The miniaturization of death: How technology has tipped the balance away from state power
Violence is coming in smaller and smaller packages these days.
war
Gearing Up for the Third Gulf War
With Donald Trump’s decision to shred the Iran nuclear agreement, announced last Tuesday, it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about what a Third Gulf War would mean. The answer, based on the last 16 years of American experience in the Greater Middle East, is that it won’t be pretty.
Are resource wars our future?
Why the Paris Climate Summit will be a peace conference – averting a world of failed states and resource wars.
A Landscape of Dreams
One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative I’ve been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned.
Syria peak oil weakened government’s finances ahead of Arab Spring in 2011
While the attention of the world is on the refugee crisis we need to look at the causes of this mass exodus.
Are We Already In Abrupt Climate Change?
In this week’s Radio Ecoshock, we cover global climate news, from the Syrian refugees to signs of an abrupt climate shift, with scientist Paul Beckwith.
Reading I.F. Stone on Earth Day: Why we still won’t get anywhere unless we connect the dots
It is in this joyous and self-congratulatory atmosphere [of the first Earth Day] that a curmudgeonly I.F. Stone, by now a full-fledged icon on the left, takes the stage. And he unapologetically rains on the parade, accusing Earth Day of providing cover for escalating war and calling for a movement willing to demand “enormous changes—psychological, military, and bureaucratic—to end the existing world system, a system of hatred, of anarchy, of murder, of war and pollution.”
Obama’s new oil wars
Washington is now the key country brandishing the oil weapon, using trade sanctions and other means to curb the exports of energy-producing states it categorizes as hostile. The Obama administration has taken this aggressive path even at the risk of curtailing global energy supplies.
Afghanistan, Ecology, and the End of War
Working with school children in Afghanistan, one experiences the great sweetness of the people there and the commonplace lack of ecological understanding of how the physical world works. This absence of understanding is magnified by the striking deterioration of the Afghan land and the American effort to address these pressing problems with bombs and bullets.