This article originally appeared in The Conversation. Featured image: Tropical rainforest.

By Bonnie Waring, Imperial College London

One morning in 2009, I sat on a creaky bus winding its way up a mountainside in central Costa Rica, light-headed from diesel fumes as I clutched my many suitcases. They contained thousands of test tubes and sample vials, a toothbrush, a waterproof notebook and two changes of clothes.

I was on my way to La Selva Biological Station, where I was to spend several months studying the wet, lowland rainforest’s response to increasingly common droughts. On either side of the narrow highway, trees bled into the mist like watercolours into paper, giving the impression of an infinite primeval forest bathed in cloud.

Editor’s note: Of course this proposal has to be framed with the usual politicians blabla and pledges about “prosperous agriculture”, “affordable, reliable clean energy” and “revitalizing the economy”, which are all bright green lies. Apart from that, any dam that will really physically be removed is a step into the right direction and an absolutely necessary measure to save the last remaining wild salmon. This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute Featured image: chinook and orca - NOAA Fisheries

This article originally appeared in The Conversation. Featured image: Sea turtle

Editor’s note: The statement in the article’s headline –that the temptation of allowing deep sea mining(DSM) “could be a problem”– seems ironic. There is no doubt that deep sea mining is extremely dangerous and destructive to oceanic ecosystems which are already serverly stressed  by overfishing and global warming. Apart from that, we all know that most of the profit will go to multinational cooperations, not to the island’s inhabitants.

This article originally appeared in Counterpunch.

By Joshua Frank

“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.” – Mark Twain

It doesn’t take too long once you’ve left the greater Los Angeles area, away from all the lush lawns, water features, green parkways, and manicured foliage to see that California is in the midsts of a very real, potentially deadly water crisis. Acres and acres of abandoned farms, dry lake beds, empty reservoirs—the water is simply no longer there and likely won’t ever be back.

This article is from the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.

This post will describe the differences between mobilising and organising following on from a previous post that describes Jane McAlevey’s three options for change: advocacy, mobilising and organising. McAlevey describes pure forms of these options for change, which is useful for understanding and analysis but clearly on the ground nothing will be this clear cut.

Jane McAlevey is a community and union organiser in the US. She has had a huge amount of success in using deep organising in hostile workplaces to build militant unions and repeatedly win. She describes this in her book Raising Expectations and Raising Hell: My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. This article describes McAlevey’s six-step structured organizing conversation.

This article originally appeared on the Protect Thacker Pass Blog. Featured image: Photo of Damon Clarke, chairman of the Hualapai Tribe by Josh Kelety

Thacker Pass gets a mention in this article in the Phoenix New Times about another proposed lithium mine in Arizona, one that would use the same sulfuric acid leaching process that the Thacker Pass lithium mine would use. It’s also yet another mine threatening the water and land of indigenous people.

Editor’s note: Of course this doesn’t come as a surprise. Scientists have been putting out warnings for at least 50 years now. The solution would be actually simple: What we need to do to survive is immediately stop burning any fossil fuels, return to a low energy livestyle and seriously start large scale ecological restoration projects globally to restore all the carbon we released. This could be done if modern societies only had the political will. Unfortunately, as we all know, this culture is insane and will continue its suicidal mission. This article originally appeared in Climate&Capitalism.

• Vale, the Brazilian mining company responsible for two deadly dam collapses since 2015, has another dam that’s at “imminent risk of rupture,” a government audit warns.
• The Xingu dam at Vale’s Alegria mine in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais state, has been retired since 1998, but excess water in the mining waste that it’s holding back threatens to liquefy the embankment and spark a potentially disastrous collapse.
• Liquefaction also caused the collapse of a Vale tailings dam in 2019 in Brumadinho municipality, also in Minas Gerais, that killed nearly 300 people; the 2015 collapse of another Vale dam, in Mariana in 2015, caused extensive pollution and is considered Brazil’s worst environmental disaster to date.
• Vale has denied the risk of a collapse at the Xingu dam and says it continues to monitor the structure ahead of its decommissioning; regulators, however, say the company still hasn’t carried out requested measures to improve the structure’s safety, and have ordered an evacuation of the immediate vicinity.

This article originally appeared in Mongabay. Featured image: Vale’s Xingu mining complex in Mariana. Image by Google.

Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens has been fighting for decades against the privatization of water and for popular control over natural resources. This article originally appeared in Roarmag. Featured image: Vale open pit iron ore mine, Carajas, Para, 2009

By Caitlin Schroering

Todos somos atingidos (“We are all affected”)

— Common MAB saying

A person can go a few weeks without food, years without proper shelter, but only a few days without water. Water is fundamental, yet we often forget how much we rely on it. Only 37 percent of the world’s rivers remain free-flowing and numerous hydro dams have destroyed freshwater systems on every continent, threatening food security for millions of people and contributing to the decimation of freshwater non-human life.

This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies.

DEEP GREENS

The living planet and nonhumans both have the right to exist. Human flourishing depends on healthy ecology. To save the planet, humans must live within the limits of the natural world; therefore, drastic lifestyle transformations need to occur at social, cultural, economic, political, and personal levels.

LIFESTYLISTS

Humans depend on nature, and technology probably won’t solve environmental issues, but political engagement is either impossible or unnecessary. The best we can do is practice self-reliance, small-scale living, and other personal solutions. Withdrawal will change the world.