7 articles
Who is failing the climate? Are underreporting journalists, politicians in denial or fatalists, who insist that only the most aggressive few can survive, at fault? Are horrified white boys or an industrial complex that capitalize on this misery more to blame? The list of potential culprits may be long, but the ultimate raft of solutions needs to be even longer. Hysterics do not help, long-time activists remind. A complex collapse cannot possibly be tackled without doing away with the stereotype that the environment is only important for the white, middle-class. The colonized and exploited must have a voice and introduce positions on the problem. An enforced cooling down of the coronavirus crisis may as well offer a window of opportunity for a transition from an economy of exploitation and disposal towards fulfilling the needs of the many.
Are ecological crises inevitable? Eurozine looks at the cultural and political factors behind delayed responses to the climate emergency, and potential ways out of it.
COP26 lists collaboration as one of its main objectives. All views are seemingly welcome. And yet environmental justice, the law-making that should speak for Indigenous people, isn’t explicitly on the table. If laws and legal action remain static, based on corporate culpability after the fact to the exclusion of motive and context, how will future environmental plunder ever be avoided?
A European elephant in the room
On public space, ecology and the lands of Europe: a conversation with Tim Flannery
Europe has never been a place for racial or environmental purity. Situated at a crossroads of the world, it has always been characterized by change and hybridisation. Palaeontologist Tim Flannery calls for reinventing the commons and bringing elephants back to Europe.
Istanbul’s water reserves are drying up: increasingly severe droughts, intense urban development and the growing population all have their impact. With no miracle cure in sight, environmental science looks for proven ways to reduce water loss in times of scarcity.
An ode to Marmara
What lies below the sea snot spectacle
Once the heart of a civilization, the inland sea connecting Europe and Asia has lost most of its astonishing wildlife and is suffocating under marine mucilage. Industrial pollution and reckless sewage policies feed the phytoplankton that took over the sea. Kaya Genç recalls the rich history of his beloved Marmara and identifies the culprits behind its rapid demise.
A just transformation?
Why the Polish PiS government is standing up for the Coal Republic
The trauma of the 1990s economic shock therapy reverberates in the Polish resistance against the green transition. The PiS government is demanding the EU finance the climate transformation, leaving them with funds to preserve the iconic coal industry despite its economic failure.
Despite real and immediate environmental catastrophes, Australia’s climate change policies are the most backward in the world. To be pro-environment is to be seen as un-Australian; coal mining in particular is a source of national pride.
A new Bauhaus?
The debate for a more inclusive Europe
The European Green Deal proposes that art-science collaborations pull us out of environmental crises. But doesn’t invoking an early 20th century movement just reflect modernist shortcomings – the very inequalities a green transition is supposed to redress?
Zones of friction
An interview with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Extractivism and its impacts seem to be globalization’s end game. Industrial capitalism plunders natural resources, wreaking havoc on biomes and the lives of Indigenous peoples – then moves on. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing speaks about the ‘friction’ between dynamic groups that can ultimately bring regeneration.
It may seem utopian, but granting rights to inanimate beings could break the institutional deadlocks of environmental policy making. Not only that, ‘a parliament of things’ could eliminate the inequalities inherent in our anthropocentric approach to politics.
Roots in nature
The pathogen and the politics of biodiversity
People are starting to notice nature’s invoices: forest fires burning koalas, plastic in the oceans, but the loss of biodiversity freefall has not yet fully broken through onto the political agenda. The pandemic now highlights the connection between human health and the mismanagement of nature and wildlife.
Will polluters ever pay?
Industrial disasters from Baia Mare to Beirut
The explosion in Beirut’s port was so loud that it was heard 150 miles away in Cyprus; a neglected store of fertilizer was the unsuspected bomb. To avoid such mismanagement of hazardous chemicals, authorities need to ensure that the polluter pays, says Gergely Simon.
Global heating, environmental collapse and increasing global scarcity: no wonder the politics of perpetual advancement are failing to convince. Progressives must brace themselves for the return of some of their most detested ideas. But dismissing the nostalgists as reactionary can no longer be their response.
Natural disasters dissolve the fundamental distinction between the human and the natural worlds. At this moment, we discover that we are surrounded by silence. On art and philosophy amidst ecological crisis.
The materiality of the cloud
On the hard conditions of soft digitization
Although we often think about the Internet as immaterial, storing the seemingly abstract ones and zeros requires actual, mechanical work. Those who provide the material means are continuously underpaid, thus ‘growth’ and ‘development’ at the centre result in energy depletion in the periphery.
What can the history of the soil tell us about modernity and its ills? An experiment in urban gardening sets Kate Brown thinking about the consequences of the western world’s perennial misuse of the land – and how to return life to today’s extinct terrains.
Related Focal Points
9 articles
104 articles
58 articles