Calgary muzzles artists critical of tar sands

BY ROB MAGUIRE

Art Threat

April 17, 2013

                                                Eeny, Meeny, Miny by Bill Helin

The Raincoast Conservation Foundation had a permit from the City of Calgary to display their travelling art exhibition, Artists for an Oil-Free Coast, at city hall. However, once the show opened, a backlash from conservative politicians caused the city to revoke the permit, arguing the show was too “political” and violated municipal bylaws banning demonstrations inside the building.

Despite the show’s unambiguous title, the city claims they “weren’t aware there was a specific political agenda or cause associated with the art exhibit,” according to Sharon Purvis, the city’s director with corporate properties and buildings.

While the city is allowing the work — largely comprised of landscapes and nature scenes — to stay up until Wednesday, they have banned exhibition organizers conducting media interviews or speaking about politics to the public.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, renowned painted Robert Bateman, who contributed artwork to the show, welcomed the hostile reaction.

“I’m sympathetic to the councillors that want to ban it. They’re actually helping the cause of raising the profile of the show, which is OK, because otherwise the show might get ignored.”

More information about the Artists for an Oil-Free Coast, including future tour dates, can be found at the Raincoast website.

Culture, Conflict and Ecology: The Commons in History

By Derek Wall
April 21, 2012

This is the first section of my new book, if any of you would like to see the first draft of the whole thing email me. I have also been lucky enough to spend some time with Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel Prize for economics for her work on the commons. 

While she is not an ecosocialist and in fact comes from a Hayekian background, she is passionate about commons and support for indigenous and a very open person willing to listen to others (the interview with her will be published in Green World in the autumn).

The book is from an environmental history perspective. 

Chapter One: Commons Ecology. 

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why? Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.Georges Perec (L'Infra-ordinaire) from Bellos 2010: 521-522. London and its environs would have no parks today if commoners had not asserted their rights, and as the nineteenth century drew on rights of recreation were more important than rights of pasture, and were defended vigilantly by the Commons Preservation Society. We owe to these premature ‘Greens’ such urban lungs as we have. More than that, if it had not been for the stubborn defence by Newbury commoners of their rights to the Greenham Common, where on earth could NATO have parked its Nukes (Thompson, 1993: 126).

Green Dreams: Eco-Comics, Then and Now

Text by Paul Buhle
Comics by Leonard Rifas, Seth Tobocman, and Sabrina Jones
Capitalism Nature Socialism
September 2009

Few readers, outside dedicated comic art fandom, are likely to know that ecologically oriented comics are more than a half-century old. EC, the company that introduced Mad Comics in 1952 (and turned it into Mad Magazine a few years later, amid the Congressional investigation of the comic industry), made its big money on the horror comics that parents often hated. The money on Crypt of Terror and such funded less lucrative but more socially oriented lines with some of the best comic art ever seen to that time (and, at least arguably, even now). Some of the best of the comics treated wars through history in realistic fashion, and in passing, offered readers a gaze at destroyed landscapes in Korea, among other places.

But Weird Fantasy and Incredible Science Fiction are especially interesting to us today because they so often dwelt—in lushly illustrated pages colored to perfection—in post-atomic war stories. In these 8-page sagas, humans struggle to gain some degree of dignity as they come across machines now incomprehensible, cities almost unrecognizable, and whole zones unlivable for plant or animal. A handful of the stories were adapted from the contemporary fiction of Ray Bradbury, who was especially keen on these themes.

The Crisis of Civilization

The Crisis of Civilization video

The Crisis of Civilization is a documentary feature film investigating how global crises like ecological disaster, financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages are converging symptoms of a single, failed global system.

Weaving together archival film footage and animations, film-maker Dean Puckett, animator Lucca Benney and international security analyst Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed – author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It – offer a stunning wake-up call proving that ‘another world’ is not merely possible, but on its way.

Like the book on which it is based, the film consists of seven parts which explore the interconnected dynamic of global crises of Climate Catastrophe; Peak Energy; Peak Food; Economic Instability; International Terrorism; and the Militarization Tendency – with a final section on The Post-Peak World.

The film reveals how a failure to understand the systemic context of these crises, linked to neoliberal ideology, has generated a tendency to deal not with their root structural causes, but only with their symptoms. This has led to the proliferation of war, terror, and state-terror, including encroachment on civil liberties, while accelerating global crises rather than solving them.

The real solution, Nafeez argues, is to recognise the inevitability of civilizational change, and to work toward a fundamental systemic transformation based on more participatory forms of living, politically, economically and culturally.

Also featuring clowns, car crashes, explosions, acrobats, super heroes, xylophones and much, much more!

FULL VIDEO BELOW...

The new Climate & Capitalism

By Ian Angus
Editor, Climate and Capitalism
March 12, 2012

Today we launch an upgraded and completely redesigned Climate & Capitalism. I’m very excited about the transformation, which is part of the alliance with Monthly Review that was announced one month ago. (see below)

The most obvious change is the revamped Home page. Instead of an inflexible chronological display of articles – which meant that still relevant articles scrolled quickly out of sight – the new C&C Home is divided into five major sections:

• New and Recent Features is what a print newspaper would call “above the fold.” It displays our current top stories and essays.
• All Articles is exactly what it says. A chronological list of recent additions, with links to pages showing every C&C article, listed by date or by topic.
• The Center Section displays various groups of articles. The display will change from time to time. For example, this section might display articles about a major event like the Cochabamba conference, or articles on a specific subject like Ecosocialist Perspectives.
• The Sidebar, on the right, starts with recent reader comments on C&C articles. C&C encourages constructive discussion and debate, and we hope you’ll continue to make full use of this feature. Below the comments, you’ll find a variety of useful (we hope!) links.
• The Footer, at the bottom of each page, links to our Ecosocialist Bookstore. (Full disclosure: C&C gets a small commission from Amazon when you order books through our Bookstore. All proceeds will be used to maintain and improve the website.)

And we’ve only just begun! We’re now sharing MR’s web servers, which give us more capacity than ever. And our powerful new “back end” will allow us to add new features and options in coming months.

This transformation would not have been possible without MR’s webmaster, Jamil Jonna. With great technical skill and endless patience, he converted our vague design ideas into a website that exceeded our expectations by a huge margin. He also managed the faultless transfer of more than five years of content from the old site to this. We simply could not have made this change without him.

Rise Up Films launched

"Our mission at rise up films is simple - To create the best archive of freely available, provocative, informative and inspirational documentaries anywhere on the web." 
- Martin O'Beirne, Rise Up Films

Visit the site HERE.

Science Fiction or Reality Fiction?

By William Bowles 

Dissident Voice

February 23rd, 2012

The Sheep Look Up, John Brunner’s remarkably prescient ‘science fiction’ novel, first published in 1972 concerns the destruction of the entire environment in the US and the rise of a ‘corporately sponsored government’ leading to the eventual total breakdown of US society.

“No one except possibly the late John Brunner… has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”¹

Or now. The ability of ‘science fiction’ to extrapolate the future and it would seem often quite accurately, but one ignored by the priests of ‘high culture’ who consistently dismissed it as ‘genre’ writing, confined to a convenient niche where bug-eyed monsters live and bought where guys in dirty raincoats prowled. ‘Science fiction’ belonged in paperbacks with lurid covers of big-busted-babes molested by alien monsters but it wasn’t art let alone almost alone in being able to deal with the present as no other prose dared to.

Scenes from the Durban Ecosocialist Conference

Ecosocialist Horizons


Conference on Ecosocialism from Ecosocialist Horizons on Vimeo.


Joel Kovel from Ecosocialist Horizons on Vimeo.

Of Elephants and Blind Men and Noah’s Ark and Elephants Again

A View of the UN Climate Talks in Durban, South Africa

By Jeff Conant
Earth Island Journal
November 28, 2011

Like the parable of the three blind men coming upon an elephant and determining, each on his own, that this thing before them is a tree trunk, or an enormous boulder, or a thick scaly snake, one’s perspective on the events here at COP17, the UN Climate Summit kicking off today in Durban, South Africa, reflects one’s position and willingness to grope with searching hands in the dark.

But no matter where you come from, if you are actually concerned about the climate crisis, it’s going to be an ugly two weeks.

The science tells us that maintaining global temperature rise to 2 degrees centigrade – the current best case scenario – will lead to the inundation of coastal areas, loss of glaciers, and a tremendous toll in human lives and species lost, but may – just may – prevent what climatologist James Hansen calls, forebodingly, the “Venus Syndrome.” But given the gridlock in the UN negotiations and the absolute unwillingness of the most polluting nations to reduce their carbon emissions, a mere 2-degree rise is increasingly unlikely. 

Can Margaret Atwood's environmental message reach a broad public?

By Kurt Cross
Resource Insights
Sunday, October 16, 2011

Okay. So you want to reach the broad public about the multiple, intertwining, galloping climate, resource, and environmental disasters facing every living creature on Earth. Do you write up a detailed, compact analysis of the problem and make it available on the Internet? Should you put it all into a documentary film to make it more accessible? Maybe you should write a companion book as well for the few remaining readers willing to pay for an actual physical copy of something.

All of that has been done, of course. And, it would be unfair to say that it has had no effect. There is now a markedly larger group of people in the world who are conversant about all the major climate, resource and environmental problems we face. There are even many more politicians and policymakers who've been educated in this way. But instead of the swift, decisive action one might expect to address these onrushing catastrophes-in-the-making, the response--when there has been any at all--has been rather tepid.

Playing into enemy hands

By Derek Wall
Morning Star
01 September 2011

Nobody can say that the left suffers from too much agreement. Divisions run deep within political parties and the bitterness between different organisations on the British left leaves an intense taste.

Sectarianism of various kinds is a major barrier to presenting an alternative or alternatives to the decaying neoliberal consensus. How can we move forward and cooperate overcoming such divisions to achieve positive goals?

The neoliberal consensus is bankrupt but like the cartoon character who runs over the cliff and continues into space unaware that the ground has disappeared, neoliberalism continues to stride into the dark abyss of empty space.

Interview with SF writer China Miéville

ISR Issue 75
January–February 2011

China Miéville

In addition to being a revolutionary socialist and longtime member of the British Socialist Workers Party, China Miéville is one of today’s most celebrated science fiction and fantasy authors. In 2010, his genre-busting mystery novel The City & the City won the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award—making Miéville the only writer to win the Clarke award three times. His latest novel, Kraken, is a tale of competing Armageddons and religious cults in underground London.

China Miéville recently spoke with John McDonald from Haymarket Books about the importance of science fiction and fantasy in today’s world, and how socialist politics informs his approach to writing.

THE FIRST thing I wanted to talk about is Kraken, since it’s your latest novel and a number of people here in the states are still reading through it. The big question I want to ask is about the power of belief—you might even say faith—in the book. It’s central to both the cosmology and the thematic content of Kraken, and what’s really striking is the way that you look at the various cults, gods, and magics that populate this mystical version of London without falling into the sneering attitude of some of the fashionable new atheism. Can you talk about all this?

IT’S INTERESTING the formulation you use, because I would definitely say faith. I’m not even wholly convinced that belief and faith are exactly coterminous, but I would have to think about that. As you probably know, I’m an atheist, and have been for most of my conscious adult life, but I’ve always been very, very, very interested in faith. I see it as quite a specific thing and not necessarily solely reducible to belief.

I’ve always been very interested in it as a sociological phenomenon, and as an aesthetic phenomenon. For example, a lot of the poetry that I like most is informed by, driven by, and is indeed an expression of faith. I’m quite an admirer of a lot of ecstatic religious poetry. People like Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, and others. So I’ve always been interested in faith from that perspective. I’ve also been interested in it from a sociological perspective, the way that faith intersects with political action and rationality and the faux opposition between faith and rationality.

Canadian Government Tries To Silence Artist Franke James

By Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
TreeHugger
July 25, 2011

Treehugger has been pleased to show the work of Franke James a number of times; delivers a strong environmental message in a humourous and trenchant style. She was off to Europe to tour 20 cities with her work. She has been critical of the Canadian government's policies with respect to the tar sands and climate change, but she is not exactly Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, really. One would think that they had bigger fish to fry, but that didn't stop the government from stepping in to stomp her, with one top official saying:

"Who was the idiot who approved an art show by that woman, Franke James?"

Let’s talk utopia

It’s utopian thinking, not grim pragmatism, that best informs and inspires the struggle for a better society, argues Mike Marqusee

By Mike Marqusee
Red Pepper
July 2011

In 1818, Shelley visited his friend Byron in Venice, where his Lordship was camped out in a decaying palazzo, ruminating on the city’s faded glories. Their conversations – on human freedom and the prospects for social change – formed the basis for Shelley’s poem Julian and Maddalo, in which the mild-mannered English rationalist Julian (Shelley) puts the case for hope, and the brooding Italian aristocrat Maddalo (Byron) argues for despair. ‘We might be otherwise,’ Julian insists, ‘we might be all / we dream of: happy, high, majestical’ were it not for our own ‘enchained’ wills. To which Maddalo replies bitterly: ‘You talk utopia!’

That snap dismissal echoes down to our own day. We’ve been taught to fear utopian thinking, which is denounced as not only impractical but positively dangerous: the province of fanatics. In ignoring the lessons of history and the realities of human nature, utopian idealism results, inevitably we are told, in dystopian outcomes. It’s a modern version of the myth of Pandora’s box: a warning against being too enquiring, too ambitious.

‘America Pacifica’ And Science Fictional Social Change

By Alyssa Rosenberg
ThinkProgress.org
Jul 13, 2011

I’ve long been a fan of Anna North‘s work, so I was excited to read her debut novel, America Pacifica. It’s an unnerving novel, based on the idea that as life on the continental United States becomes unlivable, a few surviving humans fled to a tropical island, counting on the idea that they’d be able to build it out on landfill and set up a viable alternative society.

And it raises an interesting question that I think more works of science fiction might usefully consider: what if we only start working on solutions to climate change and other environmental problems after we’re past the point of no return?

The ongoing evil of asbestos exports

Murray Dobbin's Blog

May 15, 2011

 

The ongoing fight to get this country to ban the export of the world’s deadliest industrial material has finally reached the Comedy Network and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The sheer absurdity of pretending that chrysotile asbestos can be used safely caught the eye of the popular show and they recently did a five minute segment, ridiculing the industry, the mining company, and the town of Asbestos. It is a must see and reveals a jaw-dropping level of ignorance and denial on the part of the people promoting asbestos. The manager of the mine, Bernard Coulombe come off looking particularly ridiculous, suggesting early on in the interview with Aasif Mandvi, that there is obviously no problem because when you walk the streets of Asbestos you don’t see any sick people.

The days when CEOs spoke to the media without being prepped by their p.r. flaks are long gone – except in Asbestos. Coulombe actually suggested that people in India wouldn’t be bothered by asbestos fibres because they are “used to pollution. …It’s like they have a natural antibiotic,” Coulombe stated. Mandvi then called Coulombe a douchebag.

Once governments and corporate executives start being ridiculed on international television, their misbehaviour often ends soon after. We can hope. 

In defense of human nature

Steve Leigh looks at a new documentary which makes the case that human beings can live together on the basis of cooperation, not competition.

Socialist Worker
May 10, 2011

TWO MOVIES opened recently addressing human nature and egoism versus cooperation: Atlas Shrugged, based on extreme capitalist Ayn Rand's book, is a call for selfishness, competition and egoism. Opening in theatres at the same time, Tom Shadyac's I Am supports love, cooperation, egalitarianism and democracy.

I Am is humorous (as can be expected from the director of Bruce Almighty) as well as being stunningly beautiful, uplifting and riveting. It calls for hope in the ability of humans to make a better world. It starts out asking two fundamental questions, "What is wrong with our world?" and "What can we do to make it better?"

Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

By Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi
Fernwood Books
Buy Now!
 

In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them; communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled; songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them.

In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Yves Engler and Bianca Mugyenyi argue that the automobile’s ascendance is inextricably linked to capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue, backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption, third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war. When we challenge the domination of cars, we also challenge capitalism. An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a unique must-read for all those who wish to escape the clutches of auto insanity.

Interview With Bill McKibben And Gregory Vickrey

By Mickey Z

27 February, 2011
Thesietch.org

Interview With Bill McKibben, Winner of Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship and Gregory Vickrey, Winner of International Peanut Butter Subsistence Prize

Bill McKibben, Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including “The End of Nature” (1989), regarded as the first book for a general audience about global warming. He is also founder of the global grassroots climate movement 350.org, which organized what CNN called “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” Most recently, he was the recipient of the annual $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Of this honor, McKibben said: 

“I’m a beginner as an organizer; it’s a great honor to be included on this list of people who have changed America for the better. I am deeply grateful to The Puffin Foundation and The Nation Institute for this recognition of my work. I am even more appreciative that this award is representative of a shared conviction that now is a singular moment in our history for all people of good conscience to come together in defense of the planet. Our work has never been more urgent.”

Utopia’s Steady State Economy

Chris Williams
Smacademia
March 22, 2011

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was written almost 500 years ago, in the early 16^th century. [1] The book has since influenced many a philosopher interested in the concept of Utopia, in theory or in practice. It is an attempt to outline the workings of an ideal state – in this case a small island state in the New World. Written originally in Latin, the book was dangerous in that it directly challenged the authority and wisdom of the ruling Crown – a standpoint that later resulted in the author’s execution by King Henry VIII.

As I began to read this book, I was startled by the early realisation that this book is nothing short of a 500 year old vision of a ‘Steady State Economy’. In this article, I will review the book and show the many parallel aspects between the two visions; comparing Utopia with the vision of a Steady State Economy as outlined recently in the report from the steady state economy conference, Enough is Enough. [2] (The following headings are chapters from the report, followed by comparisons from Utopia).