Category: Biodiversity / Biodevastation

The Sahel-wide flooding between June and October has exacted a particularly high toll on the people of Niger, destroying crops, cattle, houses and infrastructure in one of the world’s poorest countries whose economy had already been strangled by the seven month-long sanctions. By late September, at least 339 were killed, many more injured, and 1.1…

The imperialist states of North America and Western Europe have consistently avoided any admission of culpability for the worsening environmental situation. What has transpired over the decades since the UN Climate Summits were initiated is that false promises of monetary compensation and assistance have been made by the industrial states while none of these pledges…

The action has to be on the demand side; that is, on transitioning to lifestyles and systems that enable dramatic reduction in resource use. The solution has to be a Simpler Way, involving far resource-simpler lifestyles and systems.

By departing from the imaginary of perpetual economic growth we can realize that the resolvement of our daily problems can come not only from high-tech solutions, which are preferred by the current capitalist standards as more marketable and more prone to planned obsolescence, but also by simpler, older methods and techniques

McCoy continues his examination of the decline of the US Empire by looking at foreign policy challenges to the US.

A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated,” wrote scientists in a letter to Nordic governments

Technological fundamentalists … have no doubt that human knowledge is adequate to run the world. But to claim such abilities, we have to assume we can identify all the patterns in nature and learn to control all aspects of nature. … Our future is fewer and less.

Under each of the three most recent presidencies, Republican and Democratic alike, U.S. oil and gas production was higher at the end of the administration’s term than at the beginning.

It is September and throughout Italy the heat and dry conditions continue. It has been the hottest two months ever recorded. What little rain we have had has hardly penetrated the hard ground. There are food shortages already. The prices in the supermarkets are higher. In the south, the citrus crop is threatened; there is…

Smil’s approximation of how much of the US land area it would take to replace all fossil fuel use (at the 2012 level) with wind and solar power: 25%. The way to control power density is to lower our demands for energy.