Editor’s note: This article, which originally appeared in The Ecologist, clearly shows the strong contradiction between the bright green hope of a transition to “green energy” and the material reality. The dirty secret of “Green energy” is that it requires a lot of rare resources which have to be extracted by heavy mining.

By Hannibal Rhoades

Communities, organisations and academics write to the EU to reject plans for a mining-heavy EU Green Deal.

This article was originally published on the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.org. Republished with permission.

Part one looked at Marxist and non-Marxist concepts of ideology, the challenges of defining ideology, ideology and the political spectrum, and the classical and new ideologies. Based on Political Ideologies: An Introduction by Andrew Heywood (4th edition from 2007) this post describes the classical ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, anarchism, fascism, plus the new ideology feminism.

Liberalism

Heywood describes the central theme of liberal ideology to be a commitment to the individual and the desire to build a society where people can satisfy their interests and achieve fulfilment. Human beings are seen as individuals, invested with reason. Therefore, each individual should enjoy the maximum possible freedom, ensuring a similar freedom for all. Individuals are given equal political and legal rights but they are only rewarded in line with their talents and willingness to work. Liberalism is based on a number of values and beliefs: the individual, freedom, reason, justice, toleration.

Fort McDermitt, Nevada – As soon as July 29, 2021, Lithium Nevada Corporation (LNC) plans to begin removing cultural sites, artifacts, and possibly human remains belonging to the ancestors of the Paiute and Western Shoshone peoples for the proposed Thacker Pass open pit lithium mine.

According to a motion for preliminary injunction filed by four environmental organizations in the case Western Watersheds Project v. United States Department of the Interior, LNC intends to begin “mechanical trenching” operations at seven undisclosed sites within the project area, each up to “40 meters” long and “a few meters deep.” The corporation also plans to dig up to 5 feet deep at 20 other undisclosed sites, all pursuant to a new historical and cultural resources plan that has never been subject to meaningful, government-to-government consultation with the affected Tribes or to National Environmental Policy Act analysis.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation.

By David Tindall, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia

The RCMP has recently been arresting protesters who had set up blockades to prevent the logging of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island. Environmentalists say the Fairy Creek watershed, near Port Renfrew, is the last old-growth area left on southern Vancouver Island, outside of protected areas.

The contested forested areas lie close to the internationally known West Coast Trail, and within the unceded traditional territory of several First Nations, including Pacheedaht and Ditidaht.

Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living beings. This article originally appeared in The Ecologist. Featured image: “Unless” by Nell Parker

By Neil Faulkner

We thought climate catastrophe the main danger. Now we know there is another. A double-whammy ecological crisis threatens collapse into dystopian chaos.

“Pathogens, a great and terrible global threat to human and many a non-human alike, [are] as much a Sword of Damocles hovering above civilisation as climate change.”

This article originally appeared on Counterpunch.

BY GEORGE WUERTHNER

In a recent May 29 Bend Bulletin article, Senator Merkley asserted he “wants to boost spending on forest management by $1 billion annually through work, such as thinning and prescribed burning, to reduce the prospects of catastrophic wildfires.”

An unexamined assumption is that thinning/logging work significantly reduces the pejoratively named “catastrophic” fires.

Despite assertions from the Forest Service and others who will gain financially from inflated budgets to log our forests, one needs to ask if “fuel reductions” work to halt wildfires when burning under extreme fire weather conditions. That qualifier is important. All large blazes, like those that charred the western Cascades last Labor Day, burn swiftly through logged sites and other “fuel reductions.”

by Austin Price, for Earth Island Journal

SIXTEEN MILLION YEARS AGO, a volcano erupted over the Yellowstone hotspot near the present-day border of Oregon and Nevada. The blast expelled 1,000 cubic kilometers of rhyolite lava as the land collapsed into a 30-mile-long, keyhole-shaped caldera. Magma, ash, and other sediments entered the keyhole, and for the next million years the clay-rich land rose and reformed like bread dough in a proofing drawer. Water mixed with the clay, bringing to Earth’s surface a swirl of chemical elements like uranium, mercury, and another metal that, when isolated and cut, shines silvery white — lithium.

• The Australian government has moved to create two new marine protected areas that cover an expanse of ocean twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
• The two parks will be established around Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean to the northwest of continental Australia.
• The new parks, which cover to 740,000 square kilometers (286,000 square miles) of ocean, raise the protected share of Australia’s oceans from 37% to 45%.
• The decision was immediately welcomed by conservation groups.

This article originally appeared on Mongabay. Featured image: Whale shark feeding the ocean surface. Image by Rhett A. Butler for Mongabay.

Biodiversity is plummeting, but restoring rivers could quickly reverse this disastrous trend. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

By Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Darryl Knudsen and Irikefe V. Dafe

In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global biodiversity framework to reverse biodiversity loss and its impacts on ecosystems, species and people. The conference is being held during a moment of great urgency: According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have less than 10 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to stave off catastrophic climate change. At the same time, climate change is exacerbating the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Half of the planet’s species may face extinction by the end of this century.

This article was originally published on the blog buildingarevolutionarymovement.org. Republished with permission.

Understanding political ideology is essential to then start thinking about theories of change, theories of power, revolutionary strategy and vision. We all have a political ideology, whether we realise it or not. Radicals refer to ideologies all the time but I think they are used vaguely without a clear frame of reference. I think it is important to have a shared understanding of concepts and words to avoid misunderstandings. I am the process of added a glossary page to the blog to help with this.