Six new books on the science for the people movement, health care under capitalism, the criminalizing of poverty, Yemen in crisis, the origins of everything, and communism and democracy
New books for reds and greens
Le Devoir
Uniting ecology and revolution: ‘Facing the Anthropocene’ featured in leading Québec newspaper
Le Devoir, the francophone newspaper of record in Canada, reviews new French translation of Facing the Anthropocene, and interviews its author, Ian Angus
Tramples Indigenous rights
Site C Dam: BC NDP fails major environmental test
The government's decision to build the dam makes it abundantly clear that the struggle to defend indigenous rights and the environment must be built outside of parliament
Low-impact fishers demand
Electrical pulse fishing: Switch it off now!
Will the EU ban technology that electro-shocks fish into nets before bottom-dwelling fish in the North Sea are driven to extinction?
Interview with Zafer Ülger
Ecological crisis and capitalism in Turkey today
Turkish socialist describes growing understanding that Marx's ideas on ecology are important, and that the oppression of labor, women and oppressed peoples is not separate from the crisis of nature and ecosystems
Facing the Anthropocene
‘A contribution to a genuinely materialist ecology’
Éric Pineault’s preface to the French edition of Facing the Anthropocene: “Ian Angus offers a critique of capitalist modernity based on a vision of liberation shaped by the recognition of substantial and real ecological limits”
apocatopia? utopalypse?
China Miéville: The Limits of Utopia
Utopias are necessary. But not only are they insufficient: they can be part of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.
Energy poverty
Renewables plan would leave world’s poorest in the dark
Converting to renewables isn't enough. The majority of the world’s people will be denied a good quality of life unless their energy sources increase substantially
Reading, red and green
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, February 2018
Five important books on famines and world hunger, on Ebola and other deadly epidemics that spread from animals to people, and on the pesticide poisons in our food.
Environmental philosophy
New materialism: ‘Idealism of the most useless sort’
Following my review of The Progress of This Storm, a reader comments on a philosophical fad that is 'burning through academia faster than a forest fire'
Book Review
The progress of this storm:
Nature and society in a warming world
Andreas Malm’s powerful critique of current environmental philosophies puts historical materialism and cutting-edge science at the center of a call for militant action
Book announcement
Face à l’anthropocène: Le capitalisme fossile et la crise du système terrestre
Facing the Anthropocene, by Ian Angus, will soon be available in French, published by Éditions Écosociété
Interview
Andreas Malm: ‘Without a mass movement we don’t stand a chance against fossil capital’
The author of 'Fossil Capital' and 'The Progress of This Storm' says there are reasons to be hopeful, but success depends on building a global movement of unprecedented scale
Imperialism
Africa: New evidence of ongoing corporate looting
World Bank report shows massive depletion of Africa's natural wealth by transnational corporations. Only mass action can block the extractivist plunder
Book Review
How to create an ecological society
Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams make a powerful case that ecological disaster can be only be overcome by a revolutionary transformation on socialist principles
Unprecedented forecast
Global warming may pass 1.5°C in the next five years
UK climate scientists say that warming in at least one year in the next five could blow past the target set in the Paris Accord.
creative self-destruction
Why corporate promises to cut carbon can’t be trusted
Relying on markets and corporate responses to the climate crisis will not work, because profits always come first
A tribute
Alan Roberts, 1925-2017: A pioneer of radical environmentalism
The Marxist author of The Self-managing Environment rejected techno-fixes for environmental crises and exposed the fallacies of populationism
Agadir Declaration
ATTAC: For food sovereignty, against ‘free trade’ agreements
"The so called free trade agreements are new colonial agreements that serve the interests of multinationals, favouring the pillage of lands, indigenous peoples’ communal areas, their water resources, their fish and their food"
Reading for reds and greens
Ecosocialist Bookshelf, January 2018
Seven new books on the new terrain of class war, social reproduction theory, limits to NGO radicalism, ideas for change, shrinking the technosphere, technology and inequality, and property formation in colonial North America