Lifestyle change and ‘ethical consumerism’ are not bridges to effective social change, but barriers to it. To build effective social movements, we must begin by rejecting individualist approaches.
Martin Empson reviews Farmageddon, an important expose of the disastrous failings of the global food system that never quite gets to the bottom of why the agricultural system is like it is.
The entire premise that justice and sustainability can be purchased in the marketplace is patently absurd.
Once again, corporate environment-killers presented a festival of greenwashing, where shopping was promoted as a painless way to save the world.
Many greens blame consumer choices and lifestyles for the global crisis. This blames the victims, while ignoring the real environmental criminals.
Exposing the myth that ‘consumer demand for low prices’ causes dangerous working conditions in third world factories
Don Fitz: To ensure fairness and sustainability, an ecosocialist society will have to ration scarce resources. The real question is, what should be rationed, and how?
My friend Kamala Emanuel, a member of the Socialist Alliance in Perth, on Australia’s west coast, posted this on Facebook. It’s brilliant.
How could socialists not love a book called How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth? Unfortunately, although it is better than most recent books on ecological and social problems, its explanations don’t hold water, and the solutions it proposes are just wishful thinking.
A UK government report blames last year’s riots on the participants’ “materialism and consumerism.” They couldn’t possibly have learned such anti-social values from Britain’s ruling class. Could they?
How did the strange idea that individual actions and capitalist markets can save the world become the dominant ideology of mainstream environmentalism? Historian Ted Steinberg traces the rise of green liberalism from the counterculture of the 1970s to the White House.
… and five reasons why voting and shopping are not the same thing (more…)
[Quotes and Insights #23] Pioneer socialist ecologist Barry Commoner, author of The Closing Circle, speaking at Harvard University, during the first Earth Day, April 1970…. “The favorite statistic is that the U.S. contains 6 to 7% of the world population but consumes more than half the world’s resources and is responsible for that fraction of […]
Adbusters is wrong. At a time when the movement finally has the ear of the public via mainstream news coverage, the call to disrupt Christmas shopping is counter-productive and harmful (more…)
Monstrous as the consumer economy has become, consumer spending is not the biggest environmental problem. Most waste and pollution is caused by industrial, military and commercial processes, over which consumers have no control. CONSUMERS ARE NOT THE BIG GREEN PROBLEM by Simon Butler Green Left Weekly, December 3, 2011 Most environmentalists would agree consumerism and […]
Clive Hamilton’s pessimism about climate change activism flows from his assumption that individual consumers are to blame. Capitalism is the elephant in the room (more…)
“Contrary to the famous Dick Cheney quote, energy efficiency is not a matter of personal virtue. The answer to collective political failure is political action.” (more…)
Prince Charles thinks people should consume less. Other people, that is … (more…)
There has never been anything resembling serious public debate of basic U.S. transportation policy (more…)
The debate following our article in Grist reveals that many greens have a blindspot about class. Blaming the world’s problems on too many people makes little sense when one-half of one percent of the world’s population owns nearly 40% of all wealth and controls most of the rest (more…)
