The New Compass has just posted a video of Brian Tokar’s presentation from last September in Oslo, titled “Climate Change as a Challenge to Democracy.” This was the opening session of the 3-day Ecological Challenges conference at the University of Oslo, and included a panel of academic and activist respondents to the opening talk. In April, New Compass Press will publish the full proceeds of the conference, under the title Social Ecology and Social Change.
This commentary appears on the occasion of the forthcoming “Apocalypse Now?” issue of the Occupied Times of London, as well as the People’s Climate March in New York City and events before and after, and also the publication of the newly revised and expanded edition of my book, Toward Climate Justice. It also appears on Counterpunch, ZNet and Toward Freedom:
Today it often feels as though we are hopelessly mired in apocalyptic thinking, both in our social movements and in popular culture. From Hollywood blockbusters to art house dystopias, and from hip-hop lyrics to “serious” literature, images of irreversible climate […]
I originally added a series of updated links as a comment to our earlier post on this topic, but there are now enough of them to easily justify a new post:
• Surprising coverage of this story on (commercial) British TV this week: www.channel4.com/news/pkk-kurdistan-workers-party-islamic-state-kurdish-spring!
• Also a current on-the-scene report: rojavareport.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/village-communes-emerging-in-colemerg.
• An earlier account, albeit written in a more typically jaded American journalese, can be found in an Atlantic article from 2007: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/10/among-the-kurds/306448/
• A more in-depth, richly detailed account, tracing many specific dimensions of Bookchin’s ideas in the Kurds’ democratic praxis, can be found at www.academia.edu/3983109/Democratic_Confederalism_as_a_Kurdish_Spring_the_PKK_and_the_quest_for_radical_democracy. Unfortunately a registration and login […]
An article from the Winter 2014 issue of the journal New Politics, based on a presentation at the 2013 Left Forum in New York City. Tokar examines the political and ideological origins of “market-oriented” approaches that aim to substitute permit-trading regimes for environmental regulation:
The theoretical origins of carbon trading go back to the early 1960s, when corporate managers were just beginning to consider the consequences of pollution and resource depletion. Since the work of Arthur Pigou at the University of Cambridge in the 1920s, economists were aware of environmental pollution as an economic “externality” that could be addressed through a […]
From Antigone in Thessaloniki, Greece, titled Klimatiké Dikaosyni. Translated by ISE alum, Stavros Karageorgakis, with editorial support from Alexandros Georgopoulos and Eliza Kolovou. More information will soon be online at http://www.antigone.gr. The original edition of my book, Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change, published by Communalism/New Compass Press, is still available in the US from AK Press.
Tuesday, March 5th was Town Meeting Day in Vermont and, following a long tradition of our towns taking a stand on issues of wider importance, at least 29 towns, including Montpelier and Burlington, overwhelmingly passed resolutions opposing the proposed transport of tar sands oil through our region. The resolutions also supported efforts to eliminate oil derived from the Alberta tar sands from fuel supplies across New England.
The main purpose of this effort was to challenge proposed changes to an aging oil pipeline that could have a serious impact on Vermont and our entire region. Recent weeks have seen visits […]
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