Death is rarely something to be celebrated, but I can’t say I shed a tear last week when I heard that Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberal economics, had gone to the great free market in the sky.
Having enjoyed brief media coverage, world attention towards climate change during the last few weeks did not end with a bang. Instead, it fizzled out, bogged down in international policy and technicalities at the UN Climate Change Conference in Nairobi last week. Why?
‘Religion is the opium of the people’ is one of Marx’s best-known aphorisms. It is memorable because it tells us so much about the manipulation of faith in the industrial era
Our lives are now so dependent on oil that it is impossible to conceive of a world without it. Before long, however, we will have no choice. The sooner we start planning for that reality, and changing the way we live, the better our chance of survival.
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.
Since colonising Tibet in 1959, China has ripped out virgin forests, dug up minerals and metals, and dumped nuclear waste with little regard for the fragile ecology of the Tibetan plateau.
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.
Some 245 Indian villages are in the middle of being destroyed by a $7 billion dam project that will consume more energy than it provides and has even been condemned by its World Bank sponsors.
Barbara Streisand prides herself on being a movie star with an environmental conscience. So why did she take one man to court over his efforts to protect the California coastline?
Ladakh is framed by the Karakoram mountains to the north and the Himalayas to the south. Yet even in this remote environment the forces of global consumerism are intruding. Nicola Graydon reports on the locals' inspiring defence of their culture
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.
They build masterfully constructed homes, have a brilliantly regulated social order, are essential to sustaining the environment and are playing a vital role in sustainable development projects.
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
Many people dismiss environmentalism as a middle-class luxury that few can afford. But in Mexico City a group of impoverished street punks are pioneering radical social alternatives because their survival depends on it. Holly Wren reports.
Russia’s zapovedniks are some of the world’s most pristine wildernesses. For 70 years they were protected ruthlessly by the Soviet system, but recently they have fallen prey to Putin, the World Bank and ecotourists. Paul Webster reports on their plight
Ros Coward reports from Murcia in southern Spain, the driest place in Europe, where tourism and intensive agriculture is draining its meagre water supplies and causing a growing environmental crisis.
As the people of Argentina are driven by economic collapse to the point of starvation, a new solution is being imposed upon them. Ben Backwell reports on a country being force fed genetically modified soya designed not for humans, but for cattle
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
