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Sleeping and dreaming — essential and mysterious. An old Tanzanian friend speaks about torrential rains and village celebrations. And, in the Dutch city of Delft, a big university digs deep for the heat beneath: geothermal energy.
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In West Africa, French colonialism officially ended in the 1960s. Six decades later, neocolonialism lives on. These days, America is the world’s preeminent imperial power and NATO its most powerful tool. In Cambodia, French colonists are long gone. Military chiefs and their rich clients rule the roost, much to the detriment of biodiverse ecosystems.
The Anthropocene defined — geologically. I speak with Jan Zalasiewicz about the history and work of the Anthropocene Working Group. Zalasiewicz was its first chair.
Uranium mining in Niger. It’s a filthy but profitable business — profitable for French extractors and Nigerien elites; filthy for Nigerien mine workers and mining communities.
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Nothing woolly-headed or Utopian about it: A universal, guaranteed basic income. A hundred years later, memories of war that do not fade. And, one of humanity’s great revolutions – the 1950s Great Acceleration has transformed Earth’s surface completely, hurtling our planet into an uncertain future.
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Humanity’s impact on Planet Earth has a name: the Anthropocene. The start of Earth’s human age can be pinpointed in ice and biological cores, and the bottom sediments of bays and lakes — including a small lake in southern Ontario. But human beings have no control. And now we stand at catastrophe’s door.
London’s largest ever public protests for climate and Earth justice have come to a close. An estimated hundred thousand attended the four-day event, organized by Extinction Rebellion and other UK groups, rallying around the theme, “Unite to Survive.”
Long before the ‘intractable conflict’ between Israeli Jews and Palestinians gets resolved, climate change will have thrown everything up for grabs — literally. It already has.
We use lots of items in our daily lives. We use them and then throw them away, or perhaps recycle them when they wear out or get damaged. Then again, some of us prefer to repair for re-use — at a Repair Cafe.
For those who thought that corporate concentration in the food industry couldn’t get tighter, wake up and smell the coffee. The Big Six seed and farm chemical producers are now on the verge of coalescing into three. Amazon may soon be the world’s biggest supermarket.
Fair trade — as opposed to Free Trade — puts farmers, workers, communities and the health of the planet ahead of national trade balances and corporate profits. Listen to the voices of fair traders gathered in Winnipeg for their national convention.
I took off for Hebron on a Sunday morning. Throngs of Israeli soldiers filled the bus station, soldiers on the move, barely more than teenagers, large backpacks and automatic weapons flung over their shoulders, smart phones in their hands.
Imagine an electric-powered fleet of Canada Post vehicles, along with vehicle charging stations at post offices. And postal banking, where loans could be secured for renewable energy installations and home energy retro-fits. Listen up.
Will global capitalism eventually wean itself off fossil fuels? Can wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources generate enough joules to drive permanent economic growth? Should carbon emissions be taxed?
It’s not a new or unique story. The factories in a blue-collar industrial town grow silent and the character of the city surrounding them is transformed.
Like Earth’s climate, Manitoba Hydro’s office tower — in the city of Winnipeg — is an integrated system. As Earth’s climate warms, energy efficient buildings like this will be in demand.
It would be difficult to go a day without stainless steel, and that steel would not be stainless without ferrochrome — the end product of chromite mining. In northern Ontario, chromium mining generates controversy.
Picture a landscape buried beneath a sky-high heap of dead plants and animal corpses. This is what Earth’s surface would look like if it weren’t for fungi. Fungi are the biosphere’s recyclers. Human society depends on them absolutely.
Mention Rwanda to someone, what comes first to their mind? Bloody genocide, most likely; certainly not swank men’s fashion. Think again.
So-called “industrial economies” on Earth value money above all else, while squandering finite resources and poisoning their little blue-green planet.
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