Topic: Less of What We Don’t Need
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Trump has Plenty of Accomplices in his Reckless Energy Policies
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The nation’s entrenched fossil-nuclear corporate elites are more focused on propping up the industries of the past than embracing the technologies of the future.
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Where’s the “eco” in ecomodernism?
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If you hadn’t heard, despair is old hat. Rather than retreat into the woods, now is the time to think big, to propose visionary policies and platforms. So enter grand proposals like basic income, universal healthcare, and the end of work. Slap big polluters with carbon tax, eradicate tax havens for the rich, and switch…
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Nuclear Disaster at Chernobyl: Reality and Unreality
With the escalating doom of climate change hovering over us, it is tempting to push nuclear horror to the back of our minds. To those of us who grew up in the 1950s, it was omnipresent. Nuclear war could not exist without nuclear power and on April 26, 1986 the world experienced a form of…
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I Want to Ride My Bicycle: Urban Planning and the Danish Concept of ‘Hygge’
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Indian cities are in crisis. Spend any length of time in a large city there and you will notice the overcrowding, the power and water shortages and, during monsoon, the streets that transform into stinking, litter-strewn rivers. At times, these cities can be almost unbearable to live in. Little wonder then that the concept of ‘smart…
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Meet the people building alternatives to mining in Colombia
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On the 26th March 2017, citizens from the mountainous municipality of Cajamarca, Colombia, voted, with a 98% majority, to ban South African miner AngloGold Ashanti’s vast La Colosa gold mining project, in a ‘popular consultation’ led by grassroots youth activists and small-scale farmers. One year on, and Cajamarca’s victory has helped inspire a much wider…
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Thousands March Against Sterlite Plant In Tuticorin
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The Proposed expansion of the Sterlite copper smelting plant in Tamil Nadu has renewed protests among the people of Tuticorin district. Protests are continuing for over 45 days, till date in the district demanding an immediate closure of the copper plant. On March 24, 2018, thousands of people marched against the decision to expand the…
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Facebook Turned Our Economy Into a Spying Operation
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George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton sold us on the idea that we no longer needed a manufacturing economy in the U.S. because the internet was coming and it would provide entirely new business models. Now we’ve seen what that new economy looks like: spying for sale. Facebook takes all the information you give them,…
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Varieties of Eco-Socialism: Comparing the thought of John Bellamy Foster with Saral Sarkar
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Sarkar challenged Foster to answer the following “straightforward question”: “Does Foster think that Eco-Socialism’s immediate goal should be to initiate a policy of de-growth, a contracting economy, and a contracting population? And the long-term goal a socialist steady-state economy at a low level?” Sarkar then went on to argue . . . that it is…
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For Climate Mobilization, Look to 1960s Vietnam before Turning to 1940s America
Confronting the global ecological emergency will require a mobilization far more ambitious than any actions now being considered by governments or international bodies. In response, several of the people and groups urging much more drastic action here in America have been saying that it needs to happen on the scale of the country’s mobilization…
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Why I’m Giving Up on Preventative Care
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How Contemporary American Medicine is Testing Us to Death In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse. It was barely even a decision, more like an accumulation…