January readings

Photo: Jesse Pratt López via Vice

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.

Belated new year’s greetings and welcome to our first newsletter of 2023! This time, you’ll be able to read up on biodiversity and colonialist conservation; the battle to save Germany’s Lützerath from being swallowed by a coal mine; the ‘Cop City’ protests in Atlanta, Georgia to save the South River Forest; nuclear fusion; why fake meat is just another food fad; psychedelics and climate activism; international struggles for justice; and so many other important topics.

If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!

A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!



Top 5 articles to read

Beyond Meat (BYND), Impossible Foods burgers are just another food fad

‘We’ll fight until the end’: a journey through the centre of Peru’s uprising

Another uprising is in the making in Tunisia

Canada birthed a mining industry in Chinese-occupied Tibet

We are ‘greening’ ourselves to extinction



News you might’ve missed

How Ghana, Africa’s rising star, ended up in economic turmoil

OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic

Death in the marshes: environmental calamity hits Iraq’s unique wetlands

Sweden’s shameless pursuit of ”green minerals” generate a conflict with the Sami people



Where we’re at: analysis

Contesting cannibal capitalism. Nancy Fraser on the destructive nature of our system.

Paying for an overheating Earth. The euphoria over the creation of a loss-and-damage fund was well justified, but the struggle is far from over.

The labor of land. In order to better resist contemporary, neocolonial accumulation, we need to historicize land grabs in Africa.

Ecomodernism on its own terms



Biodiversity and colonialist conservation

The world is losing its biological complexity

The collapse of insects

‘We used to have everything’: Western conservation models threaten Indigenous rights, says new report

Why 30×30 would be the worst possible outcome of COP15

Harriet Friedmann reviews George Monbiot’s Regenesis

Decolonizing nature: How “wilderness” dispossesses Indigenous People



Global struggles

Fighting Amazon’s neo-colonialism in Cape Town

An unsolved murder amid Costa Rica’s Indigenous land disputes

Inside the battle to save the sacred peyote ceremony: ‘We’re in dire straits’

What we are saying is freedom, not the veil 

Turkey is starving the Rojava revolution

Mennonites deforest Peruvian Amazon, encroach on Indigenous lands

Land conflicts targeting Indigenous communities intensify in Northern Guatemala

‘How are we going to live?’ Families dispossessed of their land to make way for Total’s Congo offsetting project



Lützerath, Germany

HSBC’s secretive loan to a coal company bulldozing a village 

Beating, kicking, tearing down houses – how police, RWE, and the German state are causing climate catastrophe in the German Rhineland



Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia

Activists occupying the woods to block ‘Cop City’ face terrorism charges

Documents show how 19 ‘Cop City’ activists got charged with terrorism

‘Assassinated in cold blood’: activist killed protesting Georgia’s ‘Cop City’

Stop Cop City! Revisiting degrowth & permanent ecological conflict



Cities and radical municipalism

Luisa Cáceres: Commune-building in urban Venezuela

Why knowing your neighbors could save you in the next climate disaster

Tiny Free Stores & Libraries of Everything: Steps towards a post-capitalist future

‘You’re not welcome’: Mexico City residents decry Airbnb

Greener cities promote social and climate inequalities: 28-city study

Zimbabwe plans a new city for the rich as Harare decays

Barcelona offers free transit to residents who ditch their cars 



Fusion

Fusion net gain is manufactured ignorance

Nuclear fusion: Don’t believe the hype!

Clean energy or weapons? What the ‘breakthrough’ in nuclear fusion really means

Fusion power may run out of fuel before it even gets started



Just think about it…

The 1 percent are many times worse than the rainforest wreckers

How much should inequality be reduced?

Reliance on hi-tech solutions to climate crisis perpetuates racism, says UN official

On nuclear energy

The hidden underwater forests that could help tackle the climate crisis

BlackRock says we’re all doomed. It’s being optimistic

Casteism and climate change: a deadly combination in South Asia

Tripping for the planet: Psychedelics and climate activism



Degrowth

All we are saying is give degrowth a chance. A decade ago, a container shipping worker had an epiphany, and it caused him to question the very basis of his business.

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Degrowth will be fun!



Sci-fi, art and storytelling

The definitive climate fiction reading list – 20 books to explore cli-fi



Resources

Comic: The corporate capture of food systems 



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August readings

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.

A little late this month, but we’re back with our August readings! We hope you enjoy what we put together. On top of the usual themes like degrowth, global environmental justice struggles, cities, and food politics, this list features a section on the (un)sustainability of fashion, an awesome piece on Marxism by Stuart Hall, and a free Leftist film archive.

If you find these lists useful, you can support us by sharing them on social media and with your friends and family!

A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!



Uneven Earth updates

Class struggle or degrowth? | Without class struggle the emancipatory potential of degrowth will fail to be realized. A revolutionary pedagogy can help to unify them



News you might’ve missed

The world’s top coal trader is cashing in on the Ukraine war

Climate change is making over 200 diseases worse and our immune systems weaker, study finds

Wildfires destroy almost all forest carbon offsets in 100-year reserve, study says

‘The new normal’: how Europe is being hit by a climate-driven drought crisis

France drought: Parched towns left short of drinking water

‘We borrow our lands from our children’: Sami say they are paying for Sweden going green

A new energy crisis brews in the Caribbean: The U.S. Virgin Islands

Aotearoa or New Zealand: has the moment come to change the country’s name?



Food politics

Nature-friendly farming does not reduce productivity, study finds

Agroecology, from Palestine to the Diaspora

Land grabs and conservation propaganda

Renewing the land question: Against greengrabbing and green colonialism

Beyond rescue ecomodernism: the case for agrarian localism restated



Where we’re at: analysis

West Africa is drowning in plastic. Who is responsible?

The plastic crisis has deep corporate roots: to protect our planet, they need to be exposed

Congo’s oil auction: foiling climate colonialism or filling the coffers?

Sri Lanka collapsed first, but it won’t be the last. Western debt killed the country; others will fall too.

Inherit the dust. The Colorado River is running out of water. No place will be more affected than the arid metropolis of Phoenix.

The Greenland ice sheet’s terrifying future

Revealed: how climate breakdown is supercharging toll of extreme weather

Floods, storms and heatwaves are a direct product of the climate crisis – that’s a fact, so where is the action?



Global struggles

Africa revives push for colonial-era reparations

Kicking oil companies out of school

Native American tribe gets its land back after being displaced nearly 400 years ago

‘We look deeper’: the Native court settling cases outside the justice system

Nuclear waste ravaged their land. The Yakama Nation is on a quest to rescue it

A series on Indonesia’s women land defenders: The women of Kendeng set their feet in cement to stop a mine in their lands. This is their story, ‘Turning fear into strength’: One woman’s struggle for justice in Sulawesi, and The battle for the mountains of Mollo

Testing transnational labour solidarity in the laboratory of Bangladesh

From resistance to power: Building climate justice in Colombia

Trying to keep the roof on in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

The new fight over an old forest in Atlanta



The (un)sustainability of fashion

From attire to ashes: Clothing waste in the Atacama Desert

Mountains of clothes washed up on Ghana beach show cost of fast fashion

Fast fashion: why your online returns may end up in landfill – and what can be done about it

H&M is being sued for “misleading” sustainability marketing. What does this mean for the future of greenwashing?

Fashion and colonialism. From sourcing and manufacturing to exporting waste, this class with Céline Semaan explores current practices that reproduce colonialism and exploitation in fashion, and how we can avoid such practices.

Why can’t fashion brands just make less stuff?

Early Majority: Fashion’s first degrowth brand. Can its community-driven membership model make degrowth principles work in fashion?

Sara Arnold & Sandra Niessen on moving toward defashion and degrowth



Degrowth

Taming the greedocracy. American elites want magical technological fixes to climate change because they refuse to confront the truth that seriously addressing the problem would require limits to their own power and luxury.

Can the economy grow forever?

Climate change, scarcity chip away at degrowth taboo

‘A new way of life’: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan 

‘Creation care’ isn’t enough. We need degrowth. 

Degrowth gains ground

Higher ed’s cult of growth

What Paul Krugman says about green growth and degrowth is not only wrong – it is dangerous. Here is why.

Reversing the freight train: The case for degrowth

Fifty years after ‘The Limits to Growth’: Dennis Meadows interviewed by Juan Bordera

The ‘progress recession’ has been here for decades

Moving beyond GDP is key to tackling the economic crises we face



Cities and radical municipalism

The city that pioneered Europe’s car-free future

The case for making public transit free everywhere

The solution is the problem. A response to the UK Prime Minister’s plan to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.

Silicon Valley’s push into transportation has been a miserable failure

Spain bans setting the AC below 27 degrees Celsius

Near-term ideas and examples for incorporating green politics into cost-of-living campaigns. A Twitter thread.



Just think about it…

I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health. And a good companion piece on the politics of mental health from earlier this year: There is no moral imperative to be miserable

Climate denial’s racist roots

What is “ecofascism” — and what does it have to do with the Buffalo shooting?

Red flags for environmental movements. An Instagram thread.

‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violin

Wrong road. The phone is a car: a symbol of freedom and convenience that transforms into an inescapable burden.

Monsoon dread

Supply chains as a game-changer in the fight against climate change



Theory

For a Marxism without guarantees by Stuart Hall

Alyssa Battistoni on care work, organizing, and the “free gift of nature”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on abolition, the climate crisis and what must be done

“Neither liberal nor social democratic policies have a structured approach to understanding imperialism, including its ecological history”. An interview with Max Ajl.



Sci-fi, art and storytelling

Miyazaki’s Marxism – the politics of anime’s legendary director



Resources

Solidarity cinema. A free film archive of struggle and solidarity.



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