The health of Earth’s ecosystem is the foundation of all health. Individuals cannot live healthy or happy lives in poisoned ecosystems and unhealthy communities.
Ecohealth
Archive | Enviro Justice
Environmental injustice
New maps of land destruction show why caravans flee Central America
Detailed maps show worldwide land degradation, including the deforestation that is now forcing migrants to leave Guatemala and Honduras
Science
Studying the health impacts of global environmental change
Planetary Health, a new field of scientific research, focuses on the human health impacts of the growing disruption of Earth’s metabolic systems
Book review
Poisoned City: How Flint fought back
Anna Clark’s new book shows how working people in Michigan organized and fought back when neoliberal austerity policies poisoned their drinking water.
Sengwer people attacked
Conservation as genocide: REDD versus Indigenous rights in Kenya
Neo-colonial ‘developmentalist’ forces with a green sheen are evicting and murdering people in the guise of conservation and climate change mitigation
Open letter to the people of the USA
Economic reconstruction, debt cancellation and self-determination in Puerto Rico!
One month after Hurricane Maria: ‘We need an adequately funded program of economic reconstruction (including the transition to renewable energy), the powers to carry it out and a true process of political self-determination.’
Cancel the debt now!
Before Maria, forcing Puerto Rico to pay its debt was odious. Now, it’s pure cruelty.
To expect Puerto Rico to rebuild from this unnatural disaster while at the same time bailing out Wall Street financiers is to condemn its residents to a permanent state of crushing hardship and impoverishment.
Origins of ecosocialism
Barry Commoner: Radical father of modern environmentalism
“The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production—in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation—essential as they are, make people sick and die.”
Profit vs People
Corporate Power + Climate Change = Geocide
Susan George: We are faced with determined adversaries who care nothing about human rights or climate change. They only want a world in which they can make endless amounts of money using all available resources, no matter what the costs to nature and to human life.
Movement Building
Food Sovereignty: A Strategy for Environmental Justice
Food sovereignty offers a strategy for social mobilization that confronts rural disintegration while addressing environmental crises.
Interview
Hannah Holleman on environmental justice and ecological imperialism
“The pace and scale of ecological degradation we confront today is unfathomable without understanding the legacy and persistent realities of ecological imperialism.”
Environmental Justice
If Nature Is Sacred, Capitalism Is Wicked
Under capitalism, everything is a business opportunity. Disasters are not viewed by business leaders as problems to be solved, they are seen as circumstances of which they must take advantage.
Fossil Capitalism
Ecocide in the Niger Delta
In Nigeria, oil extraction and production has devastating consequences for the people living in the Niger Delta, but those who flee are not protected by the Geneva Convention on Refugees.
Interview
Capitalism driving biodiversity loss to point of no return
Ashley Dawson: ‘Today’s mass extinction crisis is one of the clearest indications we have of the fundamental irrationality and destructiveness of the capitalist system.’
Book Review
Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin
Janet Biehl’s engrossing biography shows that Bookchin, an unlikely social theorist and radical philosopher, produced an important body of work of lasting significance.
Marxist Ecology
Colonialism, Racism and the Global Dust Bowl of the 1930s
An important new paper challenges prevalent conceptions of the Dust Bowl, in which colonial and racial-domination aspects of the crisis are invisible, and affirms the necessity of deeper conceptions of environmental (in)justice.
Movement Building
Canada: Leap Manifesto unites broad forces, builds climate justice campaigns
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has acknowledged shocking details about the violence of Canada’s near past. Deepening poverty and inequality are a scar on the country’s present. And Canada’s record on climate change is a crime against humanity’s future.
Climate Justice
Ground zero of climate change
The coastal and island nations of the Asia-Pacific have contributed the least to global climate change, but suffer the most from climate breakdown and disaster capitalism
Video
Film: Scotland’s Landscape of Fear
Liam Young examines the causes of environmental damage in Scotland and the impact communities can have when they take control of their own resources.
The Hurricane Katrina Pain Index: 10 Years Later
A decade after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, despite billions of dollars in ‘aid,’ the poor and people of color are still paying the price