Our farmer-managed seed systems in Africa are being criminalized and displaced by a very aggressive green revolution project of corporate occupation by big multinational companies. This violent agrarian transformation is facing profound objection.
There are three longer-range challenges where choices must be made, choices made more complex by the attacks: the COP21 meeting, upcoming regional elections in France, and the wider conflicts in the Middle East.
Shutting down borders and blaming Muslim immigrants for the Paris attacks would give ISIS precisely the type of “civilizational conflict” it craves.
The recovery of a Syrian passport at the site of one of the Paris terror attacks has the European press and the continent’s right-wing politicians in an uproar.
The document, found near the remains of one of the suicide bombers, had been registered by Greek authorities on the island of Leros on October 3, 2015, leading to speculation that some of the assailants may have been jihadists traveling from the Syrian battlefields to Europe posing as refugees.
Source: Outlook
“Every nation-state tends towards the imperial – that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.”—Daniel Berrigan, poet, Jesuit priest.
Janet Biehl, author of a newly published book about Vermont social ecologist Murray Bookchin, will be speaking in Burlington, VT on November 19thabout her recent visit to Rojava, Kurdistan where Kurdish men and women have organized themselves into a democratic autonomous region based in part on principles advanced by Bookchin.
Source: The Asian Age
In 2008, before the climate summit in Copenhagen, I wrote the book Soil Not Oil. It was a time when the intimate connections between climate and agriculture, air and soil were not being recognised in any forum, neither in the negotiations on climate change nor in the climate movement. As we head into the Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 in Paris, agri-corporations are attempting to hijack climate talks once again.
Today we are faced with two crises on a planetary scale — climate change and species extinction. Our current modes of production and consumption are contributing to what climate change scientists term anthropogenic emissions — originating from human activity. If no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gases, we could experience a catastrophic 4°C increase in temperature by the end of the century.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019