by José Seoane

The great mutation

In historical, biological and philosophical terms, life in all its forms—including that of human societies—is inextricably linked to water. It was there that the first cellular developments began nearly four billion years ago. Living organisms, including the human body, are primarily composed of water. The reproduction of life depends on its consumption. For billions of years, this process generally posed no risk. Water was not considered a scarce resource but a renewable one: the well-known hydrological cycle taught with enthusiasm in elementary education for decades. Its constant circulation between the Earth’s surface and the atmosphere—the change in its physical state from liquid to vapor, only to return as rain or snow—enabled life to flourish on Earth. This cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, runoff and infiltration into rivers, seas, and underground aquifers ensured, in turn, its infinite reproduction.

However, this process has undergone a profound and tragic transformation. Nearly three-quarters of the world’s population now live in areas with insecure or critical access to water. Unless significant change occurs, the outlook will grow bleaker in the years ahead. Over the past five decades, an area of wetlands nearly the size of the European Union has been lost. A recent report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) has warned that we are entering an era of global water bankruptcy. This is no longer a crisis that can be resolved in some way by restoring the human-water system; rather, it is a persistent condition affecting both flows and stored reserves, with a virtually irreversible degradation that prevents a return to a given previous normality.

The collapse of this hydrological cycle, which has existed for billions of years, is the most revealing and dramatic expression of the fracturing process of the social metabolism that began in recent centuries with capitalism and intensified under its neoliberalization. Furthermore, the framing of this crisis process has served to underpin the neoliberal management of water resources. In these brief lines, we will attempt to account for this dual dimension and the current challenges it poses.

The commodification of scarcity

In bourgeois economic thought, the scarcity of a good is a prerequisite for its economic consideration and its transformation into a commodity. Neoliberal rationale adds that this condition arises solely from its subjective perception. In this regard, the epistemic construction of the water crisis has been a necessary step toward its commodification—driven, along with that of a wide range of social and natural goods, by capitalist neoliberalization. This is the market-driven technological solutionism that responds to climate and socio-environmental degradation by expanding the free market and promoting the technocorporate innovation that caused the breakdown in the first place.

In this way, the subjective construction of scarcity has fueled the commodification of water and the terrestrial water system over the past half-century. The first stage involved a global process of privatization of water utilities, which had been almost entirely public since the postwar period; between 1990 and 2005, 381 companies worldwide were privatized for a total value exceeding $45 billion. In the same vein, in 1992, the first International Conference on Water and the Environment deemed water a finite and vulnerable resource; to prevent its waste and promote its conservation and protection, it proposed recognizing it as an economic good. Decades later, in 2020, water itself—specifically, the water usage rights in California—began to be traded through futures contracts on the New York Stock Exchange, enabling stock market speculation on its scarcity or abundance.

A cynical rationale that exploits the crisis to reinforce the very policies and processes that caused it. And so, in a self-perpetuating cycle, the advance of neoliberal transformations laid the material foundations for the water stress and scarcity resulting from a production model—particularly the imposition of ruthless extractivism in the Global South—that overuses, squanders and pollutes water resources. Compounded by the effects of the climate crisis, this model has caused the collapse of freshwater supplies in a growing number of major cities (Montevideo, São Paulo and Lima, among the most significant in Our America) as well as entire regions (more than 1.8 billion people worldwide suffered from droughts between 2022 and 2023).

The normalization of the catastrophe

The intensification of these periods of drought and wildfires amid the climate crisis is compounded by extremely intense cyclonic storms that bring flooding. The water that is missing returns with a demonic and destructive fury. The power of life is not only in short supply but, under fossil capitalism, is transformed into a deathly threat. In the face of these climate collapses, the far right and neo-fascist movements have promoted their naturalization, denying their social causes and reducing them to inevitable natural phenomena or cycles. Furthermore, another more general process of naturalization is also unfolding, attributing the socio-environmental and water crisis to a supposed human nature. From this perspective—for example, under neo-Malthusian arguments regarding demographic or economic growth—identifying the causes of the water crisis avoids questioning the societal framework.

In either case, the management of scarcity focuses its strategies on promoting a shift in attitudes and behaviors that prioritizes social adaptation to the ‘new normal.’ By invoking resilience and resignation, a change in habits is proposed to impose and legitimize increasing public rationing of water use. Under this narrative, deprivation is here to stay and one simply needs to get used to it. As official documents point out, the aim is thus to promote acceptance of living under permanently constrained conditions, a deliberate effort to rebalance demand within a context of reduced carrying capacity, and to support adaptation to a reality presented as unchangeable.

The technocorporate governance of scarcity

The material and subjective construction of scarcity became the foundation of its commodification; but likewise, as with capitalist neoliberalization, this promotion of the free market required strong governments and, at the international level, a network of international organizations, business corporations, investment funds, scientific institutions, and a vast network of NGOs that, for at least four decades, have promoted pro-market water paradigms on a global scale.

The growing material reality of the water crisis has, in turn, reinforced and reoriented the need for this public-private and techno-corporate governance. It is no longer merely a matter of commodification but of capitalist governance of scarcity, which seeks to identify, monitor and control available and potential water reserves, even resorting to technological solutions such as wastewater treatment or seawater desalination. Far from proposing the regulation or transformation of the productive matrix responsible for the crisis, this global governance advances the institutional-corporate appropriation of the scarce resource. It aims to guarantee its access and availability for productive activities considered strategic for capital, prioritizing the imperatives of large private companies at the expense of the consumption needs of the majority of the population.

The Israeli state-owned company Mekorot, accused of restricting access to water for the Palestinian population while favoring illegal settlements, has been advancing since the 2000s in the construction of this technocorporate management of scarcity in Latin America and the Caribbean. With agreements signed in Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Argentina (with agreements covering more than half of its provinces), it recently had to withdraw from the Bío Bío Region in Chile due to protests and social pressure.

The new digital-military extractivist offensive

While the export-oriented extractivist model imposed on Our America since the 1990s found its primary expressions in agribusiness, mega-mining, forest monocultures, and conventional/unconventional hydrocarbons—with their impacts on water and territories— in recent years, in tandem with the intensification of geopolitical disputes over hegemonic transition and the interventionism of U.S. imperialism, the extractivist wave has placed central emphasis on controlling the natural resources required by the military industry and digitalization. A new offensive characterized by: a) the securitization of these resources, now placed under the purview of national security and militarization; b) a counter-reform of the socio-environmental institutions won or built in past decades; and c) a network of bilateral and multilateral agreements that restricts sovereignty by granting industrialized centers access to and control over these resources.

Their deployment poses a major threat to populations, ecosystems and water resources. On the one hand, the relocation to the region of the data centers required for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) has and will have an enormous impact on water and energy. Consider that processing, depending on its complexity, between 5 and 50 queries oposes a major threat to populations, ecosystems and water resources.r prompts by AI consumes approximately half a liter of water and that these data centers require enormous amounts for cooling. On the other hand, the central role that the digital-military complex assigns to the control of so-called critical minerals—for example, the 60 minerals identified by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2025, which include among others copper, lithium, uranium and the so-called rare earth elements—promises to dramatically intensify their exploitation, which, in the mega-mining model, uses (and pollutes) immense amounts of water for processing and transport, reaching 1,300 liters per second of activity.

The value of societal alternatives

The critical nature of these minerals does not refer to any intrinsic property or essence they possess, but rather to the vulnerability or dependence they represent for the economic and geopolitical strategies of the companies and governments that label them as such. In response to these arguments, communities and peoples have been proclaiming that water is worth more than those commodities; that it is worth more than gold, copper, lithium, uranium and rare earths. This is not simply a matter of different languages of valuation, but of the difference between a community organization founded on social utility and one dominated by the interests and profits of corporations and their states. The defense of water—and, consequently, of life—is not only a programmatic stance of resistance adopted by the affected populations across the conflicts of Our America, but also the foundation of a possible, desirable, and more necessary than ever societal alternative.

by Orinoco Tribune

US President Donald Trump has escalated his openly imperialist rhetoric against Venezuela, portraying the South American country as a neocolonial possession whose sovereign resources Washington may plunder as the “spoils” of military aggression.

On Wednesday, August 5, during an event named Powering the American Dream, Trump boasted about the criminal act perpetrated against Venezuela on January 3 which culminated in the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, National Assembly Deputy and First Lady Cilia Flores, as well as the murder of more than 100 people, including 32 Cubans and 47 Venezuelan soldiers.

Oil as the “spoils” of war
Trump described the attack as “a 48-minute war” before declaring: “And we paid for the war with what we’ve taken out many, many, many times.”

He further claimed that 219 US men, accompanied by “a few women,” entered Fuerte Tiuna, a Venezuelan military complex housing thousands of soldiers, to carry out the operation.

Without reservation, Trump presented Venezuela’s oil as the material reward for Washington’s military aggression.

“We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela,” Trump declared, adding that “billions and billions of barrels” were coming out of the country.

Immediately beforehand, he stated, “Now I love Venezuela,” effectively associating his newfound approval of the country with Washington’s appropriation of its petroleum and laying bare the colonial nature of the January 3 bombing and abduction.

Trump then summarized his position with an explicitly imperialist maxim: “To the victor belong the spoils.”

The statement amounted to one of the clearest public admissions that Washington views Venezuelan petroleum as both a material objective of the attack and compensation for the costs of its military aggression.

Trump also incorporated Venezuela’s sovereign resources into his calculation of US energy power. “Now you add Venezuela to it, add that and we have 60% of the world’s oil and gas, including Venezuela,” he said.

The language portrayed Venezuela’s reserves as part of a US-controlled energy stockpile rather than the sovereign patrimony of the Venezuelan people.

Unease within the US right
The bluntness of Trump’s colonial rhetoric appeared to generate some caution even among far-right US media outlets that have spent years providing platforms for calls for sanctions, “regime” change, and open aggression against Venezuela since the election of socialist Hugo Chávez as president in 1998.

The coverage of these outlets maintained a degree of journalistic distance from the US ruler’s discourse rather than openly celebrating his description of Venezuelan resources as war booty.

Some Chavista analysts have suggested that this caution reflects frustration that US military violence did not return Venezuela’s far-right opposition to political power or produce the much-touted economic boom promised by supporters of Washington’s aggression, even if those outlets have not acknowledged that failure openly.

Leftist forces reject imperialist plunder
Other Chavista and leftist analysts have questioned decisions taken by the Venezuelan government, currently led, in President Maduro’s forced absence, by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez.

Leftist and popular forces have consequently begun reorganizing to build an internal bloc capable of defending socialist, popular, and anti-imperialist principles while resisting Washington’s increasing control over Venezuela’s political and economic affairs.

On Tuesday, August 4, approximately 150 demonstrators gathered in Caracas’ Plaza El Venezolano for a demonstration organized by a coalition of leftist political groups, including Comunes, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) and the League of Socialist Workers (LTS), reported Venezuelanalysis.

“This is a protest against the imperialist plundering of our resources,” LTS member Ángel Arias declared. “Anti-imperialism is not merely a discourse, it is a necessity for the Venezuelan working class.”

Arias added that Venezuela’s resources remain removed from the control of its people, “with the decisions in Trump’s hands.”

The demonstration also condemned the January 3 attack, Washington’s continuing economic warfare on Venezuela (euphemistically referred to as “unilateral sanctions”), and US control over Venezuela’s oil revenues. Participants called for unity across political differences and the construction of a common front capable of confronting colonial domination and removing imperialism from Venezuela.

by Rima al-Swisi

Photo caption. Palestinians walk among makeshift shelters next to raw sewage at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, 24 August 2024.   Omar Ashtawy APA images

Most mornings at al-Deira displacement camp, northwest of Gaza City, the women gather in the open air, outside the tents, to drink coffee and commiserate.

Life is hard at this camp, and the women have a lot to talk about: poverty, illnesses, problems with their husbands, and how to get aid.

I live near the camp, and a friend of mine, knowing I am a journalist, told me about these morning meetings, thinking I might like to attend.

I joined one morning in July, and it did not take much time for me to understand what most troubled the women: a lack of sanitary and accessible toilets, and the health problems that have come as a result.

Al-Deira camp is a temporary home to around 70 displaced families that is spread across three dunams, or a bit less than an acre of land, according to the camp coordinator Ayda al-Kiyali.

A minority of the families have private toilets, she said, but the majority of people living in the camp must share three public toilets.

These public toilets do not have plumbing and sewage infrastructure. Instead, they are simple holes in the sandy ground.

Privacy is also lacking, as the toilet area, a space of about two by two meters, is enclosed by old blankets. The odor is very bad.

For many, a trip to the toilet can mean a walk of up to 25 meters. This is not a walk that many women feel comfortable making in the dark, especially because of the dogs that roam around at night, scavenging through the trash.

The women describe holding their urine all night and not drinking water, to prevent a journey to the toilet. Several of them have developed kidney stones and serious health problems, not to mention the mental toll of not having access to a toilet.

I visited with the women individually, at their tents, to talk more about the situation.

“I live in hell”

Wa’ad Matar, 32, is a mother to four children and is currently seven months pregnant.

She used to live with her husband Mahmoud, 33, and their family at al-Karama Towers, but they were forced to live in the camp after Israeli planes bombed the building in December 2025. Before this, her husband endured an injury in his neck from shrapnel from an Israeli attack.

We sat inside her tattered tent with a UN logo on it, with Matar holding her 18-month-old girl.

“I felt ill all night long,” she said. “I had severe stomach pain as if I was in labor. I waited till the morning and I went to the doctor.”

She visited a medical tent at the camp and the doctor told her she had kidney stones.

“The doctor’s words were a shock to me,” she said, describing how, when the doctor asked about her routine, she was embarrassed to tell him that she held her “urine all night long, as the toilet is far away from the tent.”

Her medical issues stemming from the toilet situation have compounded over time and include urinary tract infections and renal colic. She cannot afford the medicine and must rely on what she can obtain for free.

“I live in hell due to the tough circumstances in which we live,” she said.

The doctor further told her that malnutrition and complications could impact the baby’s health.

Yet Matar does not see the situation at the camp improving in the future.

Improvised toilets fall short

Ayda al-Kiyali, from the camp committee that helps run day-to-day affairs, said that the camp leadership tries “to provide the tents with private toilets, yet what is needed goes far beyond our abilities.”

“Women in the tents suffer a lot,” she said, and she estimated that “only 20 percent of those living in the camp have a good private toilet.”

Among the women, the connection between their health issues and the lack of access to a sanitary and private toilet is clear, and it is not unique to the women in al-Deira camp, as nearly one million people in Gaza live in tents due to Israel’s systematic destruction of housing and infrastructure.

All across Gaza’s tent camps, improvised toilets are being constructed, as materials such as piping and toilet seats come at a high cost. The cheapest method is to dig a hole in the ground. Yet even these private toilets being dug inside of tents can feel humiliating and unsanitary.

As of July 2026, 87 percent of Gaza’s households face “barriers to accessing toilets or latrines,” with the top impediment being a lack of access to water and the secondary obstacles being a lack of privacy, cleanliness issues and fear of rodents or pests, according to a UNICEF-led group, the Gaza WASH Cluster.

Afraid to go to the toilet

Sally Said, 21, was married two months ago.

She said the couple had no choice but to get married in their tent.

Her husband’s family lives in al-Deira camp as well, and she uses their toilet, which is located outside the tent and about 12 meters away.

She does not feel comfortable using the toilet at night.

“I don’t use it at night,” she said. “I feel afraid from the bombing as currently the tents are targeted mostly at night … I also don’t drink water in the evening at all so as to avoid going to the toilet.”

In July, she started to feel discomfort and itching, and she was having trouble urinating in general.

She visited the camp doctor and was told that she had high levels of salt and a urinary tract infection. The doctor further said that she was at risk of kidney stones.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I pay for this situation from my health.”

Private toilet bombed

Hanan al-Gerem, 50, lives in a tent with her husband Nabil, 55, who has cancer.

“I am originally Egyptian,” she said. “I came to Gaza 18 years ago to marry Nabil. I tried to get out of Gaza during the war, but it was in vain,” due to the Israeli closure of the Rafah crossing.

She and her husband arrived at al-Deira after their home in northern Gaza City was bombed in December 2025.

She uses the communal toilet since, three weeks ago, “an Israeli plane fired a number of missiles on a nearby tent,” and this destroyed the private toilet.

Al-Gerem said they have no income and rely on aid.

“I sometimes have to wait 40 minutes to access the toilet,” she said. “This waiting costs me a lot.”

Al-Gerem has a urinary tract infection and also regularly has blood in her urine.

“I did some medical tests, [and] a doctor told me that I have a gallstone and that I have to drink a lot of water and take medications.”

Al-Gerem described the communal toilet as a “crisis,” and, like the other women who live in al-Deira camp, she does not see the situation improving.

by Junaid S. Ahmad

Photo caption.  The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier and a U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress, conduct joint exercises in the Arabian Sea. [AP Photo/Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Brian M. Wilbur]

The American aircraft carrier was built to terrify other nations. The USS Abraham Lincoln has instead become something far more revealing: a floating monument to an empire powerful enough to bomb half the world, yet too arrogant, overstretched and politically diseased to care properly for the people it sends to do the bombing.

The symbolism is almost vulgar in its perfection.

A nuclear-powered supercarrier — one of the most sophisticated instruments of organized violence ever constructed — prowls the waters near Iran, launching aircraft and advertising Washington’s capacity to reach virtually anywhere on Earth.

Below deck, meanwhile, sailors endure exhaustion, psychological strain, deteriorating conditions and the torment of a deployment whose end repeatedly disappears over the horizon.

Behold American primacy: exquisite machinery, limitless ambition, exhausted human beings.

The contradiction is not incidental. It is the empire in miniature.

Aircraft carriers are floating political theology. They proclaim that America is everywhere; that oceans are highways of command; that no country is sufficiently distant to escape Washington’s attention. Presidents display them as steel embodiments of “credibility.” Generals shuffle them between regions like casino chips. Think-tank strategists move them across maps while never having to smell the machinery, miss the birthdays or contemplate the psychological wreckage below deck.

And there in lies the obscenity.

The American ruling elite experiences war as abstraction. Sailors experience it as life.

Around five thousand people inhabit the Lincoln. Its crew has endured months at sea and prolonged combat operations. Families have described severe exhaustion and mental-health distress; one sailor was rescued after going overboard, while relatives have alleged additional alarming incidents. The Navy disputes claims of a broader suicide crisis.

READ: US Senate minority leader calls for defense secretary’s firing over conditions aboard USS Abraham Lincoln

Very well. But bureaucratic dispute cannot conceal the larger reality: Washington is stretching human beings because its imperial commitments have stretched beyond political sanity.

The Pentagon calls this “readiness.” Naturally.

Empire possesses a magnificent vocabulary for disguising dysfunction. Exhaustion becomes sacrifice. Overextension becomes resolve. Strategic failure becomes deterrence. Indefinite deployment becomes duty. And when human beings begin cracking beneath the weight, the institution that imposed the burden congratulates them on their resilience.

The ruling elite has perfected the art of converting its incompetence into somebody else’s heroism.

The United States maintains not a military of territorial defense but an apparatus of global coercion: hundreds of overseas installations, carrier groups, bomber fleets, intelligence networks, regional commands and permanent war plans spanning continents. Washington must confront Iran, contain China, reassure monarchies, protect Israel, encircle Russia, patrol oceans and prepare for tomorrow’s crisis while managing yesterday’s catastrophe.
Eventually even an empire discovers that omnipresence is expensive.

The decision to send the George Washington from the western Pacific to relieve the Lincoln captures the farce beautifully. One carrier is exhausted in the Middle East, so another must leave Asia to replace it. Washington plugs one strategic hole by opening another, then publishes a press release describing the maneuver as flexibility.

This is not omnipotence.

It is overstretch wearing aviator sunglasses.

And beneath the geopolitical theater lies class power. The people ordering these deployments do not endure them. Presidents speak beneath chandeliers. Cabinet officials issue solemn statements. Defense contractors count revenues. Television generals discuss “acceptable costs.”

READ: US military loses roughly 25% of Reaper drone fleet in Iran war: Report

The enlisted sailor becomes the acceptable cost.

He sleeps inside American foreign policy. She misses anniversaries inside it. They inhale its machinery, endure its monotony, absorb its anxiety and discover that the glamorous architecture of global domination contains an astonishing quantity of fatigue, loneliness and industrial grime.

Imperialism always looks cleaner from a satellite.

The sailors are therefore neither simple heroes nor simple villains. They are agents of coercive power and, simultaneously, expendable components within the machinery exercising it. Sympathy does not require absolution. It requires understanding who sends whom to kill, who profits, who decides, and who pays.

American militarism survives by persuading Americans that war happens elsewhere.

The bombs fall elsewhere. Hospitals collapse elsewhere. Families mourn elsewhere.

But prolonged war has a nasty habit of returning home disguised as insomnia, broken marriages, psychological injury and sons and daughters who no longer understand why they were sent away in the first place.

That is the question Washington fears most: why?

Why are we here? Why must American “security” require permanent military domination thousands of miles from American shores? Why does every distant conflict become a referendum on American credibility? And why does preserving that credibility always require someone with less power than the policymaker to bleed for it?

The answer is increasingly obvious.

Because empire cannot admit limits without admitting what it is.

So it continues. More deployments. More enemies. More “resolve.” More exhausted sailors proving the supposedly inexhaustible power of the state exhausting them.

Above deck: roaring jets, nuclear propulsion, billion-dollar technology, imperial choreography.

Below deck: fatigue, uncertainty, human beings waiting to go home.

The bunker remains armed to the teeth.

But beneath the flight deck, the rot is becoming difficult to perfume.

by Joshua Frank

It’s dry, hot, and windy. The dust is swirling. My buddy Colby and I are in the heart of the blazing Mojave to visit California’s most expansive open-pit mine. Owned and operated by the Australian mining goliath Rio Tinto, the pit, which produces a mineral called borate, is uncomfortably large, stretching two miles long, 1¾ miles wide, and 755 feet deep. According to the Rio Tinto guide that let us through the gates (of hell?), the mine produces about half of the world’s borax supply, a borate-derived compound with many uses.

From our perch above the mine, we watch excavators fill large dump trucks, which are winding their way up dirt roads, spewing clouds of diesel exhaust as they navigate huge piles of dirt. It’s a slow, meticulous operation that digs out 1 million tons of refined borate each year. Rio Tinto has been seeking to offload its $2 billion California boron assets but has yet to find a buyer.

The US has classified borax as a critical mineral because it’s important not only for everyday items like food and laundry detergent but also for military applications and clean energy tech, such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle batteries. So, you could say this open-pit mine is vital to both the US war machine as well as the green energy transition. 

If that sounds like an oxymoron, welcome to capitalism, pal.

There are many such metals and other elements vital to the transition away from fossil fuels. Lithium-ion batteries, of course, dominate. Cobalt, nickel, aluminum, graphite, and more are required to building out green energy infrastructure and renewables. Copper is crucial because it’s an excellent conductor of electricity. It’s in everything. EVs, transmission lines, solar panels, you name it. The booming market for these metals, bolstered by the AI craze, means one thing: more mining is in our future, much of it in the name of battling climate change.

The amount of materials needed to sustain an electrified future at the world’s continued pace of economic growth is as remarkable as it is troubling. By one estimate, at least 384 new mines will be needed by 2035. This means we’ll see more open-pit mines, and lots of them. New copper deposits, for example, will need to be tapped. The International Energy Forum puts the top number of new copper mines at 194 by 2050. Many of these operations are set to be built in areas of biological importance. It’s also estimated that in the US, 79% of lithium reserves, 97% of nickel, and 89% of copper are within 35 miles of Native American reservations.

It’s not just green tech that needs new mines. Data centers require not only a lot of energy and water but also a heap of critical minerals. A conventional data center requires 15,000 tons of copper. A hyperscale AI data center, on the other hand, needs far more, upward of 50,000 tons (100 million pounds) of copper. The World Economic Forum believes the world will need over 4.3 million tons of copper for data centers and their power infrastructure by 2035.

As I explore in great detail in Bad Energy, the transition away from fossil fuels, as it’s now headed, means a hell of a lot more extraction, which in turn means even more environmental damage. I think it’s worth reckoning with these various impacts and contemplating whether we can save the climate (if that’s even the goal) by pillaging what remains of the planet’s resources.

Many mainstream environmentalists (and certainly policy wonks) downplay the need to couple the energy transition with something just as important: reducing consumption in wealthy societies, especially among the billionaire class. Some argue that humans aren’t capable of consuming less and rarely address the market-based economy’s reliance on endless growth. Doing so, of course, would require a more sophisticated analysis of what we are up against.

Take Bill McKibben, who, in his seminal 1989 book The End of Nature, argued that society cannot survive a culture driven by capitalist consumption and that technology alone will never save us. I still believe the book’s thesis, but a more risk-averse McKibben has since altered his perspective, not on the need to end the use of fossil fuels, but on the belief that swapping these climate-warming energy sources for renewables will do the trick. I don’t share Bill’s optimism.

As long as the market demands perpetual expansion and finite resources are consumed, humans and the Earth remain in serious trouble. There’s no silver bullet for the mess we’re in, and we’ll never save the planet, let alone humanity, until we reckon with the forces behind its destruction, starting with the crooks on Wall Street.

Rio Tinto’s Borax Mine, in Boron, California. Photo by Colby Groves.

by Richard Heinberg

by Guillermo R. Barreto

This year we commemorate the centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro.

Like few others, Fidel embodies human dignity and the defense of principles as unyielding values for building that other possible and necessary world of justice, equality, and peace.

It happened on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, in the US. George Floyd (a Black man) was arrested on suspicion of attempting to pay for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Police officer Derek Chauvin (a white man) pinned him to the ground and pressed down on his neck for more than 9 minutes. It was to no avail that George Floyd repeated “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times. He lost consciousness and died of asphyxiation. In other words, he was murdered by the police officer. This incident sparked a wave of outrage and protests that spread to more than 2,000 cities across the US and beyond.

US history reveals a long record of discriminatory policies that reflect a structurally racist system. Outrage over the ruthless murder of a Black man at the hands of a white police officer seems like an inevitable reaction. Despite this, the US State Department has found no better explanation than to attribute responsibility for the protests to the Cuban government, whose “founding myth and central principle is to wipe the US off the face of the Earth,” as stated in an infamous report published on July 20, 2026, titled “Cuba. The Capital of 21st-Century Communism.”

The State Department report, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence, is a collection of clichés reminiscent of the era of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who launched an anti-communist crusade between 1950 and 1954 that led to the persecution, dismissal, or imprisonment of anyone accused of belonging to or sympathizing with leftist movements – actions interpreted as “anti-American activities.” In general, there was never a judicial investigation linking the accused to such activities. A committee was created that summoned the accused, who were required to denounce acquaintances with alleged leftist views. The harassment reached such a level that refusing to answer by invoking the constitutional right against self-incrimination (Fifth Amendment) was considered proof of guilt.

Now, in the middle of 2026, the State Department is appealing to fear to create a fantasy that portrays the Cuban government and its intelligence services as the greatest threat facing the world’s greatest military power, thereby generating a climate of paranoia among the US population that fuels mistrust and sets the stage for a possible armed attack on the island.

In that report, Cuba is accused of having supported resistance movements against dictatorial and criminal regimes such as the Tupamaros, who fought against the Uruguayan dictatorship in the 1970s, the Sandinista Front, which overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, or the Venezuelan guerrillas of the 1960s, who fought against the social democratic governments of Betancourt and Leoni – regimes that practiced and perfected forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial executions. Although the report, just as McCarthy did, presents no evidence against Cuba, there is at least no doubt that the accusation is based on Cuba’s support for those who resisted criminal governments that have been heavily criticized by history. It seems that the AI used failed to notice this detail.

The 99-page report lists the numerous actions that, without any evidence, the Cuban government allegedly carries out to infiltrate not only the US government but also social movements, labor unions, universities, and scientific and cultural platforms. It is a narrative that mixes a few verified convictions for espionage with unverified testimonies from defectors or reports from Congress, the CIA, or the FBI that cannot be substantiated.

What the report omits are the more than 60 years of U.S. aggression against Cuba, including the illegal blockade – which has been repeatedly condemned each year by the United Nations General Assembly and has caused cumulative damages since its inception amounting to $164 billion dollars – armed attacks such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the more than 600 assassination attempts against Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro, and the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 on October 6, 1976 – which killed 73 people and whose masterminds, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, lived under the protection of the United States until their deaths.

The State Department uses this report to incriminate all forms of dissent within the US, conflating different eras and movements (such as the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, lawyers’ associations, universities, and solidarity brigades) as part of an alleged plan to destroy “American values.” Suddenly, it turns out that academic agreements between the University of Havana and US universities are part of an espionage agenda, that Cuba’s tourism development plans are part of an indoctrination agenda, and that the Cuban medical brigade is actually a brigade of spies scattered around the world to destroy Western values.

The State Department report (now headed by Marco Rubio, a liar, opportunist, and ambitious politician) has no academic or intelligence value. That is not its significance. Its significance lies in the fact that it explicitly reveals an essentially fascist government that seeks to impose itself on the world through force, censorship, and fear – and this includes the American people themselves.

The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar wrote: “To be a fascist – even if no one has defined it exactly – one need only observe it as a form of behavior to sense that its root is negative, that it stems from fear.” It is precisely that fear that the Trump administration uses to justify its authoritarian actions. The evil enemy is first called a communist, then a terrorist, an Islamist, a drug trafficker, a migrant, and now, once again, a communist. A dangerous course of action that seeks to build an international platform of repression in the style of a renewed and reinforced Operation Condor, using sophisticated technological tools to ruthlessly attack Cuba – but which aims to destroy anything that challenges it.

This year we commemorate the centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro. Like few others, Fidel embodies human dignity and the defense of principles as unyielding values for building that other possible and necessary world of justice, equality, and peace. Where Cuba sends medical brigades, the United States sends soldiers trained to kill. Where Cuba sends teachers to teach reading and writing and bring light to marginalized communities, the United States sends media trash, alienation, darkness, and death. Cuba has withstood humanity’s greatest threat with dignity, and it is the duty of all of us to voice our strongest condemnation of the policies implemented by the US government (as outlined in that despicable report today) and to express our solidarity, on the centennial of Commander Fidel Castro, with that brave people.

by Eirini-Erifyli Tzekou

Photo caption.   Food coop mural, Image by Robert Ashworth, Creative Commons 2.0

When people hear the word degrowth, when not problematized or adverted by the rejection of the growth paradigm, they often imagine a future that still needs to be invented. But in many places, parts of that future already exist. In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, a wide range of grassroots food networks have emerged over the last fifteen years: cooperative grocery stores like Allos Tropos, BiosCoop, Eklektik, and To Koukouli; cooperatives operating in the food processing sector or the food services industry, like To Oraion Ntepo or Rediviva; markets without middlemen like the one in Kalamaria; solidarity kitchens, such as Room 39, peri-urban gardening projects (for example Per.Ka.) and seed banks, like  the local group of the Peliti network. These initiatives have been shaped by the Greek debt crisis and the related austerity, unemployment, social crisis and distrust in dominant institutions. But they also offer something more than emergency responses. They show what food systems can look like when organized around care, democracy and sufficiency rather than profit and endless growth.

Food systems in crisis

Across Europe, especially during the last years, food has become more expensive, more unequal and more dependent on fragile global supply chains. At the same time, industrial agriculture drives biodiversity loss, soil degradation, high energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. On the other side of the food supply chain, supermarkets promise convenience, but they often hide the social and ecological costs of cheap food.

Degrowth asks a simple but radical question: what if food systems were designed not to maximize sales and accumulation, but to meet needs fairly within ecological limits?

Alternative food networks in Thessaloniki offer some practical answers.

Food as solidarity, not only commodity

One of the clearest lessons from local initiatives is that food does not have to be treated only as something to buy and sell. In solidarity kitchens, surplus food that would otherwise be wasted is transformed into meals for homeless people, migrants and others in need. In cooperative groceries, members organize food donations, solidarity baskets and mutual aid systems. Small producers share unsold produce directly with activist spaces or vulnerable households. These practices matter because they challenge a core logic of the dominant food economy: that access depends only on purchasing power. They also reveal an important degrowth principle. Reducing waste and redistributing resources can improve social justice and lower ecological pressure at the same time.

Work with meaning — but also real limits

Many participants in Thessaloniki’s initiatives describe something often missing in conventional retail and food chains: meaningful work. Instead of rigid hierarchies, cooperatives use assemblies, collective decisions and shared responsibilities. Worker-members often report stronger relationships, more autonomy and a sense that their labour serves a social purpose.

This is important from a degrowth perspective, since degrowth is not just about producing less. It is also about transforming the meaning and organization of work. But we should be careful with romanticizing these initiatives. Many face chronic financial pressure to the point that they cease operations; hard and digital infrastructure tends to be limited, paid staff may receive modest incomes, volunteers can become overburdened and burnout is a real risk. Grassroots alternatives struggle everyday to carry the burden of transformation while operating inside an economy still structured around competition and accumulation.

Democracy through everyday food practices

Apart from elections or parliaments, democracy, as degrowth among other movements has insisted, also happens in everyday life: who decides, whose voice matters, who controls resources, whose knowledge counts. Grassroots food networks often create small but meaningful spaces of democratic practice. Members debate prices, sourcing, wages and priorities. Consumers meet producers directly at market or at fiestas. Knowledge about farming, nutrition and cooperation is shared horizontally rather than imposed from above.  This does not mean power inequalities disappear. Participation can still be uneven. Some people have more time, confidence or expertise than others, but these spaces matter because they allow people to practice democracy, not just talk about it.

Just a white middle-class experiment?

Alternative food networks are often criticized for serving mainly educated and  middle-class consumers. Sometimes that critique is justified. Yet the picture in Thessaloniki is more complex. Some initiatives, such as markets without middlemen or peri-urban gardening, have attracted and still attract, to a large extent, also low-income households. Some deliberately try to reduce barriers through material and knowledge support, affordable prices, donations or flexible participation models. Still, inclusion does not happen automatically. Cost, time, cultural norms, childcare, transport and confidence all shape who can participate. This is a key lesson for the wider degrowth movement: alternatives are not enough if they remain socially narrow. Social justice must be built intentionally.

What public policy should learn

Too often, governments praise “community resilience” while leaving communities underfunded. If policymakers are serious about food sustainability, they should support alternative food networks instead of treating them as marginal experiments.

That could include:

• access to affordable urban space
• public procurement from local and cooperative producers
• municipal food policy councils
• cooperative-friendly finance
• land access for agroecological growers

The point is not to replace every supermarket tomorrow. It is to expand the ecosystem of food systems that already work differently.

Degrowth is already happening in fragments

Thessaloniki’s alternative food networks are imperfect, partial and often fragile. They face contradictions every day: affordability versus fair wages, volunteer energy versus exhaustion, ethics versus survival. But that is precisely why they matter. They remind us that transformation does not begin with a perfect blueprint. It begins with experiments, tensions, collective learning and institutions built from below. Degrowth is sometimes dismissed as unrealistic because it challenges dominant economic common sense. Yet in solidarity kitchens, cooperative grocery stores and shared gardens, people are already practicing pieces of it. Not necessarily as ideology or only as ideology, but also as everyday life that sets the foundations of a different food future.

This article draws on research that Eirini-Erifyli conducted as part of her PhD dissertation and on some of the findings presented in this article.

by Steve Early

by Mark Burton

The supply chain problems arising from the unprovoked USA/Israeli attack on Iran are becoming clear. They are multiple, affecting not just oil and natural gas, 20% of which passes through Hormuz, but also the many things dependent on petroleum. The impacts have yet to be fully felt, but what the world will experience is going to be just a practice performance for a longer term and more permanent change, a slowdown that will mean a collapse in the multiple systems on which we all rely.

Systemic impacts of the Hormuz blockades

Just as the Vietnamese people fought the USA to a standstill (which led to ultimate defeat), Iran’s authoritarian government has enforced a stalemate on the bigger power, in this case by preventing ships transiting through the Gulf of Hormuz bottleneck. The USA has compounded the problem by blockading Iran’s ports. While this impasse might end with a peace agreement, it has already, in early May 2026, led to price rises for petroleum products and multiple items, large and small, dependent on them. These rises are baked into the system for the near to medium term future.

Petroleum

The way of life of the vast majority of humanity is now wholly dependent on petroleum: in effect we eat it, wear it, get carried around by it, communicate through it, sit on it and medicate ourselves with it.  Oil has the virtue of being a dense and transportable energy source. It is not so difficult to substitute for oil in applications such as electricity generation, although the renewable energy capture systems themselves are made and maintained by burning oil. It is far more difficult to do so in areas such as agriculture, shipping, aviation and heavy freight. There will still be oil available, but it will be more expensive, if the blockades continue, since the global stockpiles will get depleted. This will increase the cost of many things, and for a country like the UK, which imports half of its food, and most manufactured products, the impacts are obvious.

Oil is also vital for the manufacture of a huge variety of products. As it increases in cost, those products increase in cost. The Hormuz constriction already directly affects several critical petrochemical products, listed below:

• Inorganic fertiliser: In addition to rising oil prices, the supply shock to fertiliser will put pressure on agricultural production, with big implications for food security. Around 30% of fertilizer products go through the Strait of Hormuz. Quatar is the world’s biggest producer of urea, a key input to fertiliser manufacture. The region also produces around 35% of the urea and 23% of the ammonia, another feedstock for nitrogenous fertiliser, which is exported globally. Sulphur, another component of fertiliser manufacture, is also produced in the region as a by-product of oil production.
• Sulphur products, notably sulphuric acid, are used in a host of industrial processes, including copper and cobalt extraction.  Some 49% of the global sulphur trade passes through Hormuz.
• Plastics are made almost exclusively from petroleum fractions. To name but two types, polyester is used in clothing, and polypropylene has a huge variety of applications, from automotive plastics to rope, to medical disposables.
• Pharmaceuticals: some 85% of NHS prescriptions could be affected, paracetamol and aspirin being particularly vulnerable. Life-critical cancer and stroke medications will also be affected.  NHS sources predict shortages from June 2026.

Depending on the duration of the blockades, the restriction of oil and its products will lead to a recession across the world, simply as a result of price escalation. Some areas will be affected more than others, depending on the degree of their reliance on petroleum products from the Persian Gulf.

Commentators are unified in calling this a perfect storm for the UK and world economy, and hence for livelihoods and well-being.

Peak resources, limits to growth and system collapse

The Hormuz constriction gives us an insight into a far bigger problem, the constrained nature of the resources we rely on in rich and poor countries alike.

Back in 1973, systems scientists at the MIT carried out a computer simulation using a methodology called systems dynamics. They modelled several scenarios, using then current trends to identify likely patterns of key variables (population and industrialisation, pollution, resource depletion and land availability for food) over the coming decades. The modeling produced has been uncannily prescient, in that what actually happened has followed the projections with relatively minor deviations, a record superior to that of any economic forecasting. The ‘standard run’ scenario (what would happen if trends then continued) indicated a civilisational collapse, starting about now. What underpins this grim diagnosis?

As more and more people achieve higher and higher levels of affluence, they consume more and more of the world’s resources. Consumption increases each year and population growth, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion all follow an exponential growth curve. Material growth cannot continue indefinitely, because the earth is physically limited. Eventually, the scale of human activity exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment, resulting in a sudden contraction. This is ecological overshoot, and we are well into that. “This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies”.

Globally we are using the equivalent of one and a half planet’s worth of the Earth’s ability to renew its resources, and absorb human-generated matter, e.g. carbon emissions, every year. Indeed, 2.8 times in the case of the UK. That requires at least a 60% reduction in the size of the UK’s production and consumption footprint, and more than an 85% reduction in the case of the Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Carbon Dioxide emission boundaries. What this means is that firstly the resources supporting humanity – food, minerals, industrial output – will begin to decline. This would be followed by a collapse in population.

It is important to understand that contraction or collapse happen, not because physical resources disappear entirely, but because the quality of some resources decline as more and more of it is extracted.  Easy to extract oil reserves, for example, are succeeded by those that require more sophisticated and costly techniques for drilling, pumping and refining.  Mineral deposits become successively less densely concentrated, requiring more energy to extract and producing prodigous mountains of spoil. It therefore requires more and more energy and investment to extract usable high-quality resources from raw materials. The same goes for energy: the key concept here is diminishing Energy Return on Investment (EROI). This diverts resources away from productive industry and agriculture, and eventually the process, and hence the system, become unsustainable. The resulting economic collapse is likely to precede the overall collapse of the earth’s life systems.

Are not renewables the answer? Yes, in part, but they cannot substitute for either the scale of use, nor all the multiple uses of oil and other hydrocarbons.

• Firstly, obviously, you cannot make petrochemicals out of sunlight or wind.
• Secondly, industrial scale renewables provide electricity. Despite advances in battery storage, large scale deployment of battery storage is not feasible for the heavy freight and similar uses.
• Thirdly, the increasing scarcity of critical minerals (copper, rare earths, for example) will constrain the scale of renewable energy capture systems, so they will not be able to substitute for the scale of energy currently used.
• Fourthly, the manufacture, deployment and maintenance of wind turbines, solar panels and energy storage systems, are all dependent on fossil fuels.
• Fifthly, the true EROI of electricity generation by renewable energy capture systems is low. All this means that our future will be far more energy constrained than today, possibly a ten-fold decrease overall.

We have been warned

Hormuz is a warning, a preview, or dry run for what lies in store. Already the warnings are emerging into the mainstream. In the last months two previously suppressed government reports have emerged. One is a national security assessment titled Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, the other considers major issues in food security. The first report listed a number of startling headlines, each with a rating of the government’s confidence in the analysis given (not of the likelihood of these dire events occurring.).

1. Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity. High
2. Cascading risks of ecosystem degradation are likely to include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources. Moderate
3. Critical ecosystems that support major global food production areas and impact global climate, water and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security. High
4. Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. High
5. There is a realistic possibility that some ecosystems (such as coral reefs in South East Asia and forests in the very far North) start to collapse from 2030, and others (rainforests and mangroves) start to collapse from 2050. Low
6. All countries are exposed to the risks of ecosystem collapse within and beyond their borders.  Moderate
7. Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security, if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food. Moderate

Note again, that this is not from some eco-activists but from the UK government itself.

The second report (from 2024 but which only surfaced in a Times article this year, 2026) expands on this last point. The Times article summarised the findings:

“…an expert group of civil servants, concluded that not only Britain’s food supply but also its water supply, and international trade networks, were “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”, meaning there was “a realistic possibility that by 2030 (increasing to 2050) our food, water and natural ecosystems (etc.) are at strategic risk of catastrophic failure”.

Yet, despite impending crisis and collapse, the political discussion is only ever about relative trivia, or the early symptoms of this ‘closing circle’. Even the Green Party leadership, in its new populist guise, backpedals on the severity of ecological overshoot and the unsustainability of economic growth..

To confront this reality means establishing several priorities, in public debate and in government action.

• A public education campaign, explaining the risks and the need for serious, and rather drastic measures (just as is done in other national emergencies). The public need to know firstly, that the situation is critical, we are all at risk, but secondly, that we will be taken care of, and take care of one another.
• A reset of expectations: no more replacing cars every few years, jetting off on holiday, eating exotic foods out of season, buying new clothes before the others wear out. Those are examples of the changes to lifestyles of reckless yet trivial consumption that are coming and which we might as well start practising. A programme to reduce the demand for energy, meaning the insulation of all housing stock on a street by street basis, mass employment of efficient heat sources (heat pumps and district heating, for example), rationing of fuel and prioritisation of necessary industrial uses.
• A food security programme with a shift in agriculture from fodder crops to direct food production, entailing a much more plant-based national diet, and the stockpiling of staples, on a rolling basis. The managed replacement of chemical inputs with proven organic, regenerative methods for soil fertility and pest management.
• Because measures of this sort will threaten some livelihoods, the design of social welfare programmes that are adequate to the challenge, yet affordable in the light of the very likely recession.
• Education for sufficiency: cultivation, making and repairing, and care of the earth.
• And above all, the dumping of the mantra of economic growth: growth will not be possible, and meanwhile its pursuit, because it magnifies material and energy flows, worsens the already grim situation.
• A reset of national security to focus on these real threats, emphasising civil defence, and rejecting the warmongering that is being pursued in a vain attempt to boost the economy.

Which academics, NGOs, media outlets and politicians will actually stand up to say these things?  Or are we going to go on, metaphorically blinkered and blindfolded?

Featured Image taken by Ivan (via Pexels)