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From Uneven Earth

We are great fans of the Uneven Earth newsletter, as an overview of the green movement and its biggest ideas. But rather than cherrypick from the latest edition, and as a way of encouraging you to subscribe to them, it seemed more useful just to lay out their curation in full below, a gift in the best Xmas spirit.

Top 5 articles to read

Remembering the Ogoni Nine. In 1995, nine activists from the Ogoni region of Nigeria were hanged after a campaign against oil giant Shell – decades later, their struggle for environmental justice is more relevant than ever.

• Rebecca Solnit on the politics of pleasure

• Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary 

• What would it look like if we treated climate change as an actual emergency?

• The hidden costs of streaming music

News you might’ve missed

• Delhi shuts schools as it mulls ‘pollution lockdown’

• Land and life: Feudalism and environmental change in the Philippines

• Life in Pakistan without a digital ID

• Greenland’s government bans oil drilling, leads Indigenous resistance to extractive capitalism

• Connecting the dots between B.C.’s floods, landslides and clearcut logging. And The cost of waiting

• Lee Maracle, revolutionary Indigenous author and poet, dead at 71 Also read: Inspiring and uncompromising, Lee Maracle could raise you up or eviscerate you. Read one of her essays: The lost days of Columbus

Indigenous and decolonial perspectives on the future

• How Indigenous peoples are fighting the apocalypse

• Indigenous cultures must not be forced to bear the brunt of global climate adaptation

• Rethinking the apocalypse: An Indigenous anti-futurist manifesto

• Taking the fiction out of science fiction: A conversation about Indigenous futurisms

• Also read: An Old New World. When one people’s sci-fi is another people’s past

• Utopia’s settler colonialism problem 

COP26

• COP is broken

• At U.N.’s COP26 climate summit, Indigenous voices are calling for more than lip service

• The climate crisis is about the Global South’s present

• Never mind aid, never mind loans: what poor nations are owed is reparations

• The US is blocking climate reparations

• How ExxonMobil captured COP26

• Technology fetishism reigns at COP26. It’ll keep us burning fossil fuels.

• Q&A: Can ‘nature-based solutions’ help address climate change?

Where we’re at: analysis

• The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing

• More than 2 billion workers make up the informal economy

• Western monopoly of climate science is creating an eco-deficit culture

• What economists get wrong about climate change

• Will climate change itself derail plans to reduce emissions?

• The last great forests

• Ruptured worlds: a photo essay on the Lower Se San 2 Dam, Cambodia 

• Dead white man’s clothes. In Accra, Ghana, imported second-hand clothing—or “dead white man’s clothes”—represents a massive industry with complex environmental, social, and economic implications.

From Uneven Earth

Just think about it…

• Forgive humans, not oil companies. It might seem like prison abolition and fossil fuel abolition have nothing in common, but they couldn’t be more related.

• ‘Injecting poison will never make you healthy’: how the wellness industry turned its back on Covid science

• Do we need to work? The history of what we call work.

• Congested, contested, and competitive: Are we running out of room in outer space?

• Why trying to clean up all the ocean plastic is pointless

• The need to trespass: let people in to protect nature, says guerrilla botanist

• The moral case for destroying fossil fuel infrastructure

On technological colonialism… 

• Mining the planet to death: The dirty truth about clean technologies

• Green hydrogen: The new scramble for North Africa 

• The headache of ‘crypto colonialism’ 

• What to know about the frantic quest for cobalt

…and liberatory technologies

• On the movement for the right to repair: Opening this article voids warranty

• Activists are designing mesh networks to deploy during civil unrest

• A path to neighborhood power

Degrowth

• Perpetual growth is an impossible fantasy – even if we wanted it

• Infinite economic growth caused the environmental crisis. Degrowth will help us fix it

• Sand and gravel: Rethinking aggregate consumption and distribution

Cities and radical municipalism

• Where are the municipalists in the US and Canada?

• Sindicat: evading eviction in one of Europe’s most densely populated cities – a documentary

• Play the game: Can you get a city to zero emissions? 

Sci-fi and utopian imaginings

• The metaverse: colonial fantasies of the wild West

• The science fiction origins of the Metaverse

• Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days. “If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write?”

• Shifting the narrative. Music and storytelling for a future earth.

• Kim Stanley Robinson on science fiction and reclaiming science for the Left

Resources

• Global Indigenous newsletter: Chemicals, climate and consultation

• Here’s how to support Wet’suwet’en land defenders

• Managing mental health in the age of climate change: Diagnosing climate disorder, Diagnosing climate trauma, 7 resources to help manage climate anxiety, and Mental health professionals on processing climate anxiety

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