Can we buy our way to an ethical society?
– For World Magazine X (Norway) Today we live in the most narrowly market-driven society the world has ever seen. Social movements in many countries are at a low ebb, and people’s lives are utterly shaped by the norms of the commercial marketplace. This is especially true in North America, but its effects are increasingly […]
Climate talks in Montreal: Averting catastrophe?
For Z Magazine, February 2006 Expectations were high in early December of last year, as 10,000 delegates, representing 189 countries, converged in Montreal to discuss the future of international measures to limit global climate change. A broad spectrum of international NGOs, from Friends of the Earth to the corporate-friendly Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), described […]
The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts
– For Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades, edited by Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann, Heinrich Böll Foundation of North America, 2006. In the America of the mid 1980s, the dreams of a more just and ecological society that had flourished during the 1960s and seventies seemed in danger of disappearing into the […]
Crisis and Crisis Management in Hurricane Katrina: A Radical Critique
During crisis events, people often show their most compassionate and even heroic sides. In Hurricane Katrina’s disruption of every day life, most people in New Orleans have done the best they can to help each other. While decried as “looting” by the officials of order and private property, reports have shown that people neglected by […]
Redefining Development
ABSTRACT The ecological society presupposes not only the rejection of the dominant development model, but even the very definition of development. Fundamental elements of a new definition of development must emphasize quality instead of quantity and the cultural particularities of people and their communities. This means that the communities themselves, with the active participation of […]
Disney Ecology
The Walt Disney movie Bambi, one of the best-known films of all time, is more than a treacly childrens fable. The tale of Bambi and Thumper is also a parable about habitat destruction, as seen through the eyes of various furry critters. One of the movies dramatic high points comes in a scene which I […]
Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution
Biotechnology is a question of power. It is a question about the power to decide what kind of technologies a society will use and for what purpose. In this way, biotechnology is linked to the broader question of political power and democracy. It leads us to think about how we, as a society, make vital […]
McDonalds, MTV, and Monsanto: Resisting Biotechnology in the Age of Informational Capital
Introduction: Biotechnology as a Mode of Production A thing is a history of a thing, and more. Indeed, history is a tangled web with frayed edges, each woven into what came before. And so it is with biotechnology. To understand it, we must understand its history, the wider universe of people, places, and things that […]
Ambiguities of Animal Rights
Throughout Europe and North America, a considerable portion of the contemporary radical scene takes for granted the notion that animal liberation is an integral part of revolutionary politics. Many talented and dedicated activists in anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian movements came to political maturity in the context of animal rights campaigns, and in some circles veganism and […]
Revving It Up! The Revolutionary Potential of the New Anti-Globalization Movement
International systems of power are bursting out of the single-issue framework. Confronted by the exponential expansion and integration of new markets, technologies, regulatory bodies, and ecological crises, activists are turning to “globalization” as a way to talk about the increasingly totalizing dimensions of capitalist and state power. Globalization-talk reflects a nascent and potentially growing popular […]
