February readings

Left to right: Dinï ze’ Knedebeas, Warner William, Dinï ze’ Hagwilnegh, Ron Mitchell, Dinï ze’ Woos, Frank Alec, Dinï ze’ Madeek, Jeff Brown, Dinï ze’ Gisday’wa, Fred Tom. In back is Dinï ze’ Ste ohn tsiy, Rob Alfred. Wet’suwet’en territory near Houston, B.C. on Saturday, January 4, 2020. Amber Bracken (Source: macleans.ca)


Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.

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.

This February, we’ve collected–once again–articles that go beyond the front-page analysis of Covid-19, otherwise known as the ‘coronavirus’. Some excellent and useful pieces in there, including an intervention by Chuang, a radical Chinese journal. You might have also seen that Indigenous warriors in Wet’suwet’en were being forcibly removed from their land by Canadian armed forces–leading to blockades of key infrastructure by other Indigenous nations in solidarity with them. We’ve collected all kinds of pieces on the issue, including basic explainers, maps, background about Indigenous struggles in Canada, and deeper dives. We’re also featuring pieces on transportation and mobility, underlined by the growing call for free public transit around the world. Finally, this month, we’re highlighting rural struggles and politics



Uneven Earth updates

Remembering | Link | “I remember rent being low. But water was expensive. A lot of electricity went into the desalination plants.” 

A post-growth Green New Deal | Link | To decarbonize we must degrow, decommodify, and democratize the economy

A Wood Wide Web Story: an Apple Tree in Daegu | Link | “The surrogate mothers could only be married to the earth.” 

Who owns the Green New Deal? | Link | Making sense of remote ownership problems and place-based governance 



Top 5 articles to read

Centuries of fire: Rebel memory and Andean utopias in Bolivia

Staring at hell: The aesthetics of architecture in a ruined world

Water is life: Nick Estes on Indigenous technologies

Mapping the end of the world

Breaking development. Our concept of “development” is destructive and irrational.



News you might’ve missed

Planned fossil fuel production rise locks in dangerous levels of warming

‘History disappears’ as dam waters flood ancient Turkish town

Heathrow third runway ruled illegal over climate change

Renewable energy could power the world by 2050

Sweden’s indigenous groups report death threats after landmark court win and Reindeer tortured after threats towards Sámi community in northern Sweden (see this on the court case about land rights)

How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

A cobalt crisis could put the brakes on electric car sales

Fates of humans and insects intertwined, warn scientists

Is this the end of Rojava? Also: Rojava after Rojava

Agribusiness company with financial support from UK, US and Netherlands is dispossessing thousands

The quiet start of Brazil’s war on the Amazon

Europeans now have the right to repair – and that means the rest of us probably will too

Armed ecoguards funded by WWF ‘beat up Congo tribespeople’

Speeding sea level rise threatens nuclear plants



Everything you need to know about Wet’suwet’en actions

Explainers

Map of Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions

Country erupts into Wet’suwet’en solidarity demonstrations: A week in pictures

The Wet’suwet’en protest and the coastal GasLink pipeline

‘What cost are human rights worth?’ UN calls for immediate RCMP withdrawal in Wet’suwet’en standoff

In Kanesatake, women are the face of Mohawk resistance

Indigenous resistance shakes the Canadian state

Rail blockades are proving to be an effective non-violent response to state violence

GasLink, the Wet’suwet’en people and Canada’s ongoing colonialism

Background

Wet’suwet’en protests a revolutionary moment in Canada: Mohawk scholar Gerald Taiaiake Alfred

Beyond bloodlines: How the Wet’suwet’en hereditary system at the heart of the Coastal GasLink conflict works

Indigenous-led CN rail blockades could cost ‘billions’ and that’s the point: Pro-Wet’suwet’en organizers

The Wet’suwet’en are more united than pipeline backers want you to think

What does “land back” mean? A thread from âpihtawikosisân on Twitter.

Dive deeper

Being with the land, protects the land

Canada’s battle against First Nations shows slide toward authoritarianism

Here’s some resources on Indigenous rights in the context of Wet’suwet’en solidarity

‘Reconciliation is dead and it was never really alive’

Yellowhead Institute’s Land Back report delivers devastating critique of land dispossession in Canada

Wet’suwet’en: Why are Indigenous rights being defined by an energy corporation?

A short introduction to the Two Row Wampu

The ideology of reconciliation



Coronavirus

Preparing for coronavirus to strike the U.S.

Coronavirus + capitalism = sad face. Why the American capitalist system will make the coming coronavirus pandemic worse.

Social contagion: The production of plagues

Race, epidemics, and the viral economy of health expertise

Coronavirus: product of a sick system

The coronavirus’s lesson for climate change

The state of exception provoked by an unmotivated emergency

Coronavirus: China’s air pollution levels, smog show hit to the economy

Covid-19 will mark the end of affluence politics



Just think about it…

William Gibson — the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse

The U.S. military is not sustainable

The Trump era is a golden age of conspiracy theories – on the right and left

Tech startups are flooding Kenya with apps offering high-interest loans

Biodiversity highest on Indigenous-managed lands

The war on food waste is a waste of time

A spider’s web is part of its mind, new research suggests

Crimea, Kashmir, Korea — Google redraws disputed borders, depending on who’s looking

We are drowning in a devolved world: An open letter from Devo

The volatile economics of natural vanilla in Madagascar

The climate crisis is like a world war. So let’s talk about rationing

The word ‘Anthropocene’ is failing us



Where we’re at: analysis

The illusion of centrist ecology

The EU’s green deal is a colossal exercise in greenwashing

Colonialism, the hidden cause of our environmental crisis

New Deal for Nature: Paying the emperor to fence the wind

White supremacy goes green

The fate of the planet rests on dethroning the IMF and World Bank

Feeding China is wrecking the Amazon

The struggle for democracy and socialism in Latin America



New politics

The growing global movement to end outdoor advertising

Puerto Rico’s energy insurrection

Planetary health and regeneration

Modern monetary theory in the periphery

Across the North, Indigenous communities are redefining conservation



Rural politics

An enormous land transition is underway. Here’s how to make it just.

What if we’re thinking about agriculture all wrong?

The youth are fleeing the farms: Aspiration and conflict in Kurram, Pakistan

How capitalism underdeveloped rural America

An Interview with Max Ajl on agrarian change in Tunisia

What if we only ate food from local farms?



Cities and radical municipalism

Cities fighting climate woes hasten ‘green gentrification’

Urbanist lessons from the densest neighborhoods across Europe

The case for truly taking back control – by reversing the privatisation of our cities

As sea level rises, Miami neighborhoods feel rising tide of gentrification

The ‘street food’ swindle: fake diversity, privatised space – and such small portions!

Housing discrimination made summers even hotter

Ancient ‘megasites’ may reshape the history of the first cities



Transportation

Luxembourg makes history as first country with free public transport 

In defence of fare evasion

The ride-hail utopia that got stuck in traffic

Cities turn to freewheeling public transport

Paris mayor pledges a greener ’15-minute city’



Degrowth!

Degrowth toward a steady state economy: Unifying non-growth movements for political impact

Why “de-growth” shouldn’t scare businesses

Beyond redistribution—confronting inequality in an era of low growth

India should stop obsessing about GDP, and start focusing on what matters



Resources

Extraction syllabus

Gender in academia resources

Documentary on the solidarity economy in Barcelona



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