Exclusive environmental investigations and films on key political and economic issues, including no-growth and steady-state economics, green business, local democracy and green politics
As the world’s poorest countries sink further and further into debt, Western corporations grow fat from government-backed projects that fuel conflicts, harm the environment and have built-in kickbacks.
Within two years, Britain could be facing a series of blackouts and the ignomony of importing the resource it once considered so plentiful from a host of politically unstable countries.
For 40 years Percy Schmeiser grew oilseed rape on his farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Usually, he would sow each year’s crop with seeds saved from the previous harvest. In 1998 Monsanto took Schmeiser to court.
Haiti is a failed state: one of those places that just can’t seem to get its act together, despite the best efforts of benevolent Western powers. Or so the mainstream media would have you believe. Yet history tells us a more complicated story.
I’m sitting opposite the large Coca-Cola bottling plant next to the village of Plachimada in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Plachimada is a farming village of about 800 families, many of them tribal. The ugly factory looks rather out of place in such a beautiful setting, the Western Ghats mountains clearly visible in the distance.
During the past decade or so, international trade agreements have been dramatically expanded to encompass affairs that had always previously been strictly matters of domestic concern.
Janine Roberts describes how De Beers cons the world into paying so much for its cheap, plentiful diamonds and turns a blind eye to the eradication of the oldest culture on the planet.
If you are one of the many millions of people who rely on vitamins and supplements to maintain their health and conquer illness, it’s time for you to get active. The Ecologist explains why
School dinners by McDonald’s. Corporations taking countries to court because their environmental regulations are ‘too tough’. The BBC sold to Rupert Murdoch. Paul Kingsnorth explains why we should be very worried by what is about to go on behind the closed doors of Cancun.
In September the World Trade Organisation will be holding its fifth ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico. Simon Retallack explains what is at stake.
Free trade. So benign sounding a phrase. A concept whose principles no reasonable person would challenge. Trouble is, free trade as we know it – free trade as it is pushed by those who will mass at Cancun, Mexico, in September – is far from free. Think about it. If it truly was free, would they put sanctions on those who don’t want to participate and use police to violently put down protests by those who oppose it? Free trade is really just a euphemism, like ‘peacekeeping’ or ‘forest management’, that hides a far uglier, more brutal reality. Free trade is a brand – Free Trade™, which sells a repackaged product no one in their right minds would buy if they knew what it really was.
The economic troubles in Argentina have been widely reported around the world. The impoverishment of the middle classes and the Argentines’ growing cynicism about their politicians have been extensively written up. Less well covered in the news has been the effects of the crisis on Argentina’s very poorest – people who live far from the eye of city-based reporters, the country’s original inhabitants, a people despised and vilified as ‘savages’ by the settler population.
When the Argentinian economy collapsed the country’s fat cats and bankrupt politicians melted into the woodwork, leaving the workers of Argentina to sort out the mess. Ben Backwell reports from Buenos Aires on their astonishing rise from the economic rubble.
For all its obsession with international terrorism, Washington fails to see how the phenomenon is driven by its own model of globalisation – a model that is itself uniquely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Fritjof Capra on security and sustainability
Measure for measure, GDP is the world’s hidden accounting scandal, the one that neither governments nor media will touch. Jonathan Rowe asks why we worship such a false idol
You can ‘structurally adjust’ an economy in a matter of years, but it takes longer to destroy a culture. Heiner Thiessen reports from Senegal on the impact of imposing a Western cash economy on a traditional African barter society
‘Immortal’ and created solely to amass ever larger amounts of wealth, limited-liability corporations institutionalise dissatisfaction. They are, Derrick Jensen writes, the economic manifestation of the Buddhist notion of ‘hungry ghosts’ – spirits that roam the earth, always eating, never sated.
