Green Social Thought

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Tag: copper

  • Under Left and Right-Wing Leaders, the Amazon Has Burned. Can Latin America Reject Oil, Ranching, and Mining?

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    fitzdon

    The chapter in Latin American history that opened in 1998 with celebrations in Venezuela has ended with a coup and violence in Bolivia. As with all tidal waves, the “pink tide” recedes to reveal a terrain transformed. The left movement landscape that produced variously striped socialist governments in a dozen countries is fractured and disillusioned.…

  • The Coup in Bolivia Has Everything to Do With the Screen You’re Using to Read This

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    fitzdon

    When you look at your computer screen, or the screen on your smartphone or the screen of your television set, it is a liquid crystal display (LCD). An important component of the LCD screen is indium, a rare metallic element that is processed out of zinc concentrate. The two largest sources of indium can be…

  • Between the Devil and the Green New Deal

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    fitzdon

    We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming. …nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic…

  • Sooner or later, we have to stop economic growth — and we’ll be better for it

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    fitzdon

    We’ve gotten so accustomed to growth that governments, corporations and banks now depend on it. It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re collectively addicted to growth.  The end of growth will come one day, perhaps very soon, whether we’re ready or not. If we plan for and manage it, we could well wind up with…

  • Digging Free of Poverty

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    fitzdon

    On March 8, 2012, a few hundred marchers set out from Pangui, Ecuador, a town in the southeastern Amazon, near the construction site of the massive, open-pit Mirador Mine. Just days earlier, a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies had signed a contract to exploit the mine’s copper reserves, the first agreement of its kind in…

  • Canada in Zambia

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    fitzdon

    While few Canadians could find Zambia on a map, the Great White North has significant influence over the southern African nation. A big beneficiary of internationally sponsored neoliberal reforms, a Vancouver firm is the largest foreign investor in the landlocked country of 16 million. First Quantum Minerals (FQM) has been embroiled in various ecological, labour…

  • By Blood and Fire Mining and Militarization in the Ecuadorian Amazon

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    fitzdon

    Before dawn on the Dec. 21, 2016, dozens of police raided the headquarters of the Shuar Federation (FISCH) in the Ecuadorian Amazon and arbitrarily detained its president, Agustin Wachapá. The indigenous leader was thrown to the ground and repeatedly stamped on and ridiculed beneath the boots of police in front of his wife. The police then…