As you read this article every breath you take in contains about 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, around a third more than your great grandparents breathed 100 years ago.1 As well as leading to potentially catastrophic global… Continue Reading
A review of Alistair Couper, Hance D Smith and Bruno Ciceri, Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea (Pluto Press, 2015), £19.99 and Stefano B Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries… Continue Reading
Life on earth is arguably the most extraordinary phenomenon in the perceivable universe. And, among living things, 21st century humans are uniquely possessed with the means to appreciate this remarkable occurrence. Scientifically, for example, we can consider the sheer number… Continue Reading
Good sense, for Antonio Gramsci, was the “healthy nucleus of common sense”.1 This article tries to make sense of what Gramsci meant by good sense, and seeks to develop his understanding of good sense into a resource we can use… Continue Reading
A review of Tony Juniper, What has Nature ever done for us? How Money really does grow on Trees (Profile Books, 2013), £9.99, and George Monbiot, Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (Allen Lane, 2013), £11.99 In… Continue Reading
Whatever else it is remembered for, 2012 is likely to go down in history as the year when climate change began noticeably to change the face of the planet. The trends we are beginning to see mean that global warming… Continue Reading
In respect of climate change, the hurricane that tore into New York was the game changer. The floods it unleashed forced the authorities to organise a mass airlift evacuation of much of the city’s population, and to begin planning the… Continue Reading
The terrible earthquake and tsunami that hit Tohuku in northeastern Japan on 11 March took place as this issue of International Socialism was on its way to the press. The scenes in which the tsunami swept away vast swathes of… Continue Reading
Climate science came massively under attack in 2010. Leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia were spun by the right wing media to claim that climate scientists had hidden and manipulated data. The… Continue Reading
On Sunday 19 September 2010 engineers finally sealed the Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which had exploded five months earlier and caused the “the world’s largest accidental offshore oil spill”.1 The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil… Continue Reading