Your interview with Phil Thornhill (PN 2527) on “The capitalism question and climate change” shows a regrettable reluctance on his part to face the facts and a lack of joined up thinking.
Climate change is caused by capitalism. Organisations such as the World Development Movement, which is linked to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, have made this clear in their publications: eg The UK’s role in forced migration of climate refugees (2008) and The International Politics of Climate…
Over the past couple of months THWAC (The Happendon Wood Action Camp) has been a hive of activity, with direct action and community resistance taking place all over the Douglas Valley in South Lanarkshire and beyond.
In November the camp hosted its second gathering and on Monday 8 November, 11 activists entered Mainshill Opencast Coal Site, stopping work on site for an hour by jumping on dumper trucks and blocking the haulage road.
Two days later, an early morning…
Two separate trials of 26 activists arrested for trying to shut down Ratcliffe on Sour, one of Britain’s most polluting power stations for a week have energised the climate justice movement. The activists were among 114 people arrested in a dawn raid on Easter Monday 2009 in a widely-criticised policing operation that saw officers smashing their way into a school in Nottingham.
In the first trial, at Nottingham Crown Court in late November, 20 people were tried for conspiracy to…
Speaking at a public meeting in May 2008, Green Party leader and MP to be, Caroline Lucas noted that the language of fear and disaster surrounding climate change is both “deeply scary and deeply unhelpful.” According to Lucas “trying to terrify people into action” simply doesn’t work.
Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at the Australian National University, doesn’t seem to have got the memo because Requiem for a Species is a deeply terrifying read.
According to…
As PN goes to press, 20 climate activists are beginning the most significant trial for climate activism in the UK since the acquittal of the Kingsnorth Six in 2008. Their crime? Planning to shut down the UK’s third-largest source of emissions – E.ON’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired station near Nottingham.
They were among 114 activists arrested in a night-time police raid on the eve of the action in April last year. (Another six, who hadn’t decided to participate at the time of arrest,…
The Scottish Resources Group (SRG), an umbrella company that includes Scottish Coal, has submitted an application for a “mixed use development” across a 230 hectare area which would include leisure and industrial expansion. The aim is to achieve “planning in principle” to make the land a more attractive investment to developers. The Happenden Wood Action Camp (THWAC) thinks the application helps to support opencast, for example the Coal Authority has stated that if the industrial development…
Fifteen members of the Welsh Youth Forum on Sustainable Development (WYFSD), Gwerin y Coed (the Woodcraft Folk in Wales) and representatives of other youth organisations spent five days in the saddle, cycling from Machynlleth to Cardiff Bay to hand deliver a petition to Jane Davidson, Minister for the Environment, Sustainability and Housing. Delivered at the Welsh Assembly Government building on Wednesday 22 September, the petition called for better cycling provision in Wales.
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“This is not a rally, a demo or a march,” read the flier. “This is mass direct action that aims to disrupt the flow of oil into London. Welcome to the Crude Awakening.” Crikey.
Following a prompt early-morning rendezvous at Euston (the website had warned that we would be leaving immediately), half-an-hour of standing around waiting (which my affinity group utilized to staple-on our home-made polar bear masks), and some fun-and-games on the tube (“Like the badger mask mate!”),…
20 climate change activists are facing trial on 22 November, after being arrested in a night-time police raid in on the eve of their attempt to shut down E.ON’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power station on 13 April. The activists, who are pleading not guilty on a necessity defence, face up to three months in prison for aggravated trespass.
114 campaigners were arrested in the pre-emptive April raid. In January another six of the 114 go on trial for the same “offence”; they are pleading not…
With industrial civilisation destroying the planet, How Shall I Live my Life? is “the only question worth asking” according to the radical thinker Derrick Jensen. Thus the ten wide-ranging interviews with largely American activists, philosophers and writers conducted by Jensen centre on each person’s holistic methods of resistance to the environmental degradation caused by the dominant culture.
Reconnecting to the natural world, looking to indigenous cultures and increasing democracy…
Climate scientists have reached an international consensus that devastating runaway climate change is inevitable unless significant changes are made. How radical do these changes have to be? Is it possible to make these changes within the current framework of industrial capitalism? Below are edited highlights of responses from a variety of activists from radical movements – the full text of the interviews are available on the Peace News blog.
PN: In your view, can we halt runaway…
PN: In your view, can we halt runaway climate change without overthrowing capitalism as well?
PT: I think you’d have to take the first question, which is a quite valid one, which is: ‘can we halt runaway climate change.’ There are serious reasons to think that we won’t be able to and that we’re too late already…. It could be a more complex question in that, if we ever get into a situation in which something that dire is happening, we’ll be doing all sorts of things like geo-…
PN: Can we halt runaway climate change without overthrowing capitalism?
EJ: It’s interesting that you talk about overthrowing capitalism because I think there’s a commonly used expression—overthrowing or dismantling or smashing—and I think that can sometimes be a little bit inaccurate about the nature of capitalism, which is a social relationship, an economic relationship that we are all participating in and reproducing on a daily basis. So I liked John Holloway’s description of how…
PN: In your view, can we halt runaway climate change without overthrowing capitalism? If not, why not? Or, if we can, why do you think that is possible?
MA: In theory, yes – capitalism has a built in drive to accumulate – and a structural incapacity to count effects on the environment into market valuations. So left to its own, with regulation, etc., it is not just incredibly harmful and destructive of human potentials, productive of poverty, and so on – but it also so violates the…
PN: In your view, can we halt runaway climate change without overthrowing capitalism?
GC: I hope so – because if we can’t then it looks like we’re well and truly stuffed.
PN: Why?
GC: I think the burden of proof is on those who say that we can’t – not least because if they’re right then this severely limits the range of strategies that it’s sensible to pursue.
Some activists simply assert that it’s impossible, as if it’s a self-evident truth.
Too often the…
