Corporate connections in green organisations, the isolation of energy policy from wider social issues, the reality of resource shortages, a response to the pro-nuclear argument, and the ideological shift required to deal with energy problems.
Spring 2013
Energy
Burkely Hermann: Does the Environmental Movement Speak for You?
“We must reject the corporate leeches in the environmental movement: TNC, the Defenders of Wildlife, the EDF, the National Audubon Society, the NRDC, Conservation International, the Wilderness Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the World Wildlife Fund. These organizations are basically a joke and too corrupted to fix.”
“Our consumption of oil is not just material – it is not just about the functional need to travel from point A to point B. The combustion of energy-dense gasoline often accompanies cultural ideas about freedom, mobility and deeply entangled normative geographies of home, work, family, and leisure.”
Kenneth Couesbouc: Future Shocks
“There is no pristine inhabitable planet to fly to and colonise – there never was, it was all a pipe-dream – and Mother Earth is turning into a junk-yard/trash-heap.”
Peter Lach-Newinsky: ‘We’re Rational, You’re Emotional’, And Other Common Myths of the Nuclearists
“Nuclearists seem incapable of even imagining a world run neither with fossil fuels nor nuclear energy but with renewables, and living at much lower levels of production, consumption and waste.”
Frank Smecker: Marx, Hegel, and the Era of Resource Scarcity
“Growth of modern societies = loss of resources = decline in growth and eventual collapse of modern societies. To simplify this equation even more: Growth of modern societies leads to the collapse of modern societies. And there’s the conundrum.”
Varia
Carl Finamore: Different Seasons of the Arab Spring: Reports from Morocco & Tunisia
“Some critics claim that the union confederation remains too far outside the political process, leaving important government issues to other social forces. This begs the question of how much influence the working class organizations that made the revolution will have on elections and the nation building process.”
Michael Barker: Biodynamic Organic-Intellectuals
“Biodynamic tensions within the organic movement are longstanding, as rationally-minded critics have always argued that magical agricultural beliefs have no place in a movement aiming to make the world a better, fairer, and less toxic place. Such criticisms however hold little water with the Soil Association.”
Bruce Bromley: Woolf, Cézanne, and Things
“To strain under Woolf’s images is to practice, on another scale, soldiering in the world upon which her approach to the visual dilates, a world figured wrongly as a contest, with human dominance the only right victory, a world made of relations neither linear nor transparent.”
Recent Issues
Winter 2013
Welfare & Inequality
Welfare & Inequality
Anti-welfare rhetoric, alternatives to 'austerity', disparity in India, and resistance against inequality.
Autumn 2012
Democrat Presidents
Democrat Presidents
The historical role of the Democrat Party, and a focus on the LBJ, Carter, Kennedy and Obama presidencies.
Summer 2012
A range of subjects, from US foreign policy and economic austerity to Fair trade and animal theory.
Spring 2012
Europe
Europe
Europe past and present. From ancient legacies to the EU and the French and Greek elections.
From the Archives
“The idea is to keep one’s own oil and spend others’, to make sure strategic reserves of the energy and fuel that maintain a highly mechanized society (and, more importantly, mechanized armed forces) last long after everybody else has run out of theirs.”