Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: things you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental and social justice, cities, science fiction, current events, and political theory.
We’ll try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.
For the summer months, we’re doing something a bit different. On top of sharing the usual editors’ picks, we’ve invited two scholars to contribute some of the best readings and resources in their respective fields. For July, political ecologist Salvatore De Rosa is joining us. Check out his list below, and scroll a bit further to find other worthwhile articles selected by us Uneven Earth editors! Oh, and follow our brand new Instagram account.
Salvatore’s links
I was asked by Uneven Earth to put together a list of my favorite readings in recent years, during which I deep-dove in Political Ecology and related fields and animated, with the fantastic ENTITLE Collective, a blog of collaborative writing around scholarly and academic takes and issues in Political Ecology.
Admittedly, this list does not follow a structure or predetermined path, rather reflecting my idiosyncrasies, the mutating focus of my interests and the associative links nurtured by a broadly defined interest in human-environment relations and in the eco-political performances of grassroots environmental activism.
Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene
Let’s start with heavy thoughtful artillery. There’s a lot of talk on the Anthropocene lately, but few original and genuinely critical takes on the issue. Amazing exception, this piece of Donna Haraway that opens up the Anthropocene narrative and goes forward in thinking its implications towards politically enabling, culturally decentering and vertiginously uplifting connections.
Are you in search of maps to study, revisit, deconstruct or add to your presentation on spatial imaginaries? Nothing better than the David Rumsey map collection: thousands of maps from all ages, freely downloadable in hi-res.
The next wave of extremists will be green
A theme that has always interested me is the relation between grassroots environmental activism and repressive and delegitimizing techniques implemented by governments against it around the world. To get a sense of how environmental mobilizations from below are increasingly considered a ‘serious’ issue by state, and often a ‘threat’ to national interests, the above readings can surely help.
Climate depression is for real. Just ask a scientist
If you were wondering why a feeling of looming desperation settled in your thoughts when you have just been reading the news, the answer may be that you suffer from climate depression.
Proposing a similar diagnosis but from an entirely different standpoint, the anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan invites us to “face the loss”.
Here’s to unsuicide: An interview with Richard Powers
To recover and to fight back, maybe it is time to turn upside down some deep seated assumptions about nature. Maybe it is time to recognize that the gap between humans and all other living things is made and remade by our drive of dominion and destruction. Wise words can be heard on this from Richard Powers.
End the “green” delusions: Industrial-scale renewable energy is fossil fuel+
Did you think top-down, large scale renewable energies infrastructures, like windmills, will solve the world’s hunger for energy without hurting ecosystems? Think again…
Friday essay: recovering a narrative of place – stories in the time of climate change
For a bit of meaning and hope, here is a reading on how we should work on recovering narratively community and place, to have the “feet firmly on the ground while reaching for the stars”.
Why “Warning to Humanity” gets the socio-ecological crisis (and its solutions) wrong
Finally, one reading from our ENTITLE Blog, that criticizes the mainstream scientific diagnoses and solutions to the environmental crises spread by articles like the “warning to humanity”, and invites to join the fight right on the frontlines of ecological friction points!
Enjoy!
Uneven Earth updates
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July | Link | “She enjoys the way they fill the space with artificial flight; an awkward posture that makes their death seem comical.”
News you might’ve missed
Crops are dying. Forests are burning. This summer’s heat wave has fueled natural disasters around the world. Here’s a list of them.
Rising temperatures linked to increased suicide rates
The first ever feminist school in Uganda was held this year by The Rural Women’s Movement
A new report shows how the world’s 35 largest meat and dairy companies will increase their emissions and derail global efforts to prevent dangerous climate change.
As Indigenous peoples wait decades for land titles, companies are acquiring their territories
Investing in Indigenous communities is most efficient way to protect forests, report finds
Deadliest year on record for environmental land defenders: A report by Global Witness. Also covered in The Intercept here.
2,500 scientists warn against the border wall’s huge environmental cost
New politics
A “happy” world requires institutional change
Meet the anarchists making their own medicine. The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is a network of tech-fueled anarchists taking on Big Pharma with DIY medicines.
Standing Rock medic bus is now a traveling decolonized pharmacy
Women’s fight to feed the world. Women Who Dig takes a global look at food, feminism and the struggle to make a future.
The teenagers fighting for climate justice
Here’s why we’re planting trees in northern Syria. This land was liberated from Bashar Al-Assad and Isis. Now we need help to keep it alive.
How to build a culture of good health. “If we wish to take full responsibility for health in our society, we must not only be vigilant guardians of our personal well-being, we must also work to change structures, institutions, and ideologies that keep us mired in a toxic culture.”
Out from emergency. Today’s crises call on humanity to act collectively, but this possibility seems more and more remote. How do we break the cycle? A dialogue between Katrina Forrester and Jedediah Purdy.
Radical municipalism
Seattle flirts with ‘municipal socialism’. The $15 minimum wage was just the beginning. Now Seattle is trying to build a whole safety net for workers—and triggering a war with its biggest companies.
Degrowth and Christiania – I saw how Copenhagen’s collective living experiment can work
Iceland’s slow-burning digital democratic revolution.
How community land trusts create affordable housing
Visions of a new economy from Detroit: A conversation with Malik Yakini. “That whole idea of private ownership of land, which in large part is how wealth is generated in capitalism, is problematic. The question of access to land is critical… The other flaw—which can exist in socialism, also—is the idea that the earth is a commodity, and what we need is more production, more extraction. I think a new way of looking at our relationship to the earth is required.”
Everything we’ve heard about global urbanization turns out to be wrong
Most public engagement is worse than worthless
‘Climate gentrification’ will deepen urban inequality, and Coastal cities are already suffering from “climate gentrification”.
Seattle and the Socialist: The battle raging between Amazon and the far left
A world class divide: Seattle vs. Vancouver on the housing crisis
A nationwide campaign to take back cities from the corporations that rule them
Barcelona’s experiment in radical democracy
Municipalism: The next political revolution?
Where we’re at: analysis
Losing Earth: the decade we almost stopped climate change. And an important response by Naomi Klein: Capitalism killed our climate momentum, not “human nature”.
Systems seduction: The aesthetics of decentralisation. “We don’t need totalizing visions but a proliferation of daydreams: lateral, experimental and situated within the localities of lived experience.”
Wildfires in Greece—the price of austerity
Science denialism is dangerous. But so is science imperialism. Calls for strict science-based decision making on complex issues like GMOs and geoengineering can shortchange consideration of ethics and social impacts.
The limits of green energy under capitalism
What are human rights good for?
Nature defends itself. Review of The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm.
The cashless society is a con – and big finance is behind it. Banks are closing ATMs and branches in an attempt to ‘nudge’ users towards digital services – and it’s all for their own benefit
Karl Polanyi and the formation of this generation’s new Left. As the democratic Left spirals ever downwards, the worrying forces of populism and neoliberalism seem to be emerging from the ashes. Could the visionary thinking of economic historian Karl Polanyi provide a feasible fix in the 21st Century? An open‐ended approach might be just the ticket to rescue global politics from a far right explosion – and it’s not rocket science…
Growth for the sake of growth. “Growth for the sake of growth” remains the credo of governments and international institutions, Federico Demaria finds. The time is ripe, he argues, not only for a scientific degrowth research agenda, but also for a political one.
Just think about it…
We can’t do it ourselves. How effective is individual action when it is systemic social change that is needed?
Is the global era of massive infrastructure projects coming to an end?
How to survive America’s kill list. “This is how America’s post-9/11 move toward authoritarianism has been executed: without massacres or palace coups, but noiselessly, on paper, through years of metronome insertions of bloodless terms in place of once-vibrant Democratic concepts.”
Intellectual extractivism: The dispossession of Maya weaving
What is metabolic rift? The ecosocialist idea you’ve never heard of and might need.
Think everyone died young in ancient societies? Think again
Conflict reigns over the history and origins of money. Thousands of years ago, money was a means of debt payment, archaeologists and anthropologists say.
The medium chill: a philosophy that asks the important questions. “We’re going to have to scale down our material expectations and get off the aspirational treadmill. So how can we do that? How can we make it okay to prioritize social connections over money and choice hoarding?”
Participatory budgeting increases voter likelihood 7%
Cesspools, sewage, and social murder. A riveting history of early environmentalism in 19th-Century London.
Steven Pinker’s ideas are fatally flawed. These eight graphs show why.
The free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis
How tech’s richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
The case for building $1,500 parks. A new study shows that access to “greened” vacant lots reduced feelings of worthlessness and depression, especially in low-resource neighborhoods.
Resources
The best books on Radical Environmentalism
After 30 years, Science for the People has relaunched!
Science for the People engages in research, activism, and science communications for the betterment of society, ecological improvement, environmental protection, and to serve human needs. Members of Science for the People consist of STEM workers, educators, and activists who are socially and ethically focused, and believe that science should be a positive force for humanity and the planet.
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