In this short film, the Story of Stuff Project's Annie Leonard reveals how
companies that sell bottled water manufacture demand for this
environmentally destructive product.
As a country particularly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming, Bolivia hosts a strong and progressive climate movement. Both government and local communities are rallying around a call to meet basic needs while existing in harmony with the natural world, writes Jessica Camille Aguirre.
It is we, through our elected representatives,
who have created a system in which corporations and banks privatise profits
and make the public absorb the losses. We also have the power to bring their
activities back under democratic control, argue Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson.
With the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon critically limited, the failed Copenhagen negotiations revealed the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time - what kind of a climate transition would be fair enough to actually work. By Tom Athanasiou.
While nearly a quarter of a billion people escaped life in the slums over the past decade, rural exodus to the cities has more than countered this trend. Sustainable urban development is likely to prove impossible
if the urban divide is allowed to persist, finds a report by UN-HABITAT.
By embracing the ‘neoliberal consensus’, European social democrats have failed to offer a meaningful alternative to the free market ideology of the right. To remain a force in progressive politics, social democracy must rediscover its egalitarian roots, argues Philippe Marlière.
Analysts suggest that the finite nature of the earth’s biosphere will inevitably limit economic growth as we know it. While governments hesitate, various community-led projects are leading the way in the transition to a sustainable and resilient post-growth world, writes Richard Heinberg.
Mounting evidence suggests we are nearing peak oil production, yet the global economy remains dependent on increasing energy use. The very infrastructure of modern civilisation may be on the cusp of fast and near-term structural collapse, warns a report by Feasta.
‘Global apartheid’ describes an international economy inherently engineered to further enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. The first step in transforming this system is for leaders in the Global South to stop thinking that without aid they cannot survive, writes Yash Tandon.
In 1980,
the Brandt Commission anticipated that unless governments corrected global
monetary imbalances through coordinated action, there would be a series of
sovereign debt crises. In the Commission’s recommendations, we have a
compendium of received wisdom long ignored yet still vital, writes James B.
Quilligan.
