Key conclusion of Anthropocene Working Group report to Geological Congress: the ‘Great Acceleration’ in the second half of the 20th century marked the end of the Holocene and the beginning of a new geological epoch.
AWG report
Archive | August, 2016
Interview
Capitalism driving biodiversity loss to point of no return
Ashley Dawson: ‘Today’s mass extinction crisis is one of the clearest indications we have of the fundamental irrationality and destructiveness of the capitalist system.’
Interview: John Bellamy Foster
Marx and the Earth: Why we wrote an ‘anti-critique’
The German daily Junge Welt interviews John Bellamy Foster on capitalism’s destruction of nature, ecological Marxism from Marx’s time to the present, and the environmental crisis as a class issue.
Movement Building
Climate justice and the prospect of power
Climate justice activists have not yet found a path to transformational change. That can only emerge from the experiences of all working people here and worldwide, present and past.
Stop Enbridge
First nation chiefs deposed for supporting pipeline
“When you are a hereditary chief leader you have responsibilities to your clan and you have to consult. They didn’t do that. Everything was a big secret up till now. At the end of the day, they are crawling into bed with Enbridge.”
Ecosocialist Bookshelf
Book Review: The Birth of the Anthropocene
Ian Angus: “I can’t recall another book that positions the present global crisis in Earth’s deep history so well, in a form that can be readily understood by non-specialists. Every ecosocialist should read it.”
Ecosocialist notebook
A vision of democratic ecosocialism
Hans Baer: “Democratic eco-socialism rejects a statist, growth-oriented, productivist ethic and recognizes that humans live on an ecologically fragile planet with limited resources that must be sustained and renewed as much as possible for future generations.”
Marxism today
Science, Socialism and the Anthropocene
Ian Angus: “We must have a concrete materialist understanding of how our world works and is changing. Without that, our political views would be floating in mid-air, with no concrete foundation.”
Earth is hot and getting hotter
Confirmed: 2015 set all-time heat records
The annual State of the Climate report confirms that 2015 surpassed 2014 as the warmest year ever recorded. Greenhouse gases, surface temperatures and global sea levels all passed previous highs.
New books
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, August 2016
Five new books for green lefts and left greens. Cuban science fiction … the birth of the Anthropocene … agribusiness and disease … surviving catastrophe … rising seas … private plunder of public assets.
Book Review
Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
Janet Biehl’s engrossing biography shows that Bookchin, an unlikely social theorist and radical philosopher, produced an important body of work of lasting significance.