Ecology and Environment

Could degrowth, community, and basic income create a sane economy? An interview with one of the godfathers of the basic income movement, Phillippe Van Parijs. Philippe Van Parijs for openDemocracy-Beyond traffic and slavery. Phillippe Van Parijs is a philosopher at…

Five years ago: Nations of the world met in Paris to draft a climate agreement that was subsequently accepted by nearly every country in the world, stating that global temperatures must not exceed +2C pre-industrial. Global emissions must be cut!…

By Farhana Haque Rahman By any measure this has been a devastating year: fires across the Amazon, the Arctic and beyond; floods and drought in Africa; rising temperatures, carbon emissions and sea levels; accelerating loss of species, and mass forced…

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is estimated that the total number of passenger pigeons in the United States was about three billion birds. The bird was immensely abundant, as illustrated by this passage written by the famous…

In this interview during COP25, Makoma Lekalakala (Goldman Environmental Prize 2018) and member of Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg, talks to Pressenza about the role of women in the climate change debate, the nonsense of using nuclear energy in Africa and what…

For tens of thousands of years, the Arctic’s carbon sink has been a powerful dynamic in the functionality of the Earth System. However, that all-important functionality has been crippled and could be permanently severed. According to new research based upon…

Throughout its history, Earth has experienced five mass extinction events. See, for example, ‘Timeline Of Mass Extinction Events On Earth’. It is now experiencing the sixth. The Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439 million years ago, wiped out 86% of…

The COP25 United Nations climate summit ended in failure Sunday, after negotiators failed to agree to a deal that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a key goal of the Paris Agreement. Scores of…

As William Nordhaus illustrated in his Nobel award address in December last year, the free-rider problem is particularly severe for climate change. Those who do nothing ride free, while those who undertake costly reductions pay dearly. If an important player…

This year’s United Nations climate summit, dubbed “COP 25” for the 25th annual “conference of the parties” to the climate negotiations, heated up Wednesday as grassroots activists, youth and indigenous leaders protested en masse outside the main plenary hall. As…