Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus looks at five new books that take on where climate change may lead, the global water crisis, Europe’s Little Ice Age, the human costs of Haiti’s unending catastrophes, and why we should be against constructing nature.
environment
The push by state and federal governments to dry up the Menindee Lakes has already had a huge impact on communities, graziers and local Indigenous people. But not everyone is losing out on the government’s plans for the Murray Darling basin.
Kosciuszko National Park — a tiny, cold, wet island in an otherwise vast, hot, dry continent — is currently being destroyed. Its unique natural values are being ruined by feral horses, with the support of the New South Wales National Party.
According to Australian Academy of Science secretary for science policy Professor David Day, "feral horses are impacting Kosciuszko’s endangered alpine animals, its wetlands and streams and the headwater catchments of the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Snowy rivers”.
School students striking for climate action won’t be bullied by conservative media and politicians telling us not to strike from school on March 15 as part of the Global #ClimateStrike.
In the US, the young new socialist Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made a splash by setting out concrete plans for a “Green New Deal” to transition away from fossil fuels to a 100% renewable, zero-emissions economy within 10 years.
After five years and $13 billion of public money spent on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, there is less water in the river than ever before — and more in the private water storages of a handful of National Party donors, writes Elena Garcia.
The NSW Land and Environment Court’s decision to refuse the Rocky Hill coalmine near Gloucester on February 8 is ground breaking. For the first time in legal history, the impact of a new coalmine on climate change was a determining factor in refusing consent.
Climate and Capitalism editor Ian Angus takes a look at five new releases for an ecosocialist bookshelf. Inclusion doesn’t necessarily imply agreement with a book’s contents.
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End Of The Megafauna: The Fate of the World’s Hugest, Fiercest and Strangest Animals
Written by Ross DE MacPhee & illustrated by Peter Schouten
WW Norton, 2019
This is an eyewitness account of the UN Climate Conference COP24, held in Katowice, Poland, in December last year from the perspective of one of the 30,000 participants. All attempts will be taken to avoid acronyms of climate terms, or at least explain them, and I will outline the ‘insider information’ that I got from my first COP.
A tailings dam owned by Brazilian iron ore producer Vale burst in Brumadinho in the state of Minas Gerais on January 25. This is the second of its tailings dams to burst in several years. Hundreds died and the devastation to local residents, water resources and biodiversity was immense.
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