Corporate power
The Crisis of Globalization and the Search for Alternatives
Moving towards genuine self-reliance in times of war and climate collapse. The world is reeling from the crises generated by the war in the Gulf, the disastrous climate and ecological collapse, deepening inequalities, genocides, and other mass atrocities. Multilateral institutions like the United Nations appear to be unable to do much about these. Like any…
Read MoreColonisation Never Ended
Seed patenting laws are a global threat, but people are fighting back. For over 10,000 years, seeds have been the bedrock of human civilisation. From the moment our ancestors traded their nomadic hunter-gatherer ways for a life rooted in place, communities have freely collected, cultivated, saved, exchanged, and sown seeds as acts of sustenance and…
Read MoreThe Global/Local Conundrum: Backing Away from Technocracy
Decades ago, some interesting ideas were in circulation about how to combine global awareness with local action. The phrase “Think globally, act locally” was in vogue and represented an attempt to combine planetary and ecological awareness with actions at the local community level that fostered those values in a pragmatic way. This line of thinking…
Read MoreEmissions Accounting: Cooking the Books
Ready for a quick climate change quiz? See if you can identify the climate hero in the scenario below: Jared and Annette arrive at a potluck, each bringing a mixed salad with the same ingredients. By a strange coincidence they’re also wearing identical Christmas sweaters. They compare notes, and it turns out that Annette’s salad…
Read MoreResisting US-India Agri-Imperialism
A “high-powered US trade delegation” recently visited India to “explore opportunities in the country’s huge agribusiness sector and further promote American products among India’s rising middle class.” So reads the opening line of one of a few recent articles (see others here and here) in the Indian elite press announcing this momentous visit, and in…
Read MoreGovernment Reforms Face Corporate Backlash in Honduras
Seven men, all dressed in suits, gathered at an undisclosed location in Honduras, sitting around a table covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with small glass vases holding yellow flowers. At the head of the table sat Roy Perrin, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, and to his right…
Read MoreRegenerative Agriculture: a Good Idea Until Corporations Got Hold of It
Food and agribusiness giants have coalesced around the term “regenerative agriculture” to signal their commitment to climate change and sustainability. This year’s COP28 will showcase regenerative agriculture prominently, and the term is gaining traction in policy circles, investor conferences and supermarket shelves. But it’s just the latest iteration of an on-going corporate strategy to undercut…
Read MoreCatch 22: Phasing Out Fossil Fuels Means Paying Polluters
US$20 billion: That’s how much American investors think Canadian taxpayers should fork over to compensate them for their failed bid to develop a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in Québec. That’s almost a fifth of the province’s total budget for this year. Ruby River Capital LLC, the US-based owner of GNL Québec Inc., filed a…
Read MoreGetting out of the food-energy-climate crisis
On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas noted, today’s high prices for…
Read MoreHow the FCC shields cellphone companies from safety concerns
The health complaints started rolling in within weeks of the activation of a new cellphone tower in August 2020 in Pittsfield, an old factory town in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. Seventeen residents reported headaches, dizziness, insomnia or confusion. A few children had to sleep with “vomit buckets” by their beds. Like many people, Bobbie Orsi had…
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