environment

More information
*Murray Bookchin:
:> The Ecology of Freedom
:> Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Forman
:> The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Dialectical Naturalism
:> The Politics of Social Ecology - Janet Biehl, w/ Murray Bookchin
:> Toward an Ecological Society
:> Other

:> The Heat is On - Gelbspan
:> Social Ecology After Bookchin - Light, ed.

The residents of Lefkimi in the south of Corfu island in greece are opposed to the construction of an Open Garbage-Dump (XYTA) near their town. The residents claimed that their marginalised, underdeveloped area known for its left-wing tradition and defience was being used as a refuse for the tourist-industry produced garbage of the north.

Gene Genies by Tom Jennings

There are, at a very conservative estimate, currently thirty local campaigns against unwanted hazardous developments in Ireland.

This campaign against the plan to build an unprecedented high-pressure raw gas pipeline and refinery in Northwest Mayo is in its sixth year, but last spring took a turn towards popular protest and direct action and has shut down construction work.

Like many frustrated Southerners in the aftermath of the hurricane named Katrina, I drove a small truck-and-trailer full of food and water to South Mississippi. I met some refugees at a camp site, during the trip down. They appeared to be poor whites. One, a native of Bay St. Louis, was snarling against the "looters", using racial epithets.

News reports said on Tuesday that around 200 members of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) on Monday evening peacefully occupied a property belonging to the Suzano company in Itanpenitinga in Sao Paulo state. A second property was also occupied in Bonito, in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco.

The workers, represented by the Union of Swaziland Conservation Workers, have warned management of a strike if talks on wednesday and thursday failed. The pay rise was recommended by a government watchdog, however management have said there is not enough money to honour the recommendation.

Protesters from the Achuar Indian communities in the northern Peru forest have won an agreement for an Argentine oil drilling firm to stop dumping toxic waste into the rainforest. The Native Federation of the Corrientes River brought jungle operations of Pluspetrol Norte to a standstill, demanding a clean-up of the harmful waste produced by 30 years of drilling in the area.

Seven hundred Peruvians have occupied oil facilities in the rainforest territories of Loreto, on the border with Ecuador, halting production. After 30 years of drilling, protesters are demanding that steps be taken to stop the Argentinian company Pluspetrol from continuing to dump one million barrels of untreated toxic waste each day.

The Earth is facing an environmental crisis on a scale unprecedented in human history. This environmental crisis is already responsible for high levels of human suffering. If the crisis continues to develop at its current rate, the ultimate result will be the extinction of human life on the planet.

The month of September was the month Shell had chosen to re-take their refinery construction site in Ballinaboy, Mayo, in the west of Ireland. They failed.
The refinery has been shut down since July 2005 by pickets involving the local community and activists from Rossport Solidarity Camp.

In the 1970s workers at the Lucas Aerospace Company in Britain set out to defeat the bosses plans to axe jobs. They produced their own alternative "Corporate Plan" for the company's future. In doing so they attacked some of the underlying priorities of capitalism.

Scabs, coppers, strikes and footy

Givet is a town of 8,000 on the Belgian border in northern France. The area was largely dominated by steel and textile until the plant closings and restructurings of the 1970s, when it became an ex-industrial wasteland. 22% of the local population was unemployed. The Cellatex plant, where the following struggle took place, was founded in 1903 and produced one the first synthetic fibres.

The bans prevented billions of dollars of development over 4 years, until the campaign was halted by the union leadership.

In 1971 a group of women from the fashionable suburb of Hunter's Hill in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were trying to save Kelly's Bush, the last remaining open space in that area. Construction firm AV Jennings planned to build luxury houses over the bush land.

Mining giant Freeport-McMoran have violently cleared roadblocks thrown up by locals in protest at the company’s exploitation of Papua’s vast mineral resources and treatment of the indigenous population.

Black Flag #208, June 1996, covered a land squat in London done by "The Land is Ours". This article is the critical evaluation of this by someone who participated.

THE LAND IS THEIRS
or, pace George Monbiot, "This Land Is my Uncle's"