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 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.
Welcome to the last newsletter of the decade! That’s right, we’re taking a break in December, to recalibrate and recharge. We’ve been running our monthly reading list for almost two years now, and nearly 1,000 of you seem to find it useful, so we’re excited to continue providing you with news and analysis in 2020. See you next year!
Uneven Earth updates
The technical assistant | Link | It had been a long time since human hands had touched grain bins
Trade governance will make or break the Green New Deal | Link | How the GND could, should, must redefine “protectionism” and transform international trade
Rethinking education for the Green New Deal | Link | Governance for an eco-centered curriculum—or not?
Down Maria | Link | There was only one prisoner left, and he would not live forever
Top 5 articles to read
Extraction Rebellion. A Green Zone of hope.
Land reform and the Green New Deal
Climate change’s great lithium problem
A Green New Deal between whom and for what?
Indonesia deforestation: The world’s demand for palm oil is igniting a climate bomb
News you might’ve missed
Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’
New land height metric raises sea level rise risk
Earth nears irreversible tipping points
Coal knew, too. A newly unearthed journal from 1966 shows the coal industry, like the oil industry, was long aware of the threat of climate change. And new paper reveals rail industry was leader in climate denial efforts.
Indigenous people blocked Ecuador oil auction in growing fight to save Amazon
WA Indigenous group’s $290 billion compensation claim could become one of world’s biggest payouts
Fearing eviction, thousands of forest dwellers protest in India
More than 1,700 activists have been killed this century defending the environment
Indigenous people pay a high price for protecting the planet
A gathering of guardians: Indigenous monitors convene for historic knowledge exchange
Farmer depression deepens as climate warms
Climate change poses threat to children’s health worldwide
Psychologists from 40 countries pledged to use their jobs to address climate change
Worldwide uprisings
Welcome to the global rebellion against neoliberalism. As distinct as the protests seem, the uprisings rocking Bolivia, Lebanon, and scores of other countries all share a common theme.
From Iran to Hong Kong, the world is becoming ungovernable
This wave of global protest is being led by the children of the financial crash
Hong Kong Protests: Inside the chaos
- Hong Kong’s fight for life
- ‘I went from chilled out Hong Kong student to battle-hardened protester contemplating suicide’
- The Left’s role in the Hong Kong uprising
“Rifles, machine guns, El Alto will not fall!” Dual Power in Bolivia
- The world upside down in Bolivia
- Western media whitewash Bolivia’s far-right coup
- What the coup against Evo Morales means to Indigenous people like me
- Thea Riofrancos on Twitter: “Was the coup in Bolivia a “lithium coup”?
- Kristallnacht in Bolivia
Debt and neoliberalism: The global roots of Chile’s crisis
A few tips on how to understand Latin American coups
More than just a “Spring”: the Arab region’s long-term revolution
Lebanon’s revolution spawns ‘direct democracy’ with citizen assemblies and people’s parliaments
Iraq is healing: The October revolution, systemic change and intergenerational trauma
Now is the time to rise up for Rojava
Indonesia protests: Land bill at center of unrest
Thousands of Romanians protest against illegal logging, attacks on forest workers
Czechs say billionaire leader must resign in mass protests
Why aren’t people in the US rising up like those elsewhere in the world?
Just think about it…
Why are rich people so mean? Call it Rich Asshole Syndrome—the tendency to distance yourself from people with whom you have a large wealth differential.
Why we are all losing sleep. With longer work hours, the rise of the gig economy and smartphone apps competing for our every waking moment, sleep has become the final frontier of consumer capitalism.
To have or not to have children in the age of climate change
Robin Wall Kimmerer on the intelligence in all kinds of life
After climate change apocalypse, kindness will be most important survival skill
Imagination is such an ancient ability it might precede language
Plastic has a big carbon footprint — but that isn’t the whole story
The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling
Smartphones are killing the planet faster than anyone expected
Pointless emails: they’re not just irritating – they have a massive carbon footprint
Where we’re at: analysis
It’s time to retire metrics like GDP. They don’t measure everything that matters
Against economics. “Any new, viable science will either have to draw on the accumulated knowledge of feminism, behavioral economics, psychology, and even anthropology to come up with theories based on how people actually behave, or once again embrace the notion of emergent levels of complexity—or, most likely, both.”
It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics
The hidden cost of gold: Birth defects and brain damage
The Native American women who fought mass sterilization
What the West doesn’t get about the climate crisis
It bears repeating: Renewables alone won’t end the climate crisis
The climate case for working less
How mindfulness privatised a social problem
The time has come to take the self out of self-care
Emergenciocracy: why demanding the “climate emergency” is risky
Geoengineering: let’s not get it back-to-front
Humanity and nature are not separate – we must see them as one to fix the climate crisis
New politics
Sowing the seeds of post-extractivism. Communities around the world are demonstrating how we can move beyond extractivism to revive cultures of care and solidarity.
Direct democracy and the passion for political participation. For a radically democratic and ecological society we need to build democratic and resilient communities capable of deepening citizen participation at all levels of public life.
Worker-owned apps are trying to fix the gig economy’s exploitation
‘Fire the bosses’: Platform co-ops set out their radical stall
Imagine a future of distributed cooperatives, or disCOs
In depth with Clark Arrington, a pioneer for cooperatives and black economic power (Part 1)
Gig workers rising: Foodora couriers and Uber drivers organizing for justice
The climate movement needs more creative tactics
Why climate action needs to target the border industrial complex
Eco-fascists and the ugly fight for ‘our way of life’ as the environment disintegrates
Accelerationism: the idea inspiring white supremacist killers around the world
The Red Deal is an Indigenous climate plan that builds on the Green New Deal
All organizing is magic: Reflections on Caliban and the Witch
Food politics
For a sustainable future, we need to reconnect with what we’re eating – and each other
Meet the activists bringing urban farms to one of America’s most deprived cities
Cities and radical municipalism
What if… cities became car-free?
Are community land trusts a way out of the system?
Against We. What the We Company offers is commune as commodity.
Berlin renters organize to expropriate the mega-landlords
How green gentrification is compromising Seattle’s last affordable neighborhood
Who is the “public” in public transportation?
Endgame Marxism (and urbanism)
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez unveil $172 billion ‘Green New Deal for public housing’
Under the paving stones, a vegetable garden. Joëlle Zask explores how greening citizenship – through cultivation practices – offers an opportunity for self-government which may just restore this relationship to one of perpetual regeneration rather than mutually destructive exploitation.
If progressives don’t try to win over rural areas, guess who will
Degrowth!
Defending limits is not Malthusian
The myth of green growth. “Economic growth, democracy and CO2 have always been intertwined.”
Unraveling the claims for (and against) green growth
Heaven hath limits: a review of Limits by Giorgos Kallis
10 ideas for degrowth architecture from the Oslo Architecture Triennale
Reflections on Seattle, 1999
Remembering for the future: Learning from the 1999 Seattle shutdown
Seattle 1999 and its “This Changes Everything” energy
Remembering the battle for Seattle: Organizers launch project to reflect on 20 years of lessons
Sci-fi and the near future
The real-world locations of 14 sci-fi dystopias
Cherie Dimaline and Rebecca Roanhorse are embodying Indigenous futurisms
Jeff Bezos’s vision of the future is basically Blade Runner
Space ageing: why sci-fi novels shun the badass older woman
Library Socialism: a utopian vision of a sustainable, luxuriant future of circulating abundance
Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On climate narratives that go beyond the Apocalypse
Highway to hell: the rise and fall of the car
Free BBC documentary: The worlds of Ursula K Le Guin
Nuclear energy will come back to haunt us
Climate change is breaking open America’s nuclear tomb
In Marshall Islands, radiation threatens tradition of handing down stories by song
Our children await a radioactive legacy
Resources
What is ‘ecological economics’ and why do we need to talk about it?
Mapping social movements and conflicts around the world
Mary Annaïse Heglar’s list of voices of color on the climate crisis
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