Tag
Climate Change
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Can the River Debate the Suburb?
Firms like Philip Morris hold rights that exceed those of most humans. Estates speak for the dead. Trusts speak for the unborn. Legally, we can devise new ways for nature to be legally represented within our human world.
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The State Will Not Save Us
In policy circles today, the primacy of the capitalist state in efforts to confront climate change is a given. This is a premise worth questioning.
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Who Will Save the Planet?
Might the market provide us with solutions to fighting climate change, or is it part of the very problem that lies before us?
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“A Gun to Our Heads”
On October 13, 2016, Almir Suruí, then chief of the Paiter Suruí indigenous people of northwest Brazil, issued a panicked appeal. “This is my cry of alarm, please listen to me!” he wrote to national and international authorities and environmentalists. “We are undergoing a total invasion of deforesters and miners of diamonds and gold.” Each day 300 trucks enter…
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Disaster Capitalism Strikes Puerto Rico
It has been a year since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving a trail of destruction: ruined infrastructure, destroyed homes, and thousands …
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Why the Lights Went Out in Puerto Rico
There is nothing like a prolonged blackout to drive home for American observers the unequal distribution of fortune. We know that no matter what kind of natural …
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Let Us Now See Climate Change
How can we learn to see climate change around us? What would it really look like for climate change to come into our homes and lives? It used to be that climate …
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B-Sides: Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”
Is there a more entrancing account of an encounter with nonhuman sentience than Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris? The reputation of this 1961 masterwork of Polish science …
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Motherhood in the End Times
Having a child forces you to confront all of those abstract threats you might have previously labored to ignore: physical entropy, the planetary future, human …
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We Have Never Known Mother Earth
In Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime, Bruno Latour aims to reintroduce us to our own planet. The Earth emerges as a bizarre and …
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The Big Picture: Building a Climate Coalition
Donald J. Trump has given notice of US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement of December 2015 and made clear that his administration is committed to dismantling the government-based scientific and policy infrastructure created during the Obama administration to cope with the dangers of climate change. If, as seems likely, these policy shifts help to…
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The Big Picture: Working-Class Environmentalism
Trump can’t make sunlight expensive or slow the wind. He can’t make walking more polluting than driving, or energy efficiency more expensive than waste. For all the damage that Scott Pruitt and others are doing to the government’s environmental agencies, they can only block so much climate progress. Thanks to a surge of elite and…
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Your Prius Is Not Enough
Many of those who voted for Donald Trump were elated by his withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Trump supporters, environmentalism is a dirty word, and like other policies designed to protect the natural world, the Paris accord was bad for American jobs, foisted on the country by out-of-touch tree huggers. Environmentalists, the stereotype…
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Even Broken History Is History
Last month the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, spoke movingly about the removal of Confederate monuments and “the cult of the lost cause” they celebrate. The “Free Southerners” in Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, which opens in 2074, are also a cult of the lost cause: …
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5,000 Years of Climate Fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson is not the first to write about Manhattan under water. Others, notably Nathaniel Rich in Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), have also …
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On the Origin of Extinction
Extinction has never been a purely scientific concept. When theories of extinction exploded onto the Western intellectual scene in the early 19th …
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What It Feels Like When Your World Ends
The increasingly popular genre recently christened “cli-fi,” or climate change fiction, tends to move from the outside in: as the environment deteriorates …
