Month: April 2010

Source: Truthout

In many forums over the past decade, public intellectuals seem unable to talk about pressing social issues without performing the equivalent of an academic literature review. Although reasons range from trying to inform their audiences of relevant debates to efforts to demonstrate erudition, that many public intellectuals present their work as the basis for rewards in academe and the entertainment industry suggests influences tantamount to the colonization of intellectuals by the ever-expanding market. read more

Source: Mother Jones

Also from the Climate Desk: A look at domestic legal strategies to address global warming [1].

The Prunéřov power station [2] is the Czech Republic’s biggest polluter: Its 300-feet-high cooling towers push plumes of white smoke high above the flat, featureless fields of northern Bohemia. Prunéřov reliably wins a place on lists of Europe’s dirtiest power plants, emitting 11.1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. So when CEZ Group, the state-controlled utility, proposed an overhaul to extend the facility’s life for another quarter of a century, protests flared-including one from a place about as far from the sooty industrial region as you can get, a place of tropical temperatures and turquoise seas with not a smokestack in sight. This January, the Federated States of Micronesia, some 8,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean, lodged a legal challenge to the Prunéřov plant on the grounds that its chronic pollution threatens the island nation’s existence. read more

Source: IPS News

Through their ancestral knowledge and traditions, indigenous peoples will make a unique and invaluable contribution to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which begins Monday, Apr. 19 in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

Julio Quette of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) told IPS that the 74 different indigenous groups who inhabit South America’s Amazon region "have traditionally coexisted with nature and the forests," and that it is up to the industrialised countries to halt the pollution and destruction of the planet. read more