This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 1-7

By LIERRE KEITH “Once our authoritarian technics consolidates its powers, with the aid of its new forms of mass control, its panoply of tranquilizers and sedatives and aphrodisiacs, could democracy in any form survive? That question is absurd: Life itself will not survive, except what is funneled through the mechanical collective.” 1 LEWIS MUMFORD

There is so little time and even less hope here, in the midst of ruin, at the end of the world. Every biome is in shreds. The green flesh of forests has been stripped to grim sand. The word water has been drained of meaning; the Athabascan River is essentially a planned toxic spill now, oozing from the open wound of the Alberta tar sands. When birds fly over it, they drop dead from the poison. No one believes us when we say that, but it’s true. The Appalachian Mountains are being blown to bits, their dense life of deciduous forests, including their human communities, reduced to a disposal problem called “overburden,” a word that should be considered hate speech: Living creatures—mountain laurels, wood thrush fledglings, somebody’s grandchildren—are not objects to be tossed into gullies. If there is no poetry after Auschwitz, there is no grammar after mountaintop removal. As above, so below. Coral reefs are crumbling under the acid assault of carbon. And the world’s grasslands have been sliced to ribbons, literally, with steel blades fed by fossil fuel. The hunger of those blades would be endless but for the fact that the planet is a bounded sphere: There are no continents left to eat. Every year the average American farm uses the energy equivalent of three to four tons of TNT per acre. And oil burns so easily, once every possibility for self-sustaining cultures has been destroyed. Even the memory of nature is gone, metaphrastic now, something between prehistory and a fairy tale. All that’s left is carbon, accruing into a nightmare from which dawn will not save us. Climate change slipped into climate chaos, which has become a whispered climate holocaust. At least the humans whisper. And the animals? During the 2011 Texas drought, deer abandoned their fawns for lack of milk. That is not a grief that whispers. For living beings like Labrador ducks, Javan rhinos, and Xerces blue butterflies, there is the long silence of extinction.

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

The decline is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health, and advanced knowledge into our lives.

By JOHN BUELL Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – While mainstream media celebrate the remarkable development in record time of vaccines spectacularly effective against the Covid virus, knowledge that might contribute to other medical breakthroughs is being steadily undermined. This decline is not the result of some dramatic lawsuit or corporate takeover. It is one of the effects of the industrial modernization that is supposed to have brought increasing comfort, health and advanced knowledge into our lives. Economic growth has produced not only a climate emergency but a less publicized decline in the many efficacious forms of traditional knowledge and the biodiversity they sustain and are sustained by. In an email exchange I had with ethnobotanist Kirsten Tripplett, Ph.D., she pointed out:

This piece was first published at Democracy Now!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3O0VBeWkIc&feature=emb_imp_woyt[/embed]

By AMY GOODMAN

In response to the completion of the contested Line 3 pipeline, which is now reportedly operational, thousands of Indigenous leaders and climate justice advocates are kicking off the “People vs. Fossil Fuels’’ mobilization, an Indigenous-led five-day action of civil disobedience at the White House to demand President Biden declare a climate emergency, divest from fossil fuels and launch a “just renewable energy revolution.” “This pipeline doesn’t respect treaty rights,” says Winona LaDuke, longtime Indigenous activist and founder of Honor the Earth, a platform to raise awareness of and money for Indigenous struggles for environmental justice. “They’re just trying to continue their egregious behavior. It’s so tragic that, on the one hand, the Biden administration is like, ’We’re going to have Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but we’re still going to smash you in northern Minnesota and smash the rest of the country.’” LaDuke faces criminal charges linked to her protest of pipelines in three different counties.

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.

By JULIA CONLEY

“Not a single drop of oil is going to come out of the Amazon until the government takes care of us,” said campaigners.

Demanding stronger social and environmental support in northern Peru’s Loreto region, about 200 Indigenous protesters on Wednesday announced a strike two days after they began occupying a station of the North Peruvian Oil Pipeline controlled by state-owned oil company Petroperu.

This article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

BY ALEC CONNON & ERIKA LUNDAHL

Shanai Matteson, a 39-year-old White settler, sat in the stuffy overflow room watching the packed Public Utility Commission meeting, along with more than a hundred others, in St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 2018. Over several hours, she listened as dozens of people—Native elders, local landowners, and young people concerned about their futures—testified against the Line 3 tar sands pipeline, urging the commission to deny the project a key permit. She listened, too, as Enbridge workers, bused in by the company, voiced their support for the pipeline.

This article originally appeared in Mongabay.

Editor’s note: We know less about the bottom of the sea than we know about outer space. We really require no scientific evidence to know that mining is bad for the environment wherever it occures. It should not be done on land, under the sea or on other planets. The ISA needs to reject the deep sea mining industry’s claims that mining for metals on the ocean floor is a partial solution to the climate crisis. As Upton Sinclair said, “it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” We can see this with the archeologist working for Lithium America in Thacker Pass. An interesting film to watch on the twisted relationship between science and industry is The Last Winter .

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

This post looks at what is social change, causes of social change, what is historical change, and theories of social and historical change. This final section of the post includes something on Marxist theories of history.

I looked at theories of change at the social movement and institutional level in previous posts: part 1, part 2, part 3.

What is social change?

Social change is the changes to the social structure and social relationships of society. There is also cultural change. Social changes include changes in age distribution, birth rates, changes in the relationship between workers and employers when there is more union activity. Cultural changes include the invention and popularisation of new technology, new words added to a language, changing concepts of morality, new forms of music and art. They overlap and all important changes include both social and cultural changes. In sociology, ‘sociocultural change’ is used to describe changes of both forms. [1] The main characteristics of social change include:

This article originally appeared in Common Dreams Editor’s note: Althought this is mostly symbolic, it is a good symbol to use. Much like Free, Prior and Informed Constent is for Indigenious People. “Today’s historic decision is the culmination of over 40 years of efforts to recognize the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment,” said Sébastien Duyck, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law.

“A victory for every person across the world over profiteering polluters.”

This article originally appeared in Survival International.

Featured image: The Ayoreo have previously blocked the trans-Chaco Highway to draw attention to government inaction over the destruction of their forest. © GAT/ Survival

The survival of the last uncontacted tribe in South America outside the Amazon is at stake.

Indigenous people living in a South American forest with one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation have appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to save it from total destruction. Their uncontacted relatives are fleeing from one corner of the remaining forest to another, seeking refuge from ever-present bulldozers.

Original Press Release

Cas Yikh of the Gidimt’en Clan are counting on supporters to go ALL OUT in a mobilization for the biggest battle yet to protect our sacred headwaters, Wedzin Kwa. We have remained steadfast in our fight for self-determination, and we are still unceded, undefeated, sovereign and victorious.

In January 2019, when Gidimt’en Checkpoint was raided by the RCMP, enforcing an injunction for Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline, your communities rose up in solidarity!