustainable human development have been crossed in several areas (climate, biodiversity, nitrogen and land use). They are in the process of being crossed in chemical and plastic pollution, while there is great uncertainty about other key factors of sustainability (freshwater resources, fine-particle pollution, the phosphorus cycle, etc.). Capitalist progress has always been incompatible with the rational management […]